riter, let us turn to
the contrast which would at once have suggested itself even if it had
not been brought forward by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than
Thomas decided the question at the same time, and decided it the other
way. To Lee's vision there was but one course open to a Virginian, and
the pledge that he had given when Virginia was one of the United States
of America had ceased to bind him when Virginia withdrew from the
compact. His duty was clear from the hour when to remain in the army
would have been to draw his sword against a people to whom he was
"indissolubly bound."

[Note: "I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere did the original
spirit of State Sovereignty and allegiance to the State then survive in
greater intensity and more unquestioning form than in Virginia--the 'Old
Dominion'--the mother of States and of Presidents.

"State pride, a sense of individuality, has immemorially entered more
largely and more intensely into Virginia and Virginians than into any
other section or community of the United States. Only in South Carolina
and among Carolinians, on the trans-Atlantic continent, was a somewhat
similar sense of locality and obligation of descent to be found. There
was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the pride which the MacGregors
and Campbells took in their clan and country. In other words, the
Virginian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last century, not to
any appreciable extent, undergone nationalization."--CHAS. FRANCIS
ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137.

I have referred to Mr. ADAMS repeatedly because as a man of my time and
nearly of my age he understood the difficulty of moving the point of
view fifty years backward.]

These contrasted cases are indeed convenient tests for color-blindness.
There may "arise a generation in Virginia," or even a generation of
Virginians, "who will learn and confess" that "Thomas loved Virginia as
well as the sons she has preferred to honor, and served her better." But
no representative Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the
color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has not yielded to treatment
during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the close of the
war, and may as well be accepted for an indefinite period. When social
relations were resumed between the North and the South,--they followed
slowly the resumption of business relations,--what we should call the
color-blindness of the other side ofte