NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH

I can look back through the whole of my life at incidents like this hour with my father which bent the twig of my mind and determined the very nature of my thinking even after I outgrew my prejudices. Thus to this day it impresses me as a queer coincidence that altruism, of all things, flared up about that time in New England. Very few of us realize the fact, but it is a sort of instinct to cover the deepest transgression with a canopy of high-mindedness. If you are a man, it is safer and more veracious not to speak too nobly of your own nature, nor to spread the wing of your soul too far. The weather changes and you come down in a bad place. Here in the South we are not good; but that is the point--we do not pretend to be. Instead of hiding behind altruism, we have permitted the world to capitalize our faults. This has been good for us. We have fewer faults than if we had lived according to a self-deceiving pose.

Time has proved us.

Personally, I prefer to have descended from those Virginia colonists who came to this country of their own free will, like hardy swashbuckling adventurers. They appear to me to have had more ease of mind, better manners, and finer qualities than fighting over doctrines ever imparts. But the Pilgrims, who came to escape religious persecution, were very good people. They were a bit wasp-waisted in their pieties, but they had a sublime courage for enduring hardship. They were the raw-boned element of Protestantism, essential to the life of a new nation in a new hemisphere, and if it had not been for persecution in England they would not have come. This country might have been settled as it is now being gorged by the overflow populations of Europe. Such people never make a civilization. Their instinct is to destroy it. So we must be thankful that enough of the hardiest and bravest Protestants were driven out to start life decently here, thus giving us two hundred years in which to mold and harden a civilization needed now to withstand the disasters of Europe.

But these people were encompassed about by the will of God. They were obliged by the everlasting order of things to survive their faults and to acquire the right virtues, as we all must do or perish. So the New England colonists stopped hanging witches and modified their blue laws. And the Virginia blades settled down and went to work. But they must have suffered cruelly for the harshness of their beliefs. History proves that the effects of theology differ dangerously from those of religion upon the characters of men. One reduces religion to formulas, doctrines, and creeds; the other lifts men by some simple wisdom of the heart to a sort of nobler goodness, kin to God.

We may perform one of those acts of impromptu justice called a lynching, which is reprehensible, but not so bad as the torturing and slaying of forty innocent men by mob violence, crimes that are more and more frequently committed in other sections. Many a time men and women of New England have felt obliged to tell me that they would not dare to live in the lawless South, no doubt with the best altruistic intentions of bringing home to me the realization of the dangerous conditions we have produced down here. Now it turns out that the South is the safest place to live in this country. It is the wisest place to build factories and start industries, because it is easier to obtain labor and control labor here. We are about to be swamped and capitalized by money and immigrants from the North. It is a terrible situation, because there is no way of limiting the quota, say from New England, as the national Government limits those from desperate Europe. Personally, I prefer the peace and poverty we now enjoy to the thrift, energy, and wealth these people insure. Presently we shall have here the same disorders and problems that greed and altruism have bred in the North, East, and West. Time changes the condition of people, but not their nature or their disposition. The people of the North, whether they are Christians, capitalists, or the sons of carpetbaggers, have a talent for meddling with the social, intellectual, and commercial life of the South, and the nobler they are the more they meddle. It is one of the characteristics of greatness of soul. This provincial state of mind is bound to affect the quality of their piety.

They have more sense than we have, but they are pathetically deficient in that deeper wit of understanding. They understand nothing but their own minds and their own wills. They are artlessly hypocritical in their relations to us. Having failed to uplift their own masses spiritually or morally, they are on a religious trek constantly toward this section. Their world is not our world; their God is not our God. We are a warmer, kinder, more spiritually minded people, therefore more patient with their chastening efforts in our behalf than, say, the West would be.

The awful thing always characteristic of them is their desire and determination to govern and take all the credit for everything accomplished. I do not think a union between the Northern and Southern Methodist Church would be any more successful, except in a financial way, than any other government set up by a foreign people who had the balance of power. And religion consists in no such circumstance. I have my very grave doubts as to whether the great body of Methodists in the South favor this contemplated corporation of the two churches. The thing is being engineered by the politicians and princes of these respective organizations.