ing as great as it is
subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old
ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love
and reverence of a proud people for its flag.

Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the
parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war. Of these only one
spoke with heat. He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in
all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon
women by soldiers--such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German
invasion of Belgium and France--he replied with a great show of feeling
that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by
northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea. At this
my heart sank, for I had treasured the belief that, despite the
roughness of war, unprotected women had generally been safe from the
soldiers of North and South alike. What was my relief, then, on later
receiving from this same young man a letter in which he declared that he
had been mistaken, and that after many inquiries in Georgia he had been
unable to learn of a single case of such crime. If it is indeed true
that such things did not occur in the Civil War--and I believe
confidently that it is true--then we have occasion, in the light of the
European War, to revise the popular belief that of all wars civil war is
the most horrible.

The attitude of the modern South (the "New South" which, by the way, one
Southerner described to me as meaning "northern capital and smoke")
toward its own "unreconstructed" citizens, for all its sympathy and
tenderness, is not without a glint of gentle humor. More than once, when
my companion and I were received in southern homes with a cordiality
that precluded any thought of sectional feeling, we were nevertheless
warned by members of the younger generation--and their eyes would
twinkle as they said it--to "look out for mother; she's
unreconstructed." And you may be sure that when we were so warned we did
"look out." It was well to do so! For though the mother might be a frail
old lady, past seventy, with the face of an angel and the normal
demeanor of a saint, we could see her bridle, as we were presented to
her, over the thought there here were two Yankees in her
home--Yankees!--we could see the light come flashing up into her eyes
as they encountered ours, and could feel beneath the veil of her austere
civility the