Carthage: and Homer makes an
enduring picture of it in the person of the King supervising his
fall ploughing, which Hephsestus wrought upon the shield of Achilles
(_Iliad_, XVIII, 540). "Furthermore, he set in the shield a soft fresh
ploughed field, rich tilth and wide, the third time ploughed, and many
ploughers therein drove their yokes to and fro as they wheeled about.
Whensoever they came to the boundary of the field and turned, then
would a man come to each and give into his hands a goblet of sweet
wine: while others would be turning back along the furrows, fain to
reach the boundary of the deep tilth, ... and among them the King was
standing in silence, with his staff, rejoicing in his heart."]

[Footnote 14: This advice to sell the worn out oxen and the sick slaves
justly excited Plutarch's generous scorn, and has been made the text
of a sweeping denunciation by Mommsen of the practice of husbandry by
men of affairs in Cato's time. "The whole system," says Mommsen, "was
pervaded by the utterly unscrupulous spirit characteristic of
the power of capital." And he adds, "If we have risen to that
little-to-be-envied elevation of thought which values no feature of
an economy save the capital invested in it, we cannot deny to the
management of the Roman estates the praise of consistency, energy,
punctuality, frugality and solidity." Without any desire to defend
Cato, one may suggest, out of an experience in a kind of farm
management not very different from that Cato pictures, that it is
doubtful whether even Cato himself was quite as economical and
efficient, and so as capitalistic in his farming, as he advises others
to be: certainly a whole race of contemporary country gentlemen was
not equal to it. It is much easier to write about business-like
farming than to practise it.]

[Footnote 15: Hesiod (W. & D. 338) had already given this same advice
to the Greek farmer:

"Invite the man that loves thee to a feast, but let alone thine enemy,
and especially invite him that dwelleth near thee, for if, mark you,
any thing untoward shall have happened at home neighbours are wont to
come ungirt, but kinsfolk gird themselves first." This agreement of
the Socialist Hesiod with the Capitalist Cato is remarkable only as
it illustrates that both systems when wisely expounded rest on human
nature. That upon which they here agree is the foundation of the
modern European societies for rural co-operative credit which
President Taft