en who are breaking their health and spirit over
a thankless tub of suds ought surely to turn their talents to better
account, ought to be designing and weaving coverlets and Roman-striped
rugs, or 'piecing' the quilt patterns now so popular. Need these razors
be used to cut grindstones? Must this free folk who are in many ways the
truest Americans of America be brought under the yoke of caste division,
to the degradation of all their finer qualities, merely for lack of the
right work to do?"

There are some who would have it so; who would calmly write for these
our own kindred, as for the Indians, _fuerunt_--their day is past. In a
History of Southern Literature, written not long ago by a professor in
the University of Virginia, a sketch of Miss Murfree's work closes with
these words: "There [at Beersheba Springs, Tenn.] it was that she first
studied the curious type of humanity, the Tennessee mountaineer, a
people so ignorant, so superstitious, so far behind the world of to-day
as to excite wonder and even pity in all who see them.... [She] is
telling the story of a people who, in these opening years of the 20th
century, wander on through their limited range of life much as their
ancestors for generations have wandered. They, too, will some time
vanish--the sooner the better."

One cannot read such a sentiment without wonder and even pity for the
ignorance of history and of human nature that it discloses. Is the case
of our mountaineers so much worse than that of the Scotch highlanders of
two centuries ago? We know that those Scotchmen did not "vanish--the
quicker the better." What were they before civilization reached them?
Let us open the ready pages of Macaulay.--

"It is not easy for a modern Englishman ... to believe that, in the
time of his great-grandfathers, Saint James's Street had as little
connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In
the south of our island scarcely anything was known about the
Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but
contempt and loathing....

"It is not strange that the Wild Scotch, as they were sometimes
called, should, in the 17th century, have been considered by the
Saxons as mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered
as savages, they should not have been objects of interest and
curiosity. The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the
manners of rude nat