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 CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF THE SOUTH

The South is, in its percentage as to population, the finest, cleanest, truest and most loyal part of the United States to-day. It holds more of the native born Americans, fewer of the foreign born, and fewer alien enemies than any like extent of our National possessions. The only pure-bred American population, sufficiently so to entitle it to a distinct origin-color of its own on the government census maps, lies along the crest of the southern Appalachians. There, in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, lower Virginia, there are Americans who for generations have known no admixture of any foreign blood. You will find illiteracy there, poverty, small industrial development. That has come about by reason of a topography which has left transportation undeveloped. The people have been held back from the westbound progress of the nation almost as though caught by the cleats of the great flume through which poured our early Scotch-Irish, Indian-fighting, wilderness-conquering ancestry. But it is the finest of gold that those cleats have caught—a clean-bred, persistent type, of the highest honor, the highest courage, the highest intellectual quality, the highest physical qualities. Here and here alone you will find a true American type, come down with little change from our Colonial days. Would God that every state in the North and West had these men as the real inheritors of America, and not the snarling mob of foreigners who in the last few decades have come to be called American citizens. We have seen in some part how loyal these last have been, how much they cared for the flag of America.

The stock of our Highlands has furnished us many strong men, many of our greatest leaders, our greatest statesmen. Above all, it is fierce fighting stock. It has been held back by lack of education. These stark mountaineers are far