THE SOUTHERN FOOL."

A TOUGH SUBJECT TREATED IN A TENDER WAY.

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Press Association of South Carolina :

PER

ERMIT me to congratulate you on the restoration of your State government. A bright day has dawned after a long and very dark night. Much of your recent triumph is due to your own stout hearts, but much more to the disturbed condition of the country. Had the volume of business remained unbroken, as from '65 to '73, you would have been crushed like an egg-shell, and the negro and the carpet-bagger would have retained power indefinitely. This is a discordant note, but it is the truth, and by the truth we must live.

You do not want, I am sure, the decorous nambypamby and the job lots of damaged advice which make up the staple of the addresses generally given on occasions like this; and if you did, could not get them from me, who know but little decorum and am but a poor adviser. Extend to me, therefore, I pray you, the forbearance which is born of that high

* Address delivered before the South Carolina Press Association, in Charleston, S. C., 1877.

bred courtesy for which South Carolinians have ever been distinguished.

A pretty showing, indeed, I should make were I to preach to the text chosen for me,-"Southern Journalism." Fancy me with a Richmond paper in one hand, and the average rural paper of my State in the other, coming here to instruct the editors of South Carolina! Comparisons are odious, and I will not make them. Although I have been alternately the accoucheur and the undertaker of newspapers in both town and country, and although I have been the correspondent of leading journals from Massachusetts to Texas, I confess to you frankly that I know nothing about Southern journalism. Yes, I do know one single thing. I know that if the money paid annually over the counters from Baltimore to Galveston for Northern papers which abuse, or, worse still, pity the South, were paid to us, we would all be rich. Whereas the most of us, like English curates and American insurance agents, are but genteel paupers. Knowing this, I lay down the dictum that no people will ever be free, or deserve to be free, who do not support their home papers in preference, and, if need be, to the exclusion of all other papers whatsoever. How is that for sound and high political science, and how does it comport with your ideas of free trade?

By your gracious leave, then, I will drop the subject of journalism and select for my thesis "The Southern Fool." That is quite in my line of busiI am accustomed to handle that class of goods,

ness.

and, like a good business man, I stick to my last. Ne sutor, you know. And it may turn out that the Southern Fool bears, I will not say a paternal relation to, but has a connection with Southern journalism much less remote than we would have the public to believe. We shall see. But first a digression.

When a boy I was sent to school in Princeton, N.J. The propriety of sending a lad four hundred miles away from home may well be questioned. Certainly it may be doubted when the money expended for his education is needed in the State of his nativity. Before the war there might have been an excuse for indulging educational whims, but what possible excuse is there now?

Dr. McCosh says there are eighty Southern students at Princeton; at $400 apiece, that is $32,000 a year, enough almost to support the average Southern college. Are there any fools among us for the want of sense? But we have no school equal to Nassau Hall. By Northern confession we have a school better than that, and equal to any on this continent.

About my school days in Princeton I remember many things, but this thing especially-that the Southern boys there taught me, a lad of ten, to look down upon the boys of the North. Was that wisdom. or folly? and if folly, was it confined to boys alone? Are all such boys dead now?

Last fall I revisited New Jersey. It is a lovely land. What land is not in October? "This land," said I to myself, "is not merely tamed, it is civilized,

it is enlightened in its thorough culture." But I care not to live in it. No. There are people who would leave Paradise to go to Orange Courthouse, and I am one of them. Dwell in a country where there are no sassafras bushes, no sumac, nor any brier patches? Never! Sir John Malcolm tells of the astonishment and disgust of an old Persian woman at hearing there were no date trees in England. Live there? Not she. No more could I live under a sky without a buzzard. I could not if I would, and would not if I could.

Yes, 'tis a beautiful well husbanded land, and the people who dwell in it are a great people, not yet in their prime, mewing still a mighty youth-who that visited the Exposition can doubt it?—and with an inconceivable destiny before them. We also of the South are great-greater in defeat, in the grandeur of selfrestraint, (as you South Carolinians have just proved to the confounding of your enemies,) we are greater in defeat than in war. Why cannot these two peoples come together without gush, fanfaronade or mental reservation, and be friends, be one people, absolutely. All good men in both sections ardently desire it. They long for it. There can be no peace, no prosperity without it. Why cannot it be? I do not know. Why is it that no house is big enough to hold one family after the sons and daughters are grown? Why must a magnet have two poles, and what is the meaning of this "inevitable duality which bisects all nature?" A battery with one wire can do no manner of work, and somewhy there is an im

perative necessity for two opposing electricities. Just heaven! can it be that the world's work cannot be done without hate, as well as love, and as much of one precisely as the other? Bah! These analogies are misleading—it's all stuff-the man's crazy. Say you so? Then are we prepared to come flat and plump to something practical, viz: the Southern Fool.

The first Southern fool whom I shall notice is the worst, for he is more knave than fool, a hound whose hide I intend some day to tear off and hold his quivering carcass up to stink in the nostrils of both sections. It is he who, having gone North and acquired money by hook or by crook, mainly by crook, proceeds to take unto himself all the glory and the fame of the South, disowns her shame, evades her suffering, and overwhelms us with his advice. His advice, quotha! Why doesn't he come down and put his shoulder to the wheel? Advice! Upon my word, gentlemen, gratuitous advice from a fool of this sort is the acme of all meanness. It is the very inversion of generosity, which naught impoverishes the giver, but makes us poor indeed. Will a beggar give me a handful of his rags? The figure is coarse, horribly coarse, but not so coarse as the fact.

It was a shoal of this kind of cattle (is that Irish enough for you?) of these advice-givers (Northern born, though,) who swooped down upon us after the war to teach us how to grow cotton and tobacco with machinery and free labor. They would hear nothing, for they knew all things. The last incompoop