That's a good example. I think George would be a brilliant Hamilton on the stage. He knows federalist types so well, having countered every argument they've ever made. I have a number of thoughts on the presidential race, but topiary is what I really have on my mind. For many years I have been a member of a garden club. We meet monthly from September to June. The Garden Club met today and we discussed topiary; in particular, the practice of shaping and pruning plants around metal forms so that they look like animals, people, buildings, and the like. I bring it up here because at least two philosophers have found topiary alarming enough to argue against. Alexander Pope wrote a letter to The Guardian (September 29, 1713) specifically to ridicule the practice as perverse. He wrote: "We seem to make it our study to recede from Nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal hopes, but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach of art itself; we run into sculpture, and are yet better to have our trees in the most awkward figures of men and animals, than in the most regular of their own." Pope goes on to say that "persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of Nature; as such are chiefly sensible that all art consists in the imitation and study of Nature." In his essay "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill also takes aim at topiary: "In some such insidious form there is at present a strong tendency to this narrow theory of life [i.e., Calvinism], and to the pinched and hidebound type of human character which it patronizes. Many persons, no doubt sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed, are as their Maker designed them to be; just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them." Would Rand have dismissed topiary as decorative, or would she have argued explicitly against it? Does she mention it anywhere? One of the things I admire most about her is her willingness to weigh in on everything. Frank O'Conner liked to garden. They must have discussed it. MLM