or that a few might
show their wealth in the barbarism of showy equipages and numerous
servants, and spend in foreign cities the wealth that should have built
up civilization and made way for refinement at home. There were no
public libraries, no colleges worthy of the name; there was no art, no
science,--still worse, no literature but Simms's: there was no desire
for them. We do not say it in reproach; we are simply stating a fact,
and are quite aware that the North is far behind Europe in these
things. But we are not behind her in the value we set upon them; are
even before her in the price we are willing to pay for them, and are in
the way to get them. The South was not in that way; could not get into
it, indeed, so long as the labor that made wealth was cut off from any
interest in its expenditure, nor had any goal for such hopes as soared
away from the dreary level of its lifelong drudgery but in the grave
and the world beyond it. We are not blind to what may be said on the
other side, nor to that fatal picturesqueness, so attractive to
sentimental minds and so melancholy to thoughtful ones, which threw a
charm over certain exceptional modes of Southern life among the older
families in Virginia and South Carolina. But there are higher and
manlier kinds of beauty,--barer and sterner, some would call
them,--with less softly rounded edges, certainly, than the Wolf's Crag
picturesqueness, which carries the mind with pensive indolence toward
the past, instead of stirring it with a sense of present life, or
bracing it with the hope of future opportunity, and which at once veils
and betrays the decay of ancient civilizations. Unless life is arranged
for the mere benefit of the novelist, what right had these bits of
last-century Europe here? Even the virtues of the South were some of
them anachronisms; and even those that were not existed side by side
with an obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero of Semmes, and
a barbarism that could starve prisoners by the thousand.

Some philosophers, to be sure, plead with us that the Southerners are
remarkable for their smaller hands and feet, though so good an observer
as Thackeray pronounced this to be true of the whole American people;
but really we cannot think such arguments as this will give any pause
to the inevitable advance of that democracy, somewhat rude and raw as
yet, a clumsy boy-giant, and not too well mannered, whose office it
nevertheless is to make the worl