, 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 energeti