It may be well at this point to ask, toward what ideal we are working, and fairly to consider the forces that are co-operating with, or working against, us in this effort. The most potent factor in the creation of a new South must be, of course, the South itself, as of necessity she will be chiefly the architect of her own fortunes, good or bad.
It would be unwise, and the effort would prove futile, to attempt its reconstruction by outside influences and agencies, in utter disregard of the fact that to her belongs the right, and upon her devolves the duty, as she alone possesses the power, of shaping her own destiny. This being the case, it becomes evident that the new South is not to be a New England in the South, and our Yankee egotism should not measure the progress made in that section simply by its observable approximation to Northern ideals. New England, as it is, could not have been built except upon New England’s hills, and we shall never see it in the cotton fields, rice swamps and everglades of the sunny South.
Other influences than those that are merely ethnic and moral help to mold the character of a people, and to develop the industries by which it shapes its civilization. We dare not think what the result to our Republic would have been had the Mayflower found the mouth of the Mississippi River instead of Plymouth harbor, and had the Pilgrim Fathers settled on the savannahs of Louisiana instead of the bleak hills of New England. The intelligent and thrifty New England farmer, transplanted to Florida, may not, indeed, degenerate into an everglade “cracker,” whose “strength is to sit still” and chew tobacco; but he cannot be a New England farmer in Florida, for the reason that he has neither the climate, soil nor products of his old farm, and none of the conditions which partly prompted, and partly compelled, the thrift which has characterized the farmers of New England.
New England has emptied itself, probably more than once, into the West; she has sent her sons and daughters out into the great prairies with the school-house and the church, and they have built them homes hallowed and made beautiful by these influences, but they have not reproduced Yankee New England, and they never can.
In the new South, the ugly mud-daubed log huts will give place to neat cottages; the school-houses will be multiplied until all her children shall possess facilities for acquiring education; churches, supplied with an educated ministry, will be accessible to all inhabitants; roads will be built, over which it will be possible to travel with comfort; the immense tracts of land now impoverished and running to waste will be brought under cultivation; a Christian conscience will displace a false code of honor among the people as a rule of conduct, and methods more civilized than the pistol and bowie-knife will be resorted to in adjusting misunderstandings among neighbors. All this will be, and of this there are evident tokens that it is now coming in. But the wide diversity of soil and climate and other conditions of life, the antipodal ideas which have shaped the character of the people, the heterogeneous elements which more and more are entering into the make-up of the population of the different sections—in short, the necessities of the case, make it absolutely certain that New England is to be confined to New England, and greatly modified even there, and that the civilizations of the South and the West are to be in many respects widely different, possessing characteristics as marked, and doubtless as valuable, as those which have made the influence of New England so beneficent upon the country at large. It is wise, as it is also incumbent upon us, to supply the educational influences which shall change the whole aspect of Southern society, but foolish to undertake to cast it in the exact form of that which we are proud to call New England.
MTESA AND THE RELIGION OF HIS ANCESTORS.
In 1875, Stanley wrote in the London Telegraph of the wonderful opening in Uganda, at the court and among the people of Mtesa, for missionary effort. Within three days after the publication of his letter, the Church Missionary Society received, from an unknown giver, $25,000, which was soon increased by the same person to $50,000, for opening a mission among the Waganda.