Leadership Quote by James Hogg

A poet who grew up a shepherd, Hogg writes like someone who has counted the sheep and the costs, and found the arithmetic insulting. The sentence is ostensibly about labor inefficiency, but its real target is a social fantasy: the belief that rural life can be "managed" into profit by tightening control. Hogg’s phrasing makes management itself sound absurdly physical and coercive: "force them into houses and folds" turns pastoral care into confinement, a miniature carceral state built for animals. The comedy is dry and cutting. If you need "more hands" just to keep the system running, the system isn’t stewardship; it’s bureaucracy wearing boots.

The subtext is a warning about the economics of enclosure and improvement, the early-19th-century push to rationalize the countryside, standardize production, and treat land and livestock as tidy ledgers. Hogg is pointing to the hidden bill that arrives with "order": supervision, fences, drives to market, the constant herding of bodies to satisfy distant demand. He also smuggles in a critique of class power. The hands required are not abstractions; they’re hired laborers whose wages will devour the margins. Profit, in this view, is maintained by making someone else’s life more precarious, and Hogg suggests even that extraction can fail when the control mechanisms get too expensive.

What makes the line work is its anti-romantic realism delivered in pastoral clothing: a shepherd-poet puncturing the myth that progress is automatically efficient, humane, or even profitable. The hills, left alone, sound almost like the more rational manager.