them fairly we must
go back and get a medieval point of view, which, by the way, persisted
in Europe and America until well into the Georgian period. If history be
too dry, read Stevenson's _Kidnapped_, and especially its sequel _David
Balfour_, to learn what that viewpoint was. The parallel is so
close--eighteenth century Britain and twentieth century
Appalachia--that here we walk the same paths with Alan and David, the
Edinboro' law-sharks, Katriona and Lady Allardyce. The only difference
of moment is that we have no aristocracy.

As for the morals of our highlanders, they are precisely what any
well-read person would expect after taking their belatedness into
consideration. In speech and conduct, when at ease among themselves,
they are frank, old-fashioned Englishmen and Scots, such as Fielding and
Smollet and Pepys and Burns have shown us to the life. Their manners are
boorish, of course, judged by a feminized modern standard, and their
home conversation is as coarse as the mixed-company speeches in
Shakespeare's comedies or the offhand pleasantries of Good Queen Bess.

But what is refinement? What is morality?

"I don't mind," said the Beloved Vagabond, "I don't mind the frank
dungheap outside a German peasant's kitchen window; but what I loathe
and abominate is the dungheap hidden beneath Hedwige's draper papa's
parlor floor." And we do well to consider that fine remark by Sir Oliver
Lodge: "Vice is reversion to a lower type _after perception of a
higher_."

I have seen the worst as well as the best of Appalachia. There _are_
"places on Sand Mountain"--scores of them--where unspeakable orgies
prevail at times. But I know that between these two extremes the great
mass of the mountain people are very like persons of similar station
elsewhere, just human, with human frailties, only a little more honest,
I think, in owning them. And even in the tenebra of far-back coves,
where conditions exist as gross as anything to be found in the wynds and
closes of our great cities, there is this blessed difference: that these
half-wild creatures have not been hopelessly submerged, have not been
driven into desperate war against society. The worst of them still have
good traits, strong characters, something responsive to decent
treatment. They are kind-hearted, loyal to their friends, quick to help
anyone in distress. They know nothing of civilization. They are simply
_the unstarted_--and their thews are sound.

CHAPTE