Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/240

 234 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Our officers are chosen according to the prescribed form, the law- makers are selected by those who obey the laws, and all over that Southern land, wherever to night there is a home, it may send up its praises to God that the ex-Confederates are a law-making, as well as a law-abiding people.

Another thing we have done is that out of our poverty we have more than restored our old educational institutions. We have in every State a university and colleges, and in every State a system of free schools. Wherever in that South there is a child who wants an education, we have furnished him with the means to get that educa- tion. Your University of Virginia, with all the credit that can be given it, finds fit competitors in every part of the South. We have said to Science : " You are our mistress; come and dwell among us. 5> We have adorned her with the gems of our love and crowned her with the jewels of our benedictions, that she might enrich us with her smiles. And to night I can truly say, that for our means and according to our circumstances there is no part of the world that furnishes so ample, so free, and so many means for education as the South which formed the late Confederacy.

Another thing we did : Formerly we were an agricultural people. There was no reason why we should do anything but till the soil. It was the richest soil in the world ; it lay under the most fruitful sun. How teeming the lands of the South were in those days ! It was a new country so new that you never wore its freshness off. We worked, as it were, in the twilight of the dawn, before the sun was warm enough to dry the dew from the leaves. The slave labor is necessarily an isolated labor ; it requires that the master should live with the slave, that he might secure the largest production of the soil. And land was so cheap, it rewards so great, that we needed no other vocation than agriculture, while its necessities were so many and so varied as to give to the best intellect full employment. He who owned a plantation of several thousand acres of land, with the necessary number of slaves, was a manufacturer in the highest sense of the word. He had those men daily to take care of. He was a provider in the sense that the Northern employer never knew of. Thus it gave the very best play to the mental faculties, and it gave a certain leisure with it that was delightful. Therefore the South was naturally and neccessarily agricultural. And now there came that disastrous war. It swept away this plant in that particular form. It did not destroy the race, but the changed condition of things