to them of
community of interests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation,
and you might as well be proffering advice to the North Star. They will
not work together zealously even to improve their neighborhood roads,
each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over
himself or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize
unions or granges among them because they simply will not stick
together.

Miss Miles says of her people (the italics are my own): "There is no
such thing as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together, man
to man, as friends, but not as a body of men.... Our men are almost
incapable of concerted action unless they are needed by the
Government.... Between blood-relationship and the Federal Government no
relations of master and servant, rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
employer and employee, are interposed to bind society into a whole....
_The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a
people._ For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee
and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily
life the same, we are yet a people asleep, _a race without knowledge of
its own existence_. This condition is due ... to the isolation that
separates the mountaineer from all the world but his own blood and kin,
and to the consequent utter simplicity of social relations. When they
shall have established a unity of thought corresponding to their
homogeneity of character, then their love of country will assume a
practical form, and then, indeed, America, with all her peoples, can
boast no stronger sons than these same mountaineers."

To the Highlanders of four States here mentioned should be added all
those of Old Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, making an
aggregate to-day of close on four million souls. Together they
constitute a distinct people. Not only are they all closely akin in
blood, in speech, in ideas, in manners, in ways of living; but their
needs, their problems are identical throughout this vast domain. There
is no other ethnic group in America so unmixed as these mountaineers and
so segregated from all others.

And the strange thing is that they do not know it. Their isolation is so
complete that they have no race consciousness at all. In this respect I
can think of no other people on the face of the earth to which they may
be likened.

As compensation for the peculiar weakness of