ngfield, "the city of homes," on a landscape thick dotted with the
cheerful abodes of an industrial community, he exclaimed: "You can see
no such sight as that in a Southern State!" And always there were some
men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized
and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those
days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers
excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner
looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording
it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North was
John Brown; to the other, the representative of the South was Brooks of
South Carolina.

There were two other marked differences between the sections. The first
was the greater concentration of interest in the South on national
politics, and the leadership conceded to the political class. In the
North, the general occupation in laborious and gainful pursuits,
and the wide variety of social interests which competed for
attention,--education, reform, the debating society, the
town-meeting,--all acted to hold men in other fields than those of
national politics. The best brains were invited by commerce, the
factory, the railroad, the college, the laboratory, the newspaper,--as
well as by the Capitol. But to the Southern planter and his social
compeer no pursuit compared in attraction with the political field, and
above all the public life of the nation. The mass of the people,
especially in the country districts, found in the political meeting an
interest whose only rival was the camp-meeting. Besides, when the
burning political question was slavery, it came home to the business and
bosoms of the South, while to the North it was remote. And thus, when
the secession movement broke upon the land, the Southern people grasped
it with a concentration, energy, and response to their habitual leaders,
in strongest contrast to the surprise, hesitation, and division, which
at first characterized the North.

And, as the last distinction to be here noted, one section was far more
habituated than the other to methods of physical force in private and
public affairs. It was an instance of this that the duel was in common
practice at the South up to the Civil War, while at the North it had
disappeared sixty years earlier, after the encounter of Burr and
Hamilton. At the South the street affray was common. There is a pi