they
could not hope to be anything but tenants or menials, ruled over by
proprietors or bosses--and they would die rather than endure such
treatment. As for the new lands of the farther West, there was scarce a
peasant in Ireland or in Scandinavia but knew more about them than did
the southern mountaineers.

Second, because they were passionately attached to their homes and
kindred, to their own old-fashioned ways. The mountaineer shrinks from
lowland society as he does from the water and the climate of such
regions. He is never at ease until back with his home-folks, foot-loose
and free.

Third, because there was nothing in his environment to arouse ambition.
The hard, hopeless life of the mountain farm, sustained only by a meager
and ill-cooked diet, begat laziness and shiftless unconcern.

Finally, the poverty of the hillside farmers and branch-water people was
so extreme that they could not gather funds to emigrate with. There were
no industries to which a man might turn and earn ready money, no markets
in which he could sell a surplus from the farm.

So, while the transmontane settlers grew rapidly in wealth and culture,
their kinsfolk back in the mountains either stood still or retrograded,
and the contrast was due not nearly so much to any difference of
capacity as to a law of Nature that dooms an isolated and impoverished
people to deterioration.

Beyond this, it is not to be overlooked that the mountains were cursed
with a considerable incubus of naturally weak or depraved characters,
not lowland "poor whites," but a miscellaneous flotsam from all
quarters, which, after more or less circling round and round, was drawn
into the stagnant eddy of highland society as derelicts drift into the
Sargasso Sea. In the train of western immigration there were some feeble
souls who never got across the mountains. These have been described
tersely as the men who lost heart on account of a broken axle.

The anemic element thus introduced is less noticeable in Kentucky than
in Virginia and the States farther south--for the reason, no doubt, that
it took at least two axles to reach Kentucky--but it exists in all parts
of Appalachia. Moreover, the vast roughs of the mountain region offered
harborage for outlaws, desperadoes of the border, and here many of them
settled and propagated their kind. In the backwoods one cannot choose
his neighbors. All are on equal footing. Hence the contagion of crime
and shiftlessness spread