[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 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.]