frontier, ought
to take to naturally? Adam and Eve did, and they--but we have squeezed
Adam and Eve dry enough.

Patriotism! Can you imagine a young man or woman without it? And if you
are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical
aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so,
do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the
appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land
only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these,
have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town
and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the
flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth
chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country
with only that kind is never long without war.

You see the difference? Patriotism for war generalizes. A patriotism for
peace particularizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all their
faults, your nation, your government, your town and townspeople, else
you would not so often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let us call
them yours? Because they belong to you? No, because you belong to them.
Beyond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, too, you are theirs;
their purchased possession, paid for long, long in advance and
sight-unseen.

You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or a post-box, or slip away
into the woods and find them cleared of savages and deadly serpents,
without seeing part of the price paid for you before your
great-grandfather was born. So, then, loving your town enough to scold
it, you will also serve it!

Now this we say not so much to be preaching as to bring in a last word
descriptive of our Northampton movement. We do not make that work a mere
aggregation of private kindnesses, but a public business for the
promotion of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic fellowship.

And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening,
but to procure its widest and most general dissemination. The individual
is definitely subordinated to the community's undivided interest. Since
gardening tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die out in
others, we have laid off our town map in seven parts and made a rule
that to each of these shall go three of the prizes.

Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be awarded in any one of these
districts. Where a competitor takes the capital p