Page:The web (1919).djvu/423

 more illiterate than were their grand-parents. To-day, in a Cumberland cabin, you may find a Latin grammar, or a tragedy in the original Greek, of which the owner will say, "I kaint read none of hit. Grandpap fotched it across the mountings when he come." "Across the mountains" lay the Carolinas and Old Virginia, seats of the most cultured and aristocratic life this country ever knew, and equal to the best of any land. When we lost that, we lost the flower of the American civilization. We never shall replace it. There is no America to-day. There never can be, unless the seed of the old American stock—never lacking in leaders—one day shall raise its voice as of old in councils where it will find hearkening.

The South is a wide country, covering a certain diversity of nature, but it remains singularly like throughout its borders. Politically it is still the slave of the color question, whose end no man can see. That same question restricts the South largely to agriculture. Of late, Northern money and methods have been reaching out for the raw wealth of Southern mines and forests, even farming lands. It is in respect of these later slight changes in the character of the southern life that the A. P. L. has found its main function there. Had it not been for imported labor, the A. P. L. would have had no alien and seditious cases, no propaganda and no disloyalty to report, because it is absolutely true that our Southern States, which once thought themselves constitutionally justified in secession, to-day are more loyal to the American flag man for man, town for town, state for state, than any or all the remaining states in this Union.

This is true; and yet it is also altogether true that a few Southern States furnished more cases of desertion or draft evasion than thrice that number of states in any other portion of the Union, even though with heavy foreign-born population. How can these two statements be reconciled?

It is easy, and the level-headed A. P. L. chiefs time and again have made it plain in their reports. A large percent of the selective service work had to do with brave young fighting men to whom liberty and personal freedom made the breath of their nostrils. Many of them were ignorant—more is the pity. While we have coddled the treacherous European immigrant, we have forgotten our own children.