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“But,” I said, “in the military relation you must also vividly keep up, across all inequalities of rank, a splendid sentiment of common interest and devotion, mutual confidence and affection, or your army will be but a broken weapon, a sword without a hilt.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “and so in civilization; if it would be of the highest it must draw across its lines of social cleavage the bonds of civic fellowship.”

It was what I had intended to say myself. Social selection raises walls between us which we all help to build, but they need not be Chinese walls. They need not be so high that civic fellowship, even at its most feminine stature, may not look over them every now and then to ask:

“How does my neighbor’s garden grow?”

It is with this end in view as well as for practical convenience that we have divided our field into seven districts and from our “women’s council” have appointed residents of each to visit, animate and counsel the contestants of that district. The plan works well.

On the other hand, to prevent the movement, in any district, from shrinking into village isolation; in order to keep the whole town comprised, and, as nearly as may be, to win the whole town’s sympathy and participation, we have made a rule that in whatever district the capital prize is awarded, the second prize must go to some other district. If we have said this before you may slip it here; a certain repetitiousness is one part of our policy. A competitor in the district where the capital prize is awarded may take the third prize, but no one may take the third in the district where the second has been awarded. He may, however, be given the fourth. In a word, no two consecutive prizes can be won in the same district. Also, not more than three prizes of the fifteen may in one season be awarded in any one district. So each district has three prize-winners each year, and each year the prizes go all over town. Again, no garden may take the same prize two years in succession; it must take a higher one or else wait over.

“This prize-garden business is just all right!” said one of the competitors to our general secretary. “It gives us good things to say to one another’s face instead of bad things at one another’s back, it does!”

That is a merit we claim for it; that it operates, in the most inexpensive way that can be, to restore the social bond. Hard poverty minus village neighborship drives the social relation out of the home and starves out of its victims their spiritual powers to interest and entertain one another, or even themselves. If something could keep alive the good aspects of village neighborship without disturbing what is good in that more energetic social assortment which follows the expansion of the village into the town or city, we should have better and fairer towns and cities and a sounder and safer civilization. But it must be something which will give entirely differing social elements “good things to say to one another’s face instead of bad things at one another’s back.”

We believe our Northampton garden competition tends to do this. It brings together in neighborly fellowship those whom the discrepancies of social accomplishments would forever hold asunder and it brings them together without forced equality or awkward condescension, civic partners in that common weal to neglect which is one of the “dangers and temptations of the home.”

Two of our committee called one day at a house whose garden seemed to have fallen into its ill condition after a very happy start. Its mistress came to the door wearing a heart-weary look. The weather had been very dry, she said in a melodious French accent, and she had not felt so very well, and so she had not cared to struggle for a garden, much less for a prize.

“But the weather,” suggested her visitors, “had been quite as dry for her competitors, and few of them had made so fair a beginning. To say nothing of prizes, was not the garden itself its own reward?”

She shook her head drearily; she did not know that she should ever care to garden any more.

“Why?” exclaimed one questioner persuasively, “you didn’t talk so when I was here last month!”

“No,” was the reply, “but since three weeks ago–” and all at once up came the stifled tears, filling her great black eyes and coursing down her cheeks unhindered, “I los’ my baby.”

The abashed visitors stammered such apologies as they could. “They would not have come on this untimely errand could they have known.” They begged forgiveness for their slowness to perceive.

“Yet do not wholly,” they presently ventured to urge, “give up your garden. The day may come when the thought that is now so bitter will, as a memory, yield some sweetness as well, and then it may be that the least of bitterness and the most of sweetness will come to you when you are busy among your flowers.”

“It may be,” she sighed, but with an unconvinced shrug. And still, before the summer was gone, the garden sedately, yet very sweetly, smiled again and even the visitors ventured back.

That was nearly three years ago. Only a few weeks since those two were in the company of an accomplished man who by some chance–being a Frenchman–had met and talked with this mother and her husband.

“We made a sad bungle there,” said the visitors.

“Do not think it!” he protested. “They are your devoted friends. They speak of you with the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they told me that last year–“

“Yes,” rejoined one of the visitors, “last year their garden took one of the prizes.” ////////