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After the manner of Dunfermline again, our rules are that no gardener by trade and no one who hires help in his garden may compete. Any friend may help his friend, and any one may use all the advice he can get from amateur or professional. Children may help in the care of the gardens, and many do; but children may not themselves put gardens into the competition.

“If the head of the house is the gardener-in-chief,” shrewdly argued one of our committee, “the children, oftener than otherwise, will garden with him, or will catch the gardening spirit as they grow up; but if the children are head-gardeners we shall get only children’s gardening. We want to dispel the notion that flower-gardening is only woman’s work and child’s play.”

Our rule against hired labor sets naturally a maximum limit to the extent of ground a garden may cover. Our minimum is but fifty square yards, including turf, beds, and walks, and it may be of any shape whatever if only it does not leave out any part of the dooryard, front or rear, and give it up to neglect and disorder. To the ear even fifty square yards seems extensive, but really it is very small. It had so formidable a sound when we first named it that one of our most esteemed friends, pastor of a Catholic church in that very pretty and thrifty part of Northampton called for its silk mills Florence, generously added two supplementary prizes for gardens under the limit of size. This happy thought had a good effect, for, although in the first and second years Father Gallon’s people took prizes for gardens above the minimum limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to contestants not in his flock, yet only in the third year did it become to all of us quite as plain as a pikestaff that fifty square yards are only the one-fiftieth part of fifty yards square, and that whoever in Northampton had a dooryard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903 more than two hundred and fifty gardens were already in the contest but every one was large enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and the kind bestower of the extra ones (withdrawn as superfluous), unselfishly ignoring his own large share of credit, wrote:

“Your gardens have altered the aspect of my parish.”

Such praise is high wages. It is better than to have achieved the very perfection of gardening about any one home. We are not trying to raise the world’s standard of the gardening art. Our work is for the home and its indwellers; for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town of homes all taking pleasant care of one another. We want to make all neighbors and all homes esthetically interesting to one another, believing that this will relate them humanely, morally and politically. We began with those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them, but soon we went further and ventured to open to gardens kept with hired service an allied competition for a separate list of prizes. In this way we put into motion, between two elements of our people which there are always more than enough influences to hold sufficiently apart, a joint pursuit of the same refining delight and so promoted the fellowship of an unconflicting common interest. In degree some of us who use hired help had already obtained this effect. Last season:

“Come,” I often heard one of our judges say on his rounds, “see my own garden some afternoon; I’ll show you all the mistakes I’ve made!” And some came, and exchanged seeds and plants with him.

“A high civilization,” said an old soldier to me only a few days ago, “must always produce great social inequalities. They are needed mainly by and for those who see no need of them.”

I admitted that the need is as real, though not so stern, as the need of inequalities in military rank.