hapter. But it must be said in a word that its main trait is the
substitution, for a territorial and slave-owning aristocracy, of an
industrial democracy. It is the coming of the new man,--laborious,
enterprising, pushing his way. His development began when the whole
community was set to work its way up from the impoverishment left by the
war. It was accelerated when new resources were found, when coal and
iron mines were started, when cotton manufacturing began where the
cotton is grown. New types of character and society are developing, yet
blending with the remnant of the old.

Politics, in all its forms, plays a smaller part in to-day's society
than in that of fifty years ago. Not only has the South never regained
its old ascendency at Washington, but it has not stood, and does not
stand, for any distinct set of ideas or principles in the national life.
It has clung closely together, under the influence of old sentiments
and lingering apprehensions. In its fear of a recurrence of "negro
domination," it has lost touch with the living questions of to-day and
to-morrow. "The Solid South" has meant a secure contingent of electoral
votes for the Democratic Presidential candidate,--whether he stood for a
gold or a silver currency, for revenue reform or its opposite, for
radicalism or conservatism,--and a solid array of members in Senate and
House equally without pilotage on living issues. Until the South breaks
away from its fetish of past fears and prejudices, it cannot rise to its
proper opportunities of statesmanship.

Yet better than the old-time absorption in Federal politics and the
prizes of the Capitol is the more diversified life of the South to-day.
It is being swept into the current of industrialism--with its energies,
its prizes, its perils. In other directions, too, the new life of the
South flows free and strong. It is creating a literature,--a branch of
American literature,--incomparably beyond any product of its earlier
days. After what may be called a literature of statesmanship,--the work
of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall,--the old South was almost
wholly barren of original scholarship and creative genius. Now it bears
a harvest so rich that one cannot here begin to classify or to name. The
war-time is bearing an aftermath, of less importance in its romances,
but admirable and delightful in its biographies and reminiscences. Of
these the most notable feature, full as they are of vivid human int