The South and the National Government

impression and create a permanent bias that would naturally outlast the reason for its original existence. The trials of the reconstruction period, the heat of the political controversies with the Republican party, all naturally, during the forty years, implanted so deep a feeling in the Southern Democratic breast that a mere change of the conditions under which this feeling was engendered could not at once remove it. The Southern people are a homogeneous people; they preserve their traditions; they are of the purest American stock; and the faith of the father is handed down to the son, even after the cause of it has ceased, almost as a sacred legacy.

Again, for a long time succeeding the war, the South continued poor. Its development was much slower than that of the rest of the country. Prosperity seemed to be Northern prosperity, not Southern. And, in such a time, the trials of life of the present only accentuated the greater trials of the past, and reminiscences of the dreadful sufferings and privat