Planting and growing a garden is a basic tenet of self-reliance, as the Founding Fathers knew. “During the whole of the American Enlightenment,” Henry Steel Commager notes, “every President was a countryman.” (The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and American Realized the Enlightenment, p 243.)
We must have hard work so that we can create order and virtue. Hesiod says, “The immortals decried that man must sweat to attain virtue, since for mortals, order is best, disorder is worst.” Those who work to “fill their barns” know this freedom better …