“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 recommended to the American people.  These societies, says the bulletin of the International Institute of Agriculture published at Rome in 1912, rest on three chief safeguards: 

(a) That membership is confined to persons residing within a small district, and, therefore, the members are personally known to one another;

(b) That the members, being mutually responsible, it will be to the interest of all members to keep an eye upon a borrower and to see that he makes proper use of the money lent to him;

(c) That in like manner, it is to the interest of all members to help a member when he is in difficulties.]

[Footnote 16:  This was an estate of average size, probably within Virgil’s precept, (Georgic II, 412).  “Laudato ingentia rura, exiguum colito.”  Some scholars have deemed this phrase a quotation from Cato, but it is more likely derived from Mago the Carthaginian who is reported to have said:  “Imbecilliorem agrum quam agricolam, esse debere,”—­the farmer should be bigger than his farm.]

[Footnote 17:  The philosophy of Cato’s plan, of laying out a farm is found in the agricultural history of the Romans down to the time of the Punic wars.  Mommsen (II, 370) gives the facts, and Ferrero in his first volume makes brilliant use of them.  There is sketched the old peasant aristocrat living on his few acres, his decay and the creation of comparatively large estates worked by slaves in charge of overseers, which followed the conquest of the Italian states about B.C. 300.  This was the civilization in which Cato had been reared, but in his time another important change was taking place.  The Roman frontier was again widened by the conquest of the Mediterranean basin:  the acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia ended breadstuff farming as the staple on the Italian peninsular.  The competition of the broad and fertile acres of those great Islands had the effect in Italy which the cultivation of the Dakota wheat lands had upon the grain farming of New York and Virginia.  About 150 B.C. the vine and the olive became the staples of Italy and corn was superseded.  Although this was not accomplished until after Cato’s death, he foresaw it, and recommended that a farm be laid out accordingly, and his scheme of putting one’s reliance upon the vine and the olive was doubtless very advanced doctrine, when it first found expression.]

[Footnote 18:  Pliny quotes Cato as advising to buy what others have built rather than build oneself, and thus, as he says, enjoy the fruits of another’s folly.  The cacoethes aedificandi is a familiar disease among country gentlemen.]