Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 19.djvu/402

 396 Southern Historical Society Papers.

from fetishism to competition with the brains and muscle of the Anglo-Saxon race, already a thousand years in advance of them in civilization. I do not believe in the theory of evolution if that means bringing- something from nothing by what you call a law of nature. Something from nothing without causation is absurd. There must be a creative touch behind all. But I do believe in the inexor- able law of " the survival of the fittest." It may be that God will help that race of people, and they may fare better than the Indians, because they are more docile, but I don't know how. He may pos- sibly transplant them ; possibly scatter them among the Northern people, or place them in some territory or Africa. Simultaneously with their freedom Africa was explored. Railways are now crossing the dark continent, and steamers are plowing her waters, and four hundred thousand of her people have lately been converted to Chris- tianity. The negroes are not reinforced by immigration, nor increas- ing as rapidly as the white race by natural laws, so that in relation to that race they stand as John the Baptist stood to Christ the one must increase and the other decrease. And thus in the coming years, the negro may cease to be a disturbing factor in our civilization, as he is now hardly felt in Virginia politics.

THE NEW SOUTH.

Men talk of the old South and the new; I rejoice in the new, because it is the same old South renewed. Like the fable phcenix bird, that from the ashes of its funeral pile came forth with its same sweet song and with richer plumage to flutter again in the great floods of the sunshine. So comes old sunny Southland forth from the fires of the crucible under the guidance of the genii of a noble ancestry, to sing the song of liberty taught our fathers by the mothers of Huguenots and Cavaliers. The thought of higher human rights in self government, for which men in all ages have sighed, begotten and born of the incarnated Christ, who conquered when he fell, becomes the guiding star song of the new South, as it was of the old; and thus the principle of the old South still stands as the storm beaten rock stands to shoulder back the billow. When time shall have grown gray and the evening of the world shall welcome the angel of liberty encircling the earth with a halo of glory and peace, and men shall look to the headlights of the ages as they shine in the dim aisles of the past, none will give a brighter effulgence than Robert Edward Lee. Leading the heroes of the South in the three years of