All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or intolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unrealistic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick Henry said, we know no other light to go by.
The consciousness of the Negro, I have said, is one common thread in the fabric of the South. There are others, identified by countless observers who have looked upon this tapestry, that merit some discussion also. Let me expand for a few moments on three themes: The Southerner as Conservative, the Southerner as Romantic, the Southerner as Realist.
Russell Kirk, in _The Conservative Mind_, examined the philosophy that generally is identified as “Southern conservatism” and found it rooted in four impulses. Apart from the Southerner’s sensitivity to the Negro question, he said, there is (1) his half-indolent distaste for alteration, (2) his determination to preserve an agricultural society, and (3) his love for local rights. These are good starting points. It was John Randolph who laid it down, as a first principle of political activity, never needlessly to disturb a thing at rest. The pace of life _is_ slower in the South, and the tendency cannot be accounted for simply in terms of a climate that often makes it “too hot to move.” We are by nature a contemplative people, and I am inclined to believe this stems from the agrarian tradition. A farm boy learns early that some things can’t be hurried--the birth of calves, the tasseling of corn, the curing of tobacco. On the farm, life is governed by patience, by the inexorable equinoctial rotation of the seasons, by factors beyond man’s control. It is, we say, “God’s will.”