tril-shears and tongue-branks that were in everyday
use under the old criminal code. He does not tie a woman to the cart's
tail and publicly lash her bare back until it streams with blood, nor
does he hang a man for picking somebody's pocket of twelve pence and a
farthing. He does not go slumming in bedlam, paying tuppence for the
sport of mocking the maniacs until they rattle their chains in rage or
horror. He does not turn executions of criminals into public festivals.
He never has been known to burn a condemned one at the stake. If he
hangs a man, he does not first draw his entrails and burn them before
his eyes, with a mob crowding about to jeer the poor devil's flinching
or to compliment him on his "nerve." Yet all these pleasantries were
proper and legal in Christian Britain two centuries ago.

This isolated and belated people who still carry on the blood-feud are
not half so much to blame for such a savage survival as the rich,
powerful, educated, twentieth-century nation that abandons them as if
they were hopelessly derelict or wrecked. It took but a few decades to
civilize Scotland. How much swifter and surer and easier are our means
of enlightenment to-day! Let us not forget that these highlanders are
blood of our blood and bone of our bone; for they are old-time Americans
to a man, proud of their nationality, and passionately loyal to the flag
that they, more than any other of us, according to their strength, have
fought and suffered for.

CHAPTER XVI

WHO ARE THE MOUNTAINEERS?

The Southern Appalachian Mountains happen to be parceled out among eight
different States, and for that reason they are seldom considered as a
geographical unit. In the same way their inhabitants are thought of as
Kentucky mountaineers or Carolina mountaineers, and so on, but not often
as a body of Appalachian mountaineers. And yet these inhabitants are as
distinct an ethnographic group as the mountains themselves are a
geographic group.

The mountaineers are homogeneous so far as speech and manners and
experiences and ideals can make them. In the aggregate they are nearly
twice as numerous and cover twice as much territory as any one of the
States among which they have been distributed; but in each of these
States they occupy only the backyard, and generally take back seats in
the councils of the commonwealth. They have been fenced off from each
other by political boundaries, and have no such coherence among
themselves