d, obliterated; and the
really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.
What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of
any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the
typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern _sentiment_ may
still be, what is there of the Southern _spirit_ even in Richmond or in
Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than
the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern
love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader
among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the
American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying
spirit of the old South.

FOOTNOTES:

[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of
Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (_The American
Commonwealth_, vol. 1, page 110).

[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines
on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (_Theodore
Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen_, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has
spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by
Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt
out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really
great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just
the right thing to do."

[296:1] See his _Addresses and Presidential Messages_, with an
introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).

[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the
mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to
which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute
form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's _History of the
United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home
Rule in the South in 1877_ (Macmillan).

CHAPTER XII

COMMERCIAL MORALITY

Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and M