ention--the
polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of
semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made
up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the
part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the
South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern
genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative.

The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high
literary effort. In the process of that demonstration, I am fully
persuaded that the Anglo-African--with his brilliant wit and humor,
his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for
literary pursuits--will contribute largely to give the South an
enviable and honorable position.

What the South lacked in literary effort before the war she made up in
a magnificent galaxy of meteoric statesmen, who rushed into politics
with the instinct of ducks taking to water, and who were forgotten, in
the majority of cases, before they had run out their ephemeral career.
A few names have survived the earthquake, and are remembered for their
cleverness rather than their depth. A few more decades, and they will
be remembered only by the curious student who plods his weary way
through the labyrinth of Congressional records and the musty archives
of States, seeking for data of times which long ago passed into the
hazy vista of history and romance. Before the war the Southern man of
leisure took to politics more as a pastime than as a serious business.
But as the pastime was agreeable, and as it gave additional weight and
distinction, all those who could, strived to make it appear that they
were men of importance in the Nation. They were largely a nation of
politicians, always brilliant, shallow, bellicose and dogmatic, as
ready to decide an argument with the shotgun or saber as with reason
and logic.

This was the temper of the people who rushed into the war with the
confidence of a schoolboy and who limped out like a man overtaken in
his gymnastic exercise by a paralytic stroke. The war taught the South
a very useful lesson, but did not sufficiently convince it that it was
preeminently a supercilious, arrogant people, who did not and do not
possess all the virtue, intelligence, and courage of the country;
that its stock of these prime elements is woefully small considering
the long years it had posed as America's own patrician class.

But when the war was ov