lf; and throughout the South sound instruction and intellectual
activity were markedly lacking--indeed, there is no serious Southern
literature by which we can check these impressions of his. Comparing the
masses of moderately well-to-do and educated people with whom he
associated in the North and in the South, he finds them both free from
the peculiar vulgarity which, we may be pained to know, he had discovered
among us in England; he finds honesty and dishonesty in serious matters
of conduct as prevalent in one section as in the other; he finds the
Northerner better taught and more alert in mind; but he ascribes to him
an objectionable quality of "smartness," a determination to show you that
he is a stirring and pushing fellow, from which the Southerner is wholly
free; and he finds that the Southerner has derived from home influences
and from boarding schools in which the influence of many similar homes is
concentrated, not indeed any great refinement, but a manner which is
"more true, more quiet, more modestly self-assured, more dignified." This
advantage, we are to understand, is diffused over a comparatively larger
class than in England. Beyond this he discerns in a few parts of the
South and notably in South Carolina a somewhat inaccessible, select
society, of which the nucleus is formed by a few (incredibly few) old
Colonial families which have not gone under, and which altogether is so
small that some old gentlewomen can enumerate all the members of it. Few
as they are, these form "unquestionably a wealthy and remarkably
generous, refined, and accomplished first class, clinging with some
pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the traditional
manners and customs of an established gentry."

No doubt the sense of high breeding, which was common in the South, went
beyond mere manners; it played its part in making the struggle of the
Southern population, including the "mean whites," in the Civil War one of
the most heroic, if one of the most mistaken, in which a whole population
has ever been engaged; it went along with integrity and a high average of
governing capacity among public men; and it fitted the gentry of the
South to contribute, when they should choose, an element of great value
to the common life of America. As it was, the South suffered to the full
the political degeneration which threatens every powerful class which,
with a distinct class interest of its own, is secluded from real contac