![]() Out of a population of some 9,000,000 whites that peopled the Southern States, according to the census of 1850, only about 300,000 were actual slaveholders. ![]() Never was there an aristocracy so compact, so united, so powerful. Knight at Acre and the “embattled farmers” at Lexington is hardly greater than that between the feudal aristocracy which dominated Southern sentiment in 1860, and the commercial plutocracy that rules over the destinies of the nation to-day. In the lifetime of a single generation the people of the South have been called upon to pass through changes that the rest of the world has taken centuries to accomplish. ![]() The author's lot was cast amid the tempest and fury of war, and if her utterances are sometimes out of accord with the spirit of our own happier time, it is because she belonged to an era which, though but of yesterday, as men count the ages of history, is separated from our own by a social and intellectual chasm as broad almost as the lapse of a thousand years. The changes of thought and feeling between the middle of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are so great that the impulsive young person who penned the following record and the white-haired woman who edits it, are no more the same than were Philip drunk with the wine of youth and passion and Philip sobered by the lessons of age and experience. ![]() ![]() To edit oneself after the lapse of nearly half a century is like taking an appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. ![]()
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