Spencer Heath Archive

Item 599

Quotation from Holmes Alexander, “I Sold My Farm — Hooray!,”American Mercury, March, 1955, pp.l4l-l44.

Original is missing.

I confess that I hated to give up the comfortable belief that the nearer a man lives to the soil, the more you can trust him. The truth is, of course, that the nearer men live to the soil, the closer they live to poverty and starvation. This makes them cunning, deceitful, quick to take advantage of ignorance and trustfulness in strangers. Historically speaking, honesty is a virtue that grew up in the trade marts and the business world, not on the farm.