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
