"patricians." To those who know the Southern people nothing can be more absurd—to those who know their personal independence, to those who know the deep interest which they have always taken in politics, the keen intelligence with which they have always followed the questions of the day. The courthouse green was the political university of the Southern masses, and the hustings the professorial chair, from which the great political and economical questions of the day were presented, to say the least, as fully and intelligently as in the newspapers to which so much enlightenment is attributed. There was no such system of rotten boroughs, no such domination of a landed aristocracy, throughout the South as has been imagined, and venality, which is the disgrace of current politics, was practically unknown. The men who represented the Southern people in Washington came from, the people, and not from a ring. Northern writers who have ascribed the firm control in Congress of the national government which the South held so long to the superior character, ability, and experience of its representatives do not seem to be aware that the choice of such representatives and their prolonged tenure show that in politics, at least, the education of the Southerner had not been neglected. The rank and file then were not swayed simply by blind passion or duped by the representatives of political gamesters. Nor did the lump need the leavening of the large percentage of men of the upper classes who served as privates, some of them from the beginning to the end of the war. The rank and file were, to begin with, in full accord with the great principles of the war, and were sustained by the abiding conviction of the justice of the cause. Of course there were in the Southern army, as in every army, many who went with the multitude in the first enthusiastic rush, or who were brought into the ranks by the needful process of conscription; but it is not a little remarkable that few of the poorest and the most ignorant could be induced to forswear the
