Columella (I, praef.) is not content with Cato’s contrast of the virtue of the farmer with the iniquity of the banker, but he brings in the lawyer’s profession for animadversion also.  This, he says, the ancient Romans used to term a canine profession, because it consisted in barking at the rich.]

[Footnote 10:  The Roman numerals at the beginning of the paragraphs indicate the chapters of Cato from which they are translated.  If Cato had not pretended to despise every thing which smacked of Greek literary art he might have edited and arranged his material, in which event his book would have been easier to read than it is, and no less valuable.  Modern scholarship would not now venture to perform such an office for such a result, because it involves tampering with a text (as who should say, shooting a fox!) and yet modern scholarship wonders at the decay of classical studies in an impatient age.  At the risk of anathema the present version has attempted to group Cato’s material, and in so doing has omitted most of those portions which are now of merely curious interest.]

[Footnote 11:  This, of course, means buying at a high price, except in extraordinary cases.  There is another system of agriculture which admits of the pride of making two blades of grass grow where none was before, and the profit which comes of buying cheap and selling dear.  This is farming for improvement, an art which was well described two hundred years before Cato.  Xenophon (Economicus XX, 22) says: 

“For those who are able to attend to their affairs, however, and who will apply themselves to agriculture earnestly, my lather both practised himself and taught me a most successful method of making profit; for he would never allow me to buy ground already cultivated, but exhorted me to purchase such as from want of care or want of means in those who had possessed it, was left untilled and unplanted.  He used to say that well cultivated land cost a great sum of money and admitted of no improvement, and he considered that land which is unsusceptible of improvement did not give the same pleasure to the owner as other land, but he thought that whatever a person had or bought up that was continually growing better afforded him the highest gratification.”]

[Footnote 12:  Every rural community in the Eastern part of the United States has grown familiar with the contrast between the intelligent amateur, who, while endeavoring earnestly to set an example of good agriculture, fails to make expenses out of his land, and the born farmer who is self-supporting in the practice of methods contemned by the agricultural colleges.  Too often the conclusion is drawn that scientific agriculture will not pay; but Cato puts his finger on the true reason.  The man who does not depend on his land for his living too often permits his farm to get what Cato calls the “spending habit.”  Pliny (H.N. XVIII, 7) makes some pertinent observations on the subject: