d to prevent improved housing
and a better country life. Still the life of the great majority in the
United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same
class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and
economic scale was distinctly better. That is what made America the
Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy
and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling.
Georgia had a population of 43,684 white illiterates, to say nothing of
the 500,000 blacks; Massachusetts had 46,262; Indiana, 60,943;
Pennsylvania, 72,156, and North Carolina, 68,128. There were 101 persons
in the jails of Georgia on June 1, 1860; Virginia had 189;
Massachusetts, 1161, and Illinois, 485. In the open life of the South
and West, where men could easily get to the land, there was little crime
and jails were often empty; in the industrial belt the prisons were
always occupied. In like manner and for the same reasons Southern and
Western hospitals for the insane and homes for the poor often showed
very small percentages of these unfortunates. Perhaps the unrelieved
poverty of the industrial workers and the stress of uncertainty in the
matter of employment made the differences. Certainly the weight of the
old English common law system, adopted in all the States, bore hardly on
the dependent classes of the East; and the courts were not loath to send
undefended men to prison. In the South the worker was punished by his
master on the plantation for all the minor offenses, and it was only
free negroes and the poorer whites who were the subjects of the ordinary
social discipline and punishment.

The abounding wealth and strenuous zest of American life were creating
just those gradations in society and distinctions of caste against which
constitutions and laws inveighed. On the broad basis of African slavery
the enterprising Southerner had built and was now perfecting a social
class hardly inferior to the aristocracies of Europe. Soft hands and
exclusive manners were there as elsewhere in the world the evidences of
a gentle life; sturdy personal independence and rough ways, here as in
England, were the marks of middle-class training, through which recruits
to the privileged order had generally come. Openly and on all proper
occasions the Southerners announced the break-down of democracy and the
benefits of a cultured elite; the few thousand "first families," who
lived upon the