Dominant Forces in Southern Life

IT is not the purpose, in this study, to describe the great advance in material development that the South has made in recent years. We have all heard of that, and some investors in “ boom “ towns have heard too much of it. Our concern is with a much more difficult investigation,— one requiring not a little audacity for its inception, and more than an ordinary amount of penetration, perseverance, and fair-mindedness for its successful prosecution. We are to endeavor to determine what the Southern people stand for to-day in economics and politics, in letters and art and science, in morals and manners and education, or, to be brief, in culture. Such an inquiry, especially when it is conducted on a limited scale, will necessitate many assumptions and omissions, but above all, if its results are to be expressed pictorially, it will require a background. For such a background we will assume a South of diversified interests in place of the former single interest, of mixed society in place of the former more or less rigid castes, of rapidly springing up and growing cities in place of a number of stagnant villages and a few unprogressive towns ; in short, a South allied in a thousand ways with the outside world, utilizing all the resources of modern progress, seeking foreign capital and welcoming foreign labor, in place of a South isolated from the world, recalcitrant against much of modern progress, and desiring only to be left alone to work out its own destiny. We shall be compelled, it is true, to let our background shade off into the gathered blackness of lingering night or threatening clouds, when we remember that around the centres of progress and light stretch dark tight belts of what would speedily become the chaos of barbarism, but for the energy and bravery and faith of the people whose intellectual and moral development we are about to study.

The figures in the foreground, whom we call loosely the Southern people, are more varied than one would at first imagine. This variety is not a new thing, nor is it in any marked degree a result of recent diversification of interests or of steady infiltrations of alien strains of population. For a long period, owing to certain economic and political conditions that are too familiar to be detailed, the States from the Potomac to the Rio Grande opposed a united front to the advance of modern civilization, waged a protracted war for the preservation of their own institutions and the establishment of their autonomy, and when defeated and restored to the Union on a new basis gave their adherence so entirely to one political party and to one set of political principles as to earn for themselves the sobriquet of the “ Solid South.”Now, a “ Solid South ” would seem to presuppose a homogeneous Southern people coextensive with the geographical, or rather political area thus designated; but to draw this inference would be to make a mistake almost equal to that made by the European who thinks Chicago a three or four hours’ ride from New York, and confounds our Eastern and Western populations. If political opinions and prejudices be not taken into account, the typical Charlestonian will be found to differ as much from the average inhabitant of Nashville as the typical New Yorker does from his rival of Chicago. The Virginian and the Georgian have points of contact, to be sure, but they differ radically in many important respects, — just, as radically as a citizen of New Jersey does from a citizen of Wisconsin. They may, perhaps, differ more radically, on account of the fact that state lines are more strictly drawn in the South than in any other portion of the Union. It is, of course, measurably true to affirm that the Southern people are descendants in the main of that portion of the English people “ who had been least modernized, who still retained a large element of the feudal notion.” The usual assumption that the civilization of the North is Puritan, while that of the South is Cavalier, rests on a substantial though small basis of fact. It is further true that the institution of slavery gave a more or less uniform patriarchal tone to society in every Southern State. But when all the points of resemblance are numbered and estimated, it will still be found that the tidewater South differs from the Southwest as much as New England does from the Northwest, that each State of a subsection differs from its neighbors ; and that there are important lines of cleavage within some of the States themselves. Such a general proposition, however, is of little value unless it is accompanied by particular illustrations.

The two leading types of Southern population are plainly the Virginian and the South Carolinian of the tidewater. For this fact there are both historical and physiographical reasons. Virginia was the first and South Carolina the second Southern colony to be settled by wellto-do Englishmen who desired to found permanent homes. The introduction of slavery and its application to staple crops speedily gave an aristocratic tone to society in both provinces; but between them, in North Carolina, and to the south of them, in Georgia, there were fewer wealthy settlers and no staple crops to speak of, so that from the first society in these provinces was more or less democratic in spite of slavery. Before, however, the gentry of the coast could expand and occupy the country lying between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, and beyond the latter range of mountains, a very different sort of people had moved in and taken possession. Hardy Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, thrifty German Lutherans, sober and industrious Quakers, had occupied the “ up country,” and in North Carolina had spread toward the coast. Among these people, owing to their habits and the nature of their soil, slavery could take no strong hold : hence they remained democratic and distinct from their tidewater neighbors, as indeed they are to this day. So it came to pass that when, after the Revolution, tidewater Virginians, in consequence of debt and the impoverishment of the land, determined to emigrate, they passed over the two mountain ranges and settled in Kentucky, or went as far to the southwest as Alabama, later on, while the hardy mountain people, hungry for land and eager for adventure, moved along the valleys and over convenient passes, and founded settlements, the more important of which were destined to coalesce into the distinctively democratic commonwealth of Tennessee. Meanwhile, the invention of the cotton-gin made it worth the South Carolinian’s while to bide at home, and opened up to immigration and settlement the States bordering on the Gulf. As in the case of all new countries, the inflowing population was extremely mixed, but the man who had most slaves could clear his land and start his cotton soonest ; and so throughout the lower tier of southwestern States aristocracy triumphed, on the whole, over democracy, being somewhat aided by the presence of French and Spanish populations at Mobile and New Orleans. But in the midst of all this movement and confusion the tidewater Virginians and South Carolinians stood for political and social ideals before which the rest of the South and the Southwest bowed until the advent of Jackson and his frontier Democrats to power. The Virginian fell before the storm, but the South Carolinian bent and rose again. Slavery, not Tennessee democracy, represented the aspirations of the Southern people during the three momentous decades before the Civil War, and slavery’s banner Calhoun and his South Carolinians were obviously best fitted to bear. So it has come about that the early prestige of Virginia and the later prestige of South Carolina have invested the “ low country ” inhabitants of those States — for it is “low country” ideals that have prevailed — with an importance in the eyes of their fellow Southerners and of the rest of the world that is only just beginning to be shaken by the progress of commonwealths that have learned better how to utilize their material resources. But what now can one say of these two types of Southerners ?

In the first place, they are nearer to the type of Englishmen that originally settled in the two colonies than might be expected, when the lapse of time is considered. They are distinctly less American in their habits of thought and action than are Georgians or Tennesseans, New Yorkers or Iowans. In the cities one naturally finds all sorts and conditions of people, but in the country and in the bosom of indigenous families one finds one’s self continually confronted with some survival or recrudescence of English trait or custom. There is a certain colonialism in the attitude assumed by many of these good folks toward all things modern and American that strikes one as odd in people who gave Washington and the Pinckneys to the cause of Independence. There is a persistence in customs, a loyalty to beliefs and traditions, a naéveté of self-satisfaction that cannot be called conceit, a clannishness, an attachment to the soil, that are radically English and thoroughly picturesque, but are certainly not American.

These and similar traits the tidewater inhabitants of the two States have in common. And yet they differ to such a degree that even the superficial observer has no difficulty in distinguishing them without having recourse to such external peculiarities as dialect or physical appearance. The Virginian is more democratic than the South Carolinian ; he has more bonhomie ; he is not nearly so punctilious, or stern, or fiery. A true South Carolinian gentleman would never have sat in the White House with slippers worn down at the heels, as Jefferson did. Many Virginian gentlemen would not have done it, either, but they would have comprehended how it was possible to do it. In some way or other, the Virginian developed from a seventeenthcentury into an eighteenth-century English squire. He became more or less an easy-going optimist, fond of good company and good living, never so vulgar as Squire Western, but likely to fall into careless, slipshod habits, unless upheld, as was often the case, by the refined women about him. With the South Carolinian it seems to have been different. What with the infusion of sober Huguenot blood, what with the masterful qualities necessitated by his isolated position among great masses of black barbarians, he took himself and life more seriously than the Virginian did, and he does so to this day. He has the earnestness and much of the courtly charm of the best type of seventeenth-century Englishman. If the Virginian gentleman is a Squire Allworthy, the South Carolinian is, if it can be conceived, a Colonel Hutchinson fighting on the Royalist side. One even finds that a Virginian boy of the better classes has more bonhomie and less dignity than a South Carolinian of similar age and breeding. The Virginian loves his State and is proud of her history, but on alien soil, amid a pleasant company, he can forget her. The South Carolinian is rarely so unbending, and is, unintentionally no doubt, supercilious toward all other peoples and States. He is not merely glad to hail from his native State, he is not merely anxious to return thither to die, he is miserable whenever and as long as he is not living there. Nay, he actually wishes to be rooted to a particular parish or town. The genius loci is the god he worships, and he stands for everything that is not cosmopolitan. Hence he is par excellence the Southern conservative, so thoroughgoing in his provincialism that it ceases to appear narrow and small, and reaches the infinite if not the sublime. On this side, as indeed in general intensity of nature, he goes far beyond the Virginian. The latter is conservative and slow to move, yet after all he is a disciple of Jefferson, and he cannot help remembering that his kinsfolk peopled Kentucky, and that there are men of Virginian stock thriving in all parts of the country. But even on him the waves of progress have had to dash and dash in order to produce any effect, and he stands to-day, with the South Carolinian, like a promontory jutting out into a rising sea. His promontory is, however, a little greener than that of his neighbor.

Such, in the main, is the material on which the Zeitgeist has had to work in the two Southern States that were in the lead before the Civil War practically leveled everything. Very different, as we have seen, is the material in the State lying between the Old Dominion and the commonwealth that had a philosopher for godfather. The North Carolinian is, and has always been, the typical Southern democrat. If he has not progressed rapidly, it is not because he has been unwilling to give up his traditions, though he has them, but because he has always been more or less hampered by physical difficulties, and more or less cast in the shade by his greater neighbors. He has ever been unpretending, but his virtues have been many and solid. He has had his history miswritten, but instead of uttering bitter complaints has set to work to rewrite it. He has labored indefatigably, although with small success as yet, to obtain a good system of public instruction, seeing that large portions of his State would without this remain unexploited for generations. He is still backward in many respects, and still has to bide taunts about not having produced many great men, about smelling of turpentine, and about allowing the practice of “ dipping ” to continue within his borders. But like the patient, thoroughgoing democrat he is, he takes it all good-naturedly, and has determined not to be last in the race of progress that he is running with his neighbors, though he does at times stop to listen, open-mouthed, to a quack proclaiming the virtues of some political nostrum.

The South Carolinian has always arrogated to himself the name “ Carolinian,” and he has never been on very familiar terms with his northern neighbor. His feeling for his southern neighbor, the Georgian, is also one of mere tolerance, for the latter has long been called the Southern Yankee, and fairly deserves the appellation. He has much of the shrewdness and push that mark the typical “ Down-Easter,” and he has a considerable share of that worthy’s moral earnestness. In addition he has a good deal of the Virginian’s geniality and love of comfort, of the North Carolinian’s unpretending democracy, and of the South Carolinian’s tendency to exhibitions of fiery temper. But over and above everything else he has an honest and hearty and not unfounded pride in Georgia, and a sort of masonic affiliation with every person, animal, institution, custom, — in short, thing, — that can be called Georgian. He may not always stand for culture, but he does always stand for patriotism, state and national. He loves success, strength, straightforwardness, and the solid virtues generally, — neither is he averse to the showy ones, — but above all he loves virtue in action. Though possessed of a strong, clear intellect, he is more particularly a man of five senses, of which he makes as good use as he can. He may not always taste the sweetness or see the light of the highest civilization, but he has a good healthy appetite for life. In fine, the Georgian is the Southerner of all others who comes nearest to being a normal American. There are, to be sure, varieties of Georgians, and different phases of civilization are represented in different sections of the State, but the features of character that make for uniformity are more numerous and important than those that make for divergence. The various elements that compose the population—original settlers, incomers from Virginia and the two Carolinas — seem to have been fused, save perhaps on the coast about Savannah, rather than to have preserved their individuality, and the result is the typical Georgian, energetic, shrewd, thrifty, brave, religious, patriotic, tending in the extremes of society to become narrow and hard, or selfassertive and pushing.

The Floridian on the one hand, and the Alabamian on the other, may be fairly described as modified Georgians. Florida, being a comparatively new State, settled under great difficulties and by various stocks, has not until recent years played any great part in Southern history, and even now represents little that is suggestive of an indigenous civilization. This is not true of Alabama, save of the mineral region in the northern part of the State; but the Alabamian, while a distinct personality, has never impressed himself upon the South as his neighbors on the Atlantic coast have done. He seems to hold partly by the Georgian and partly by the Virginian (with whom he is often connected by ties of blood), and has many of the best qualities of both. He is either a “ limbered - up ” Virginian or a mellowed Georgian. He is also a much less strenuous type of man than his neighbor to the west of him, although in their dates of settlement and in their physiographical features the two States do not present striking points of difference. As for the Mississippian, he too possesses well-defined but mixed characteristics. He seems to hold by the South Carolinian on the one hand, and by the Tennessean on the other, which is another way of saying that he is a Southwesterner whose natural democratic proclivities have been somewhat modified by institutions and customs of an aristocratic cast. On his large plantation, amid his hundreds of slaves, it was a matter of course that he should develop some of the South Carolinian’s masterful traits, while his position as a frontiersman and pioneer necessarily gave him a basis of character not dissimilar to that of the hardy settler on the Watauga or the Cumberland. To understand the Mississippian, then, or indeed any Southwesterner as far as the Rio Grande, we must know something about the Tennessean.

This stalwart citizen of a State which has already played an important part in our history, and which from its position and resources ought to play a still more important part in the future, naturally holds by the North Carolinian in many of his characteristics. He can generally point to Scotch - Irish ancestors from whom he has inherited the love of independence and the sturdy democratic virtues that characterize the people of the mountain sections of the States on his eastern border, but he owes to these ancestors something that differentiates him from his kinspeople east of the Alleghanies. The latter have been somewhat abashed, somewhat kept in check, by their contact with the civilization of the tidewater, but he wears upon his forehead, whether he dwell on hill or plain, that “ freedom of the mountaineer” of which Wordsworth sang. His fathers, whether they owned slaves or not, never ceased to be democrats, and so he is a democrat through and through, of a less unpretending type than the North Carolinian. Through the valor and the exertions of those fathers he has a wide and fair domain in which to choose his dwelling-place, but whether he has his abode among the mineral treasures of his mountains, or in the blue grass plains, or amid the low-lying fields that whiten with the cotton - boll, he is always and everywhere the open-handed, self-reliant, easily-excited son of equality and freedom that Wellington’s regulars went down before in the fatal trenches of New Orleans. In fact, the Tennessean is not, strictly speaking, a Southerner at all. The basis of his character is Western, and though his sympathies were divided in the Civil War, and though he helps to make up the “ Solid South,” he has really as little affiliation with the Southerners of the Atlantic coast as Andrew Jackson had with John C. Calhoun. He has not, indeed, the murderous intentions of his great hero and idol, but when he counts himself as being of the Southern people he ought to change his preposition and say that he is with them.

The other Southwestern States naturally have more distinctively Southern features than Tennessee, but we need hardly go into particulars. Arkansas and Texas are as yet too new to have stood for much in the history of Southern culture, and save in certain localities they are still in the transition stage common to pioneer States. When their various strains of population have been fused and their immense territory has been really settled, the emerging civilization will be almost inevitably Western in tone. It will not be Western in exactly the same way that the civilization of Wisconsin and Illinois is Western, but then the civilization of the latter States differs from that of Nebraska, or Colorado, or the Dakotas. Yet it will most assuredly not be Southern in any true sense of the term, for in this country the meridians of longitude have on the whole prevailed over the parallels of latitude.

In Louisiana a Southern civilization has been developed in the lower part of the State, and will probably always dominate it. The Louisianian of this section is quite different from his western compatriots of the towns on the Texas and Arkansas borders, and he possibly comes nearer to the foreigner’s idea of what a Southerner is than any other of the types that have been described. Perhaps this is because most foreigners get their ideas of the South from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Be this as it may, the typical Louisianian seems to understand the dolce far niente better than the Virginian ; he keeps social life going with less trouble than the South Carolinian ; he would never think of bustling and working like a Georgian ; he would die of the blues if he had to exchange the picturesque contrasts of his chief city and the lower half of his State with the gray-colored uniformity of the life that the North Carolinian has led for generations. But if the Louisianian has enjoyed life, he has not had the wisdom to develop all portions of his interesting commonwealth, and he has never taken a commanding position among his Southern brethren. With him, however, our modest efforts at portraiture must cease, and we must endeavor to take such a view of the Southern people as a whole as will enable us to answer the question with which we began, — what do these people stand for in economics and politics, in letters and art and science, in morals and manners and education, or, to be brief, in culture?

Such a question would be important and hard to answer in case of any homogeneous people; it is especially important and hard to answer in the case of the heterogeneous Southern people. It is important because the world has a very vital interest in learning what has been the general result of the four longyears of war waged to preserve the Union, and to rid the South of an incubus that she seemed to have no means and little desire of shaking off. This result cannot he fairly measured in census statistics showing an increase in population and wealth, a growth of towns and factories, an advance in material prosperity. Information is needed about the character of the new generation that has wrought this material improvement.

Are men and women growing up in the South who will not be content merely to see great commercial centres developed, new lines of railroad constructed, fresh and varied industries introduced, but will endeavor in addition to raise the standard of American life and culture, and thus to contribute to the essential and eternal welfare of the race ? The importance of such a question needs no comment.

But it is as hard to answer as it is important. Not only are the Southern whites heterogeneous in race elements and in character, but alongside of them lives and moves a race to which it would be manifestly unfair to apply customary tests, yet which must be taken into account at every stage of our investigation. Then, again, the people we are to study have not passed in a normal way from one stage of culture to another ; they have not borrowed of their own accord from other peoples, as the Romans of old or the Japanese of our day ; they have been forced by external circumstances to change their modes of life and habits of thought: so that the problem of determining how far their present status of culture is firmly rooted, and how far it really represents their ideals and aspirations, is rendered delicate and complex in the extreme. Furthermore, the inhabitants of the South in 1865 began their new lives under varying conditions of disadvantage. In the older States much of the land was thought to be worn out. Some States had served as battle - grounds, while others had escaped the severer ravages of war. The ratio of negroes to whites varied, also, as did the capacity of the white population for the kinds of work that were most needed. And what was true of the States when compared was true of the various divisions of a State. Virginia was on the whole better fitted to begin the work of rehabilitation than South Carolina, and Piedmont and southwestern Virginia were better fitted than the tidewater region of the same State.

It follows, then, that even if the inhabitants of the Southern States had presented a uniform type of character at the close of the war, they would not present to-day a uniform tone of civilization, or at least would not have made uniform progress. Yet, in spite of all variations of character and of all divergences of actual achievement, there are reasons for maintaining that in 1896 the people of the States stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande form a population which may be profitably considered as a whole by the critic of American culture.

In the first place, the citizens of all these States have been affected in more ways than they imagine by that defunct institution of slavery of which many of them have no personal knowledge. They are likewise affected to-day by the fact that they are brought into perpetual contact with a free alien race, to whom they are theoretically bound to allow legal and political rights, but to whom they cannot allow social rights without the risk of disintegrating their own civilization. They are further affected by the fact that in every locality and grade of society men and women are to be found who represent an old order of things, who inculcate social and political principles alien to American ideals, and who seek in every way to foster sentiments that favor Southern segregation, and that antagonize the unifying forces at work in the rest of the nation. They are affected finally by the fact that the dominant political party for many years practically treated them as citizens of a section, and by its legislation welded them into a compact mass of tax-payers who, rightly or wrongly, regarded themselves as tribute - payers. The generation, then, that has built up the South of to-day is united by ties of sentiment and interest, which, while not strong enough to endanger the permanence of the Union, are strong enough to have overcome till now the forces that make for divergence, and to warrant the critic and historian in speaking of a Southern people heterogeneous in manners, but homogeneous in ideas.

The men who are doing the brunt of the work in the South to-day may be said to range between twenty-five and sixtyfive years of age. The youngest was born six years after the war, and can remember nothing of the period of reconstruction ; the eldest had got his education and had started in life before the South seceded. The men ranging from sixtyfive to fifty-two had had more or less schooling, and had become imbued with Southern feelings and ideas before they went to the field ; those from fifty-two to forty received little schooling, and were practically unaffected by the civilization for which some of them fought. Indeed, any man born between 1850 and 1860, and it is this class that best represents what the South is to-day, — unless he was favorably situated, obtained little education except such as he could pick up himself after the war was over. Even the men born in the decade from I860 to 1870 were often deprived of educational facilities on account of the necessity they were under of entering at once upon the active duties of life. It follows, then, that most of the men who since 1865 have built up the South have either brought to their task the ideas and training of an older generation and a bygone civilization, or else have carried on their work untrained or self-trained. When this fact is duly weighed, their achievements will seem little short of marvelous. But the men from thirty-six to twentyfive, who have pressed forward to fill the gaps made by death or to increase the army of workers, have had educational and other advantages in inverse proportion to their ages, and there is now no reason why the South should not be able to count each year on a fully educated quota of citizens from her upper and middle classes. Until recently she has not been able to do this, and has had to bear in addition the weight of the ignorance and thriftlessness of her millions of illiterate whites and negroes. With these facts before us, let us now endeavor to estimate what she has accomplished and what she is in point of culture. And first with regard to economies and politics.

While the material development of the South in the past thirty years has been almost startling, it would nevertheless be rash to assume that the economic character of her people has been entirely transformed. Slavery no longer exists, and labor is no longer considered disgraceful ; but the negro, though politically free, is still socially and economically servile, and still affects his white employer disastrously in many ways. With the growth of towns, an artisan and a middle class have been developed, and the former aristocracy of birth and wealth has given way to one of wealth only ; but in the country the well-to-do middle-class farmer is the exception, the gentleman planter is becoming much rarer, and the negro and “ poor white ” squatters cumber and choke the ground. Want of thrift and intelligent foresight and an inherited instinct of laissezfaire are to be observed in every rural community, — normally in tidewater and remote mountain regions, less commonly in such favored spots as the Valley of Virginia. In cottongrowing localities the factor or commission merchant plays a part fully as important as he did before the war, and practically holds both planter and plantation in his grasp. With the factor on one hand, and the lazy negroes with whom he works on shares on the other, it is no wonder that the lot of the gentleman farmer is continually growing worse, or that his sons seek urban employment whenever they can.

It is also no cause for surprise that the agricultural classes, hampered by their own improvidence, by their failure to diversify their crops and utilize their resources, and by their still limited commercial facilities of every sort, should become discontented with their fate, and should lend a ready ear to each new political sophism. The day of prosperity is still far removed from men who, — some of them, — primitive enough to buy in the spring the mules needed for their fields, work them unmercifully during the summer and fall, mark them and turn them out to shift for themselves in the winter, and then in the spring following buy a fresh lot on credit from a drover ; mildly wondering the while why mules and money are so hard to keep.

The rural South, then, especially in the older portions, is, economically speaking, far from progressive, and what was once the single occupation of the Southern gentleman is now the last that he would voluntarily assume. In the rich Valley and on the grazing-lands of southwest Virginia, in parts of Georgia and in the blue grass region of Tennessee, farming pays fairly, owing to the greater thrift of the inhabitants and to the fertility of the soil; but on the whole, the progress of the New South, like that of the rest of the country, has not taken the direction of agriculture. It is through its urban development only that the section has justly earned its sobriquet. New cities like Roanoke, Va., have sprung up on ground that twenty years ago was parceled into farms. Ante-bellum villages have become large cities, as in the case of Atlanta and Chattanooga. Old towns like Nashville and Richmond have taken a fresh lease of life, and become rich and progressive. A new railroad has made the fortune of this place, a new textile or other industry has caused the growth of that. And all this progress has been due to the abolition of slavery and to the destruction of property caused by the Civil War. The Southerner of the last thirty years has simply had to work in order to live, and, like the rest of the world, he has preferred the town to the country. The Congressman who to-day should cease attacking bankers and syndicates, and imitate bis ante-bellum predecessors by delivering a speech against commerce and manufactures, would be looked upon by his constituents as a lunatic or a fool. The man who should declare it to be beneath his dignity to engage in any respectable and productive calling would be similarly regarded. The point of view has changed, and it is now no longer necessary to call commercial conventions which shall pass resolutions beseeching the gentry not to look down on commerce and to give some of their sons a business training. Yet, in spite of all this advance, it would be idle to assert that Southern urban communities have not much to learn. The business energy and enterprise of Atlanta would not be so commented on if they were abundantly evident in other cities ; and with all its energy Atlanta is far from being a model municipality. In every Southern town the citizens are still new to civic needs and duties. Money is often generously expended on schools, but entirely withheld from libraries. Museums and art-galleries are almost unknown, theatres are poor, and the workingman and the shopkeeper are left to amuse themselves as best they may in the bar-room or the meeting-house. Men of wealth have comfortable homes and opportunities to travel that make up for the lack of the ordinary public instrumentalities of culture, even of decent bookstores, but they do not properly consider the needs of the average citizen, perhaps because old Southern traditions of family life interfere with the spread of modern ideas of civic collectivism.

Yet while there is much to desire in the economic progress of Southern cities, and while the jealousy constantly shown toward them by the rural communities is greatly to be deplored, there is also much to be thankful for. What has been accomplished rests on a solid basis, except in the case of certain mushroom towns, and there is every reason to hope for a steady development. For the Southerner, though conservative and ever hampered by untoward conditions, has not been quite so lacking in industrial enterprise as is often imagined. His success in other sections is proof of this, and the student of ante-bellum history can point to many commercial schemes of splendid scope that did not fail through any lack of capacity on the part of those who inaugurated them. That the people at large are still far too easy-going and visionary cannot be denied ; that the negroes and illiterate whites are not the best material out of which to make artisans is also true; but the facts remain that the Southerner of the towns is becoming more energetic and shrewd, even if he is losing some of his social graces, and that the negro makes a better artisan than he does a farmer, and the illiterate white a fairly tractable miner and mechanic. With this hopeful outlook, we can afford to be content and to pass to other topics ; remembering, however, that economic conditions enter so largely into the warp and woof of a people’s civilization that we shall be continually compelled to take fresh account of them.

The truth of the last statement becomes apparent the moment one begins to discuss politics. Never before in the history of the world have political and economic questions been so inextricably confused, and this is especially true of the South. The presence of the negro, certain party traditions, lack of great statesmen and of wide-reaching views, and the financial policy of the general government have been the chief causes of the maintenance of the “ Solid South;" economic unrest is the chief cause of its instability to-day. The late accessions to the Republican party in Louisiana have been due to the discontent of the sugar-planters. In mining and manufacturing districts there is a decided demand for protection, and numerous desertions from the Democratic ranks would follow in consequence but for the feeling, right or wrong, that white control of the negro is based on the continued success of that party. But in rural circles the revolt has already advanced to such a degree that it is impossible to predict results. The discontent of the farmers, after expressing itself in the so-called Alliance movement, has driven them by thousands into the arms of a new political body that appeals through its name and its principles to the common people. The Democratic party, after first making war on the Populists, has recently fused with them to a large extent, a procedure which is likely to result in a permanent alienation of a majority of its influential supporters in the cities. In whatever way the present complications are unraveled, the result will almost certainly be a splitting up of the “ Solid South “ along economic lines of cleavage. Nor is this to be wondered at. The urban communities have different needs from the rural; they are far in advance of them in education ; their political ideals must therefore vary, sooner or later.

The benefits that will flow from this political disintegration of the South, even though it be based, as seems likely, upon class antagonism, cannot be overestimated. The despotic sway of party principles, combined indeed with that of church creeds and of social conventions, has contributed more than anything else to the isolation and backwardness of the South. It has brought it to pass that the section which gave Washington and Jefferson to the Union has for two generations failed to produce a thoroughly great statesman, or, of recent years, even a politician of more than respectable powers. It has put mountebanks into the gubernatorial chair, and stained the judicial ermine with homicidal blood. It has checked the growth of a native literature except in the narrow field of provincial story-telling. It has rested like a black cloud over every schoolhouse and college, has enfeebled and diverted to wrong ends the power of the press, has taught honest men to cheat and excuse themselves by casuistry, has retarded the sense for law and order, and has hampered or thwarted the genius of every youth of lofty aspirations.

No one who has not lived in the South can at all appreciate what the waning of political intolerance will mean for its people. It will mean far more than the liberation of genius. It will mean the checking of political corruption, and the uplifting and ennobling of every citizen who has a vote to cast. It will mean a freer play of mind that will affect advantageously every industrial, educational, and social interest. It will mean that at last the South’s cry for more capital and more laborers will be fully responded to, that in wealth and culture its people will soon be abreast of those of other sections, that they will contribute in ample measure to the glory of the Union, and that they will grapple with their own peculiar problems with confidence and enthusiasm. It will mean, finally, that the justly earned reproach that the South has been for seventy years the chosen home of almost every possible economic and political heresy known to men will be forever removed.

Nor is this good result entirely dependent upon the immediate outcome of present political complications. Should the fusion of Democrats and Populists insure a practically “ Solid South “ for a generation to come, the work of disintegration would still be going on. Schools and colleges are being multiplied and improved, and the press is becoming a greater power for good. The generation which is growing up knows little or nothing about the horrors of reconstruction rule, and while rightfully determined to keep intact that supremacy of the whites which is essential to any civilization worthy of the name, is comparatively free from prejudice against other sections, and disposed to give the negro as fair a chance as circumstances will permit. Time, in other words, is doing its usual work of amelioration. The announcement that a politician has deserted to the Republicans is not necessarily followed now by his ostracism, as it was a decade ago. A man would not today be blackballed from a club for political reasons alone. One may express almost any political views on the platform or in print without running much risk of insult, provided one keep within the bounds of decency. One may even be an independent voter and not be too rudely stared at. On practical, present issues freedom of speech and action is becoming more and more assured except in one particular, in which few Southerners have any desire to go contrary to their fellows, — the advocacy of negro equality. This does not mean, however, that there are not men in the South who desire to secure for the negro his political rights within limits and his legal rights in toto, though they are forced to deny him all social privileges, or that they are debarred from giving publicity to their views. There are, fortunately, individuals here and there who dare to maintain the iniquity of the practice of lynching negroes, as boldly as others in high places, who should know better, brazenly defend or condone it. In view of such facts, it would be idle to hold that the political condition of the South, for all its present turmoil and confusion, is not improving.

Yet it would be equally idle to imagine that because there are signs of the gradual breaking down of party unity and political intolerance, the next generation of Southerners will find their civic duties altogether light and pleasant. They may find it possible to choose between two or more parties where their fathers could support only one, but in any party they will still have to grapple with difficulties as great as have ever confronted any people. They too will have their negro problem, and the disfranchisement of the race by the Mississippi plan or any other will only stave off the day of reckoning. They too will have to face the dreadful menace to civilization presented by the illiteracy within their own ranks. They will have to reap the results of the election frauds practiced by their own fathers, and will discover that the maxim “ The end justifies the means ” will apply with as full force to a white adversary as to a black one. They will find that while lynching may be an expeditious method of obtaining the redress that cannot be got from badly ordered courts, it is very far from simplifying the problem of how to render those courts efficient. They will have to learn, finally, that glib talking is not sure evidence of statesmanship, that the color of a man’s skin cannot make up for his deficiencies of education, and that sentiment for the past, however worthy, cannot of itself supply the place of all the civic virtues.

In conclusion, there is another point, also, that must be taken into account when we consider the probable amelioration of political conditions in the South. Where politics touch history, it must be confessed that the Southern people are as a rule totally astray in their thinking and unduly sensitive to criticism. Even the most liberal of them often fail to understand the historical development of the Constitution (although a great Southerner, Marshall, did most to develop it), and long-exploded theories in regard to it still hold sway among them. This sensitiveness to any treatment of their political history, whether by an alien or by a native, that does not square with their own preconceived and largely erroneous notions, is due in the main to a highly honorable and natural sentiment not controlled by adequate knowledge. It will pass in time, and must pass before competent ideas of political philosophy can be held by any Southern publicist or statesman. Without the basis of such a competent political philosophy, statesmanship of an enduring character is, of course, not to be looked for ; but the growing liberalization of ideas which is visible in polities and literature and religion renders it certain that no long time will elapse before the advent of both philosophy and statesmanship. Here also, then, the outlook seems hopeful, although, alas, more than one political Boanerges is leading his much enduring people astray at the very moment of this writing,

W. P. Trent.