A felt want of the South is the restoration of old-fashioned love of country. A sore need is to feel in our souls, as a passion, that this is _our_ country; that _we_ have part and lot in it; and to be deeply interested in its welfare and perpetuity. To keep alive animosities is unchristian. Brooke found it impossible to frame an indictment against a whole people. It ought to be equally hard to involve a whole party, or geographical section, in sweeping accusations of injustice, and tyranny, and fraud. Strong as is the provocation at times to bitterness and hatred, the South should not cherish resentment, but rather seek that which makes for peace and reconciliation. It is better, as far as possible, to obliterate unpleasant memories, to practise toleration and forgiveness, to cultivate a genuine patriotism, ardent love for this ancient birth land of the free. It is easy by cheap rhetoric to open wounds afresh and inflame hostility; but every true son and daughter of the South should strive not to transmit a legacy of hate, nor make our land a Poland or an Ireland. The noble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public schools; elevate the tone of a free press; preserve an able and independent judiciary; insist upon juster and more enlarged ideas of official duty; maintain the principles of constitutional liberty and absolute freedom of religion, and above all, a spirit of subordination to the divine law, and a reverent acknowledgment of Him in whose hands are the destinies of nations.
IF the St. Louis preacher who lately tilted against novels chose judiciously his points of attack, he presumably won a victory. His own Sunday-school library is very likely filled with wishy-washy fiction for bright young minds that might be harvesting works worth remembering, whether of romance or history. The prudent Quakers of Germantown rejoice in a free library without a novel, and a librarian who never read one. Indiscriminate novel reading is as sorry a tipple as addiction to newspapers, which also, in fact, are largely works of the imagination. Besides, the moral of even a goody-good story may be ingeniously twisted by perverse readers. The other day a lad was indicted in England for breaking into the Rev. Mr. Sherratt's schoolroom, where he stole some books and cake, trudging off with them in a wheelbarrow at midnight. He was an old pupil, the son of respectable parents; in his pocket was a book entitled "Industry Without Honesty," and his ambition was to become a _Chevalier d'Industrie_ of the sort he had been reading about. It is said that Dumas's story, "Monsieur Fromentin," so spread the rage for lottery gambling that the author in great grief bought up and burned every copy he could lay hands on. For generations English youth have turned footpads or thieves, in emulation of Sir Richard Turpin, Lord John Sheppard, and other knights of the road whose careers are set forth in the shining pages of biographical romance. French youngsters have a like exemplar in Louis Cartouche. Two San Francisco lads are now in jail for trying to rob a stagecoach, in Claude Duval style--luckless little victims, knocked down by the passengers in a way not recorded in the novels that had ruined them. Lads are for ever running away to sea in imitation of some Jack Halyard or Ben the Bo's'n; and surely we know that urchins of all ages and sizes are picked up on their way west to "fight Injuns," thanks to their dogs'-eared dime novels narrating the prowess of Buffalo Bills and Texas Jacks. Boyish sympathy goes out toward the Paul Cliffords, the Arams of romance. I remember, as if it were of yesterday, the sad fate of Red Rover, and how the overwrought little reader, when he came to the hero's death, put by the book that he could not finish, and walked about in the twilight of a Saturday whose hours had slipped unnoticed away, inconsolable with sympathy and grief.