l River, Mass., with 104,863 inhabitants,
had 50,042 of foreign birth.

The mountains proper are free not only from foreigners but from negroes
as well. There are many blacks in the larger valleys and towns, but
throughout most of Appalachia the population is almost exclusively
white. In 1900, Jackson County, Ky. (the same that sent every one of its
sons into the Union army who could bear arms), had only nineteen negroes
among 10,542 whites; Johnson County, Ky., only one black resident among
13,729 whites; Dickenson County, Va., not a single negro within its
borders.

In many mountain settlements negroes are not allowed to tarry. It has
been assumed that this prejudice against colored folk had its origin far
back in the time when "poor whites" found themselves thrust aside by
competition with slave labor. This is an error. Our mountaineers never
had to compete with slavery. Few of them knew anything about it except
from hearsay. Their dislike of negroes is simply an instinctive racial
antipathy, plus a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions.
A neighbor in the Smokies said to me: "I b'lieve in treatin' niggers
squar. The Bible says they're human--leastways some says it does--and so
there'd orter be a place for them. But it's _some place else_--not
around me!" That is the whole thing in a nutshell.

Here, then, is Appalachia: one of the great land-locked areas of the
globe, more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by
blood than any other part of America, encompassed by a high-tensioned
civilization, yet less affected to-day by modern ideas, less cognizant
of modern progress, than any other part of the English-speaking world.

Of course, such an anomaly cannot continue. Commercialism has discovered
the mountains at last, and no sentiment, however honest, however
hallowed, can keep it out. The transformation is swift. Suddenly the
mountaineer is awakened from his eighteenth-century bed by the blare of
steam whistles and the boom of dynamite. He sees his forests leveled and
whisked away; his rivers dammed by concrete walls and shot into turbines
that outpower all the horses in Appalachia. He is dazed by electric
lights, nonplussed by speaking wires, awed by vast transfers of
property, incensed by rude demands. Aroused, now, and wide-eyed, he
realizes with sinking heart that here is a sudden end of that Old
Dispensation under which he and his ancestors were born, the beginning
of a New Orde