Southland

“ We are underfed, half shod and ragged, yet inspired by the dauntless resolution and splendid valor which sustained the Southern heart. Over the slope and straight against our line come pouring the Northern hordes, those relentless invaders of our beloved Southland, lusty and strong and equipped with every appliance for conducting warfare that modern science can provide.
“We are outnumbered three to one; we are weak from hunger while they are lusty with bacon and beef. ”

“ A few years hence the South will have ceased to be chiefly agricultural. Mills for cotton, iron, and other factories will have dotted hilltop and valley, and with them will come the Northern operative with his exclusive "unions" and trade prejudice, shutting the doors of mills and foundries against him. To meet this scramble for favor from the wealth and intelligence of the Southland—the ruling factors—he should avail himself of every appliance for fostering harmony and co-operation along all the lines of contact. In slavery and in his subsequent journey in freedom he has suffered much. ”

“ Yes, for paradise the Southland is my nominee.
Jes' give me a ham hock and a grit of hominy.
I wanna start relaxin'
Down in Birmingham or Jackson.
When we're havin' fun, why, no one interferes.
I wanna talk with southern gentlemen
And put my white sheet on again.
I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years.
The land of the boll weevil
Where the laws are medieval,
Is callin" me to come and nevermore roam.
I wanna go back to the Southland,
That "y'all" and "shet-ma-mouth" land.
Be it ever so decadent,
There's no place like home. ”

“ The local condition didn’t just happen, but had its origin in some reason, good or bad, perhaps once convincing but now outgrown. Sometimes the reason is so vital as to be a principle in itself. In our beloved Southland there are local conditions of society which do not obtain elsewhere in this country. ”

“ This being a department devoted to the particular interests of the platform of the South, it is our desire to give special attention to all worthy attractions which include the South in their field of operation. We shall not “puff” the unworthy for a price, but among those who come to the Southland with the genius and the power to instruct, entertain and uplift us, there shall be none too poor in pocket to command our columns and our full energies for the exploitation of their merits for the benefit of the public. ”

“ Exports are wool, preserved meat and timber. The district of Southland was surveyed in 1841, but was reported unfavourable, and settlement was delayed till 1857. Southland was a separate province between 1860 and 1870, but, failing financially as such, rejoined the parent province of Otago. ”

“ We have therefore parted on the very best of terms, and the only bond that still joins us together is that of reciprocal commercial interests. The vast Southland has become a powerful government; and if ever—improbable as it is—civilization should migrate from Old Europe, it still would know where to find a centre. You will soon become aware of this on our landing.”
We were rapidly moving. New Zealand disappeared from our horizon, and in opposite direction other districts seemed to emerge from the sea. That was New Holland, the great Southland, the goal of our voyage. ”

“ So, in the Southland, there are crimes and criminals and the law will be powerless to bring them to book until a nobler sentiment is created by the supremacy of the better classes, and the relegation of the riotous element, through the vigorous and constant efforts of the rightful rulers of the South—the educated and peace-loving citizenry. ”

“ Here in Southland vast areas, while they have not been made one whit more adapted for settlement, have simply been despoiled of all that made the land valuable to the State. Some few individuals have been enriched, but the country has been impoverished to an extent that would appal the heavily-taxed farmer, and general consumer, could he be only made properly cognizant of the fact. ”

“ The Southern emigrant to the North finds no door shut to him because he comes from elsewhere; his origin is interesting to the people he meets; and unless very violent in temper and abusive to the section of his adoption, he may criticise his home and set forth the superiority of the Southland without making enemies. ”

“ AUSTRALASIA For nearly two thousand years the existence of a great Southland, in the ocean of the southern hemisphere, corresponding to the land mass of the Old World in the northern, was a matter of doubt and dispute among geographers. ”

“ He did more than any other individual in teaching the world “that democracy’s plan for the solution of the race problem in the Southland is not primarily in the philanthropies and wisdom of Northern people ”

“ Maybe we shall go far on this journey, and see at least one of the garths of the Southlands, even those which they call cities. For I have heard it said that they have more cities than one only, and that so great are their kindreds, that each liveth in a garth full of mighty houses, with a wall of stone and lime around it; and that in every one of these garths lieth wealth untold heaped up. ”

“ Southerners, boasted this young apostle of the old order, “have been and still are, closer by blood, by belief, and by behavior to the framers of those two documents than are persons of any other section of the country.” [82] L. B. McCord, the Clarendon County school superintendent and former Presbyterian minister, thought the decision “one of the worst things that has happened in this century,” endangering as it did “the splendid relation” which had previously existed between the races “in this good old Southland.” ”

“ The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. ”

“ The crew could only tell, that these Southlanders have a very black skin, much like the Caffers of Angola, but with long black hair on their head, and were much stouter and taller in stature than any Europeans, and quite naked, with the exception of their middle. ”

“ Thus for several centuries, from the British Isles to the heart of Russia, all lands were Scandinavian pure, or under the influence of the ever conquering Norse. Had the race possessed a spark of Roman organising power, here had been established a dominion greater than any that the Southlands knew, for such an empire had hardly failed to girdle the world, expanding eastward through northern Asia, westward from Vinland the Good. ”

“ Much inquiry and mutual communication appear to have taken place, as was to be expected, between the Southlanders and their guests respecting the institutions and manners of their respective countries; and among others the subject of duelling, as prevailing among the Europeans and Americans, happened one day to be introduced in a mixed company. A large proportion of the younger persons present expressed their astonishment that a people 42pretending to civilization should fight out their disputes “like the savages.” ”

“ Borne down by colonial subjugation, monopoly, and bigotry, these vast regions of the South were hardly visible above the horizon. But in our day there has been, as it were, a new creation. The southern hemisphere emerges from the sea. Its lofty mountains begin to lift themselves into the light of heaven; its broad and fertile plains stretch out, in beauty, to the eye of civilized man, and at the mighty bidding of the voice of political liberty the waters of darkness retire. ”

“ It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, Sudbury, that is Southborough men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving ”

“ The North is rich, never so rich; the South is poor, never before so poor. The population of the North is nearly double that of the South. The industry of the North, in diversity, in forwardness and productiveness, in all the machinery and education required for manufacturing, is half a century in advance of the South. Churches in the North crown every hill, and schools swarm in every neighborhood; while the South has but scattered lights, at long distances, like light-houses twinkling along the edge of a continent of darkness. ”

“ Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not forget. The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever. If to err is human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same token, attained something like divinity. ”

“ The whole South is maintained in a frontier condition by the system which is apologized for on the ground that it favours good breeding. This system, at the same time, tends to concentrate wealth in a few hands. If there is wisdom and great care in the education of a family thus favoured, the result which we see at the North, under the circumstances I have described, is frequently reproduced. There are many more such fruits of frontier life at the South than the North, because there is more frontier life. ”

“ What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. ”

“ The lines running to the north and north-west carry us into an entirely new type of country, and before following them up we must look carefully at the build of the island on the other side of the mountain backbone. Here our experience of South Island will help us little. Instead of a gentle uniform slope to the ocean, we find a confused and bewildering structure. The mountain ranges in the long northern neck and in the Coromandel Peninsula, with its continuing islands, run from north-west to south-east, almost at right angles to our main dividing range. ”

“ Between 1810 and 1820 the lot of the settlers was no easy one, and those who came intending to amass a fortune and return to England found their project a mere dream, and that they needed steady perseverance before they could make their way in the Colony itself. Bigge noticed that New South Wales was unlike any other British Colony, inasmuch as the colonists looked upon it as their future home. ”

“ Yet busy, smoky, and in some spots ugly and squalid as it is, Sunderland hardly deserves the censure that has been heaped upon it as a town where “earth and water are alike black and filthy,” through whose murky atmosphere the blue sky seldom shows itself, and whose architectural features are utterly contemptible. Sunderland has a number of fine buildings and handsome thoroughfares, and a large part of the town is lifted clear of the dingy streets by the wharves and river-bank. ”

“ Yet New England is reproached with cowardice and ingratitude to her Southern benefactors! If one man were to knock another down with a broad axe, in the attempt to brush a fly from his face, and then blame him for not being sufficiently thankful, it would exactly illustrate the relation between the North and the South on this subject. ”

“ This settlement contributed a new element to our national development and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard South to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and the men of the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic history of the "Old South." Nevertheless, the Upland South, as slavery and cotton cultivation extended westward from the coast, gradually merged in the East. ”

“ I have now given the sum of our geographical knowledge of New South Wales up to the present period; and dividing the map of that vast country into seven equal parts, one division will fully include the tracks of all the journeys which have been undertaken since 1817, with a view to discovery, by Oxley, Sturt, Hovell and Hume, myself, and others; whilst the remaining six portions, which comprehend a great expanse of interior beyond the tropic, and the whole of the equinoctial part of the continent, continue, at this day, a vast region, entirely unknown. ”

“ At an epoch in the existence of an infant state, when the first settlers ought to consist of a few gardeners, a few shepherds, a few farmers, and a few mechanics, with half a dozen men of superior attainments and energy, and plenty of sheep and cattle, and when a village with a wharf was all the town needed, South Australia had nine square miles of building land, a bank, two newspapers, and a population of speculative gentlemen. ”

“ A newspaper in Richmond chronicled the sale to Northern interests of a large coal field in the State, and in unconscious irony placed in juxtaposition to the notice this confident exhortation: "It is plain that a new and glorious destiny awaits the South, and beckons us onward to a career of independence. Shall we train and discipline our energies for the coming crisis, or shall we continue the tributary and dependent vassals of Northern brokers and money-changers? Now is the time for the South to begin in earnest the work of self-development! ”