Much, if not most, of our foreign immigration now comes from cities, and pours itself into the already corrupted life of our own great cities. ("Syrian Orontes pours its filth into The Tiber."--_Juv._) It does not buy land, it sells votes; it specifically performs the political contracts of its priests; it buys and sells political jobs; it officers ward politics. It is one of the arms--and the negro is the other--by which greed and monopoly, the twin devils which dance attendance upon national decline, are consolidating our government.
No great city has ever been fit for self-government and civil liberty. From Babylon to Nineveh, from Nineveh to Carthage, from Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice to New York and Chicago (neither of which can elect an honest board of aldermen), it is the same old story of avarice which finally overreaches itself. This is the sin which, when finished, brings forth the death of nations.
In vain did Virgil and Horace sing their deathless melodies of country homes to a people whose blood was already poisoned with the lust for gain and fevered with the excitement of artificial life.
The South, the rural South, in spite of many shortcomings, is the great conservator of our institutions. It is the distinctively American section of the Union, jealous of all foreign domination or interference, and stands firm in the patriot's faith that we as a nation can work out our own salvation without the aid of European capital or distinctively European ideas of finance, government or society.
Though contaminated by modern machine politics, and much hampered by the race question, the South still clings to local self-government and to the dignity of Statehood as the only sure foundation for civil liberty and perpetual Union. Long taxed unfairly, by the subtle operation of the Federal tariff and internal revenue and currency laws, out of money which has long enriched another section, in the shape of pensions, internal improvements, and "protection to home industries," the South is still the section most loyal to constitutional government, having infinitely more genuine affection for it than the pension-pampered patriotism of such as make merchandise out of "saving the Union."