emocrats of the 'old Southern type' from the Capital on the Kanawha and
that the Lost Cause was lost all over again. He was still sad because
Senator Matthew M. Neely had been elected Governor on a platform to
restore democracy to the Democratic Party, and government to the
governed, in West Virginia.

"The cartoonist represented us by a stock hill-billy character with
bushy beard and rifle in hand, gunning for someone around the mountains.

"Both editor and cartoonist have their heads in the sands of the past.

"West Virginians are Mountaineers by geography and tradition, and proud
of it. Originally they were induced by wily Virginians to come into
these mountains and form a buffer back-country against Indians, French
and British. Here they grew sturdy, self-reliant and independent. They
fought the first and last battles of the American Revolution, as well as
the first land engagement of the war to preserve the Union. They were
shooting for liberty while Patrick Henry was still shouting for it among
appeasers of King George. A continental commander, it is told, refused
to enlist more volunteers from the Colonies, saying he had plenty of
West Virginians. General Washington, too, thought these mountaineers
were tops, for in a dark hour of the Revolution he said: 'Leave me but a
banner to place upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will gather
around me the men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust and
set her free.'

"These mountaineers saved piedmont and tidewater Virginia from Indians,
helped win the American independence, and made possible the opening up
of Kentucky to the West. They then expected a fair deal from the
Virginia Government, but they did not get it. So when Virginia seceded
from the Union, they seceded from Virginia. And proudly they adopted the
motto, 'Mountaineers are always free,' a sentiment so generally
subscribed to that it appears over the entrance to our penitentiary.

"The slurs persist through ignorance.

"True, we have had all-out clan wars. We have had violent chapters in
our industrial story, under state governments apparently considered
benevolent by the Virginia editor. We tolerated waste of both human and
material resources under wild individualism. But a new day has come,
promising the greatest good to the greatest number, and we shall have
much to advertise, as envisioned in Governor Neely's inaugural address
when he said:

"'Fortunately impoverished land can be re