have sometimes
thought," said the author, and this passage may be taken as embodying
the leading point of the narrative, "that many of the men who survived
that unnatural war unwittingly did us a greater hurt than the war
itself. It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life
and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this. Thus it
stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock. The
fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind. Their speech was a vocabulary
of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties,
but to old commanders and to distorted traditions. They were dead men,
most of them, moving among the living as ghosts; and yet, as ghosts in a
play, they held the stage." In another passage the writer names the
"ghosts" which are chiefly responsible for preventing Southern progress.
They are three: "The Ghost of the Confederate dead, the Ghost of
religious orthodoxy, the Ghost of Negro domination." Everywhere the hero
finds his progress blocked by these obstructive wraiths of the past. He
seeks a livelihood in educational work--becomes a local superintendent
of Public Instruction, and loses his place because his religious views
are unorthodox, because he refuses to accept the popular estimate of
Confederate statesmen, and because he hopes to educate the black child
as well as the white one. He enters politics and runs for public office
on the platform of the new day, is elected, and then finds himself
counted out by political ringsters. Still he does not lose faith, and
finally settles down in the management of a cotton mill, convinced that
the real path of salvation lies in economic effort. This mere skeleton
of a story furnishes an excuse for rehearsing again the ideas that Page
had already made familiar in his writings and in his public addresses.
This time the lesson is enlivened by the portrayal of certain typical
characters of the post-bellum South. They are all there--the several
types of Negro, ranging all the way from the faithful and philosophic
plantation retainer to the lazy "Publican" office-seeker; the political
colonel, to whom the Confederate veterans and the "fair daughters of the
South (God bless 'em)" are the mainstays of "civerlerzation" and
indispensable instrumentalities in the game of partisan politics; the
evangelical clergymen who cared more for old-fashioned creeds than for
the education of the masses; the disreputable editor wh