Southern France

“ The region immediately to the southward of the Loire valley is generally accounted the most fertile, abundant, and prosperous section of France. Certainly the food, drink, and shelter of all classes appear to be arranged on a more liberal scale than elsewhere ”

“ Put the Southern and Northern soldiers together and you have the strongest element, in a military sense, that could be gotten together for any national purpose. As fighters, they would be invincible. The Southerners are impetuous and will fight quicker and fiercer, but they give out sooner; the Northerners are slower, but they stay longer; they have more endurance, and fight steadier and more stubbornly. In fighting qualities, the South represents France, and the North England. ”

“ The literary and historic associations have not unnaturally operated upon our common notions of the country; and for the "South of France," we are very apt to conjure up a brave, fictitious landscape. Yet this country is no Eden. It has been admirably described, in a single phrase, the "Austere South of France." ”

“ 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. ”

“ If life in the Northern States is a grand epic, a poem full of great teaching, then is that of the Southern States a romance of infinitely-picturesque beauty—yes, even though slavery and sandy deserts exist there. ”

“ In England, we have immense tracts of common in many of the counties;—in Scotland; we have our barren hills, our mosses, and moors;—in America, the cultivation bears but a small proportion to the wilds, the swamps, and the forests. In our beautiful provinces in the East Indies, the cultivation forms but a speck in the wide extent of common, and forest, and jungle. Why should France furnish a different spectacle? Why should the face of the country there wear a continual smile, while its very heart is torn with faction, and its energies fettered by tyranny? ”

“ When, however, we have made all allowance for difference in climate, difference in traditions, total difference in the way of looking at life for a century, it is plain to be seen that a great transformation is taking place in the South, and that Southern society and Northern society are becoming every day more and more alike. ”

“ But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the slaveholding population of the South,—a nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp ”

“ The South as a whole, on any basis of material advancement, is below the average of other parts of the Union [Pg 339] and of several foreign countries; it is poor where it ought to be rich; it needs economic regeneration. ”

“ The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology, philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. ”

“ The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900) , who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. ”

“ There is doubtless just the same thing in Northern places, if you look for it, but in the South it follows you. With all the aristocratic feeling classes are more mixed together, and it is a harder thing than in the North to sift your acquaintances. Still there is an upward movement in every stratum of society ”

“ Southern men are not favorably disposed towards Northern improvements in any department, no matter whether it be trade, commerce, or agriculture: hence they have no such farms South as they have North, even in portions of their country where the soil is equally susceptible of improvement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The South will work out the problem for herself, with the help of that God who has evidently appointed her to do a great work for the African race, and all the more perfectly and speedily as our Northern people let her entirely alone as to the moral relations of the subject. ”

“ Range and characteristics.
The domain of the Langue d'Oc is included between two lines, the northernmost of which starts from the Atlantic coast at or about the Charente, follows the northern boundaries of the old provinces of Perigord, Limousin, Auvergne, and Dauphiné, and overlaps Savoy and a small portion of Switzerland. The southern limit is formed by the Pyrenees, the Gulf of Lyons, and the Alps, while Catalonia is overlapped to the south-west just as Savoy is taken in on the north-east. ”

“ A river is an advantage to both groups, but to the second it is of more consequence than to the first; and in South England, if we go back to the origins of our history, it is in fixed settlements that we find the first evidence of man. With every year of research the extreme antiquity of our inhabited sites becomes more apparent. And indeed the geographical nature of Southern England should make us certain of the antiquity of village life in it, even were there no archæological evidence to support that antiquity. ”

“ Thus, in Spain and Italy, the men who ought to serve the people, prey upon them, and the direct and chief reason why the northern nations of Europe surpass the southern is, that in the north the superior minds are turned to account, and in the south they have been entombed in the Church or paralyzed by titles of nobility. ”

“ Outside of New Orleans and Charleston, where they are conducted by foreigners, the South has no such market gardens, or such abundance and variety of wholesome fruits and vegetables, as the more sterile North can boast of everywhere. ”

“ The Southern Cross shines on a Southern world.
Now soon, with ecstasy, they hear the cry,
Land! land in sight! the land we can descry.
And now the longed-for shores before them rise,
With mountain peaks which fringe the azure skies;
Tall beetling crags frown o’er the breaker’s roar,
Whose white-tipped billows kiss a sandy shore;
’Tis Afric! land of mystery and fear,
Of burning climate, and of desert drear,
Where the fierce lion and fiercer savage roam ”

“ I say it only surprises me as being done here; for I know full well, that it is, and has been, the settled policy of some persons in the South, for years, to represent the people of the North as disposed to interfere with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns. This is a delicate and sensitive point in Southern feeling; and of late years it has always been touched, and generally with effect, whenever the object has been to unite the whole South against Northern men or Northern measures. ”

“ But the bad management of the French farmers is no derogation from the just praise of its rich soil.
The natural and agricultural produce is such, as to render these provinces worthy of their characteristic designation—they are truly the garden of France. The most beautiful shrubs are common in the woods and hedges: not a month in the year but one or other of them are in full flower and foliage. ”

“ There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, on 'lone plantations,' is positive proof against the ready suspicions and accusations of Northern people. ”

“ The Southern States have great advantages over the Northern in soil, climate, and situation; they have a monopoly of the tropical productions so greatly sought by all northern nations; they have superior facilities for the acquisition of wealth, and through that for the rapid increase of population. In some countries the advance of both is retarded by oppressive legislation. Of this the South cannot complain, as it will by and by appear. ”

“ The South is a prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states and New England. ”

“ In every discussion of Southern affairs an important thing to reckon with is a fixed belief that the South is the most prosperous part of the country, which fits in with the conviction that it has long surpassed all other parts of the world in civilization, in military ardor, and in the power to rise out of the sufferings of a conquered people. This belief is hard to reconcile with the grim fact that the South under slavery was the poorest section of the country. ”

“ The most that can be expected of Northern individuals in the way of bettering Southern conditions is attempts like that of this volume to get into the real nature of the problems and to offer good advice. ”

“ The hard work of the pioneer has been done, and civilization has rapidly changed the whole aspect of the great south lands. To-day the continent is bordered by thrifty seaports connected by railroads, coasting-steamers, turnpikes, and electric telegraphs. It is occupied by an intelligent European population numbering between three and four millions, possessing such elements of political and social prosperity as place them in an honorable position in the line of progressive nations. ”

“ Every century is marked by renewal of the age-long clashes between the northern and southern races which have been thrown in contact along the western end of the line which separates the plains of northern Europe from the mountainous southland of the continent. ”

“ The settlements that were formed on the south-western coasts of England resembled on the one hand those early colonies of Teutonic people on the southern and eastern coasts in the earliest Anglo-Saxon period, and on the other the later settlements of maritime people, including Danes and Northmen, on the coasts of Wales. ”

“ The animosities inflamed by a four years' war, and its distressing incidents, cannot be easily overcome. But they extend beyond the limits of the army, to the people of the north. I have read in southern papers bitter complaints about the unfriendly spirit exhibited by the northern people—complaints not unfrequently flavored with an admixture of vigorous vituperation. But, as far as my experience goes, the "unfriendly spirit" exhibited in the north is all mildness and affection compared with the popular temper which in the south vents itself in a variety of ways and on all possible occasions. ”

“ Much of the mountains is still in the colonial condition, but railroads, schools, and cities are powerful civilizing agents, and a people of so much native vigor may be expected in course of no long time to take their place alongside their brethren of the lowlands. The more prosperous South is too [Pg 38] little interested in these people, and is doing little direct civilizing work among them, in many districts leaving that task to be performed by schools founded by Northerners. ”

“ Change and grow more marked in their peculiarities with every generation, they certainly do, very obviously. “The South” has a traditional reputation for qualities and habits in [Pg 231] which I think the Southern people, as a whole, are to-day more deficient than any other nation in the world. The Southern gentleman, as we ordinarily conceive him to be, is as rare a phenomenon in the South at the present day as is the old squire of Geoffry Crayon in modern England. ”

“ Our country extends at present to a region which is already in some degree infected by the moral miasma of the tropics. The influence of Northern civilization in close contiguity may, by its preponderance, be strong enough to control the disturbing elements, and thus to impart to our South, in its present limits, a reasonable measure of the peculiar blessings we enjoy. But to secure that beneficent result it is absolutely necessary to preserve the preponderance of Northern civilization to such an extent, that the Southern weight cannot seriously disturb the balance. ”

“ The southern portion of the province is inhabited almost exclusively by natives. Only missionaries, tourists, and a few Government officials had hitherto traversed these interesting regions. The north of the island, on the other hand, is much better known. Numbers of European settlers inhabit the shores of the numerous bays of the northern Peninsula. The colonists themselves, by word of mouth, or written information, could furnish me with all the information I required respecting the natural history of those regions, not to speak of the specimens that were constantly being sent me. ”

“ The inhabitants of the South and the North are very different from each other in many points (See Letter X.) , and in a certain degree there are the same analogies and the same contrasts between the North and the South, as between England and France. [AJ] The South, like, France, is most distinguished for the brilliant qualities; the North, like England, for the solid; great ideas have their origin rather in the South; good execution belongs rather to the North. The North is gifted with the English perseverance, at once the pledge and the condition of success ”