The Old South; essays social and political

Preface To New Edition

A peeface is usually either intimate or didactic. The first kind serves better the proper use of a preface to give the reader the true spirit in which a work is written and thus give the chance to read in that spirit of open-mindedness, and possibly sympathy, which alone can give either profit or pleasure. Without this spirit no book can be read as it should. To one reading in another spirit, a book is mere writing; poetry is mere verse; romance mere fiction; history mere annals or statistics, of which some one has wittily said the chief use is to refute other statistics.

History, to be worth the name, must have its horizon and its background. Otherwise it is simply an isolated record which must be brought by some other hand into its proper perspective to have value. Without this due relation, it is "no more history than loose bricks are a house."

In this volume of early essays on the history of the Old South, I have only fluttered the leaves of the history of our people, getting a glimpse only here and there of its full life with many, many pages left unseen.

It is a far cry from an old plantation in Old Virginia to the Quirinal Hill; from the Fork Church Road to the street of the Twentieth of September. And yet, looking through these essays there is a connection between them. In the years which these essays attempt viii PREFACE

to reflect there was the movement of the same spirit of Liberty which has given the ancient Sabine High Road its modern name.

In those years, sitting amid the ruins of an old civilization which had been swept away by war, we were just facing a new life. The old was passing away. The awakening was rude enough. But the new life was met, and the old had its part in it. It gave it that which was immortal. Strangely enough, in a land where Domestic Slavery had been implanted, it gave in increased measure the spirit of Liberty, It gave it the Immortality of Democracy. Its expounders from Jefferson to Wilson drank of the well beside the gate of that Bethlehem and to-day we find the fountain spreading into a river to water and make glad the new world. What matter if its course has been different from that which the old seers foretold, if the future be somewhat veiled in mist! The mist will clear away, the sun will shine in the dark places and the world will be made "safe for Democracy."

An old friend of mine, Joaquin Nabuco, formerly Brazilian Minister to Washington, said to me once: "Charon takes little luggage across to Posterity. Gather together your stories and essays on the Old South and its Life; pack them in small compass, and try him ! "

I know that this kind speech was prompted by friendship, but I treasure it the more highly for that reason. Here is a part of the luggage to which he so graciously referred.

Thos. Nelson Page.

Rome, March 27, 1919.

Preface

Several of the within essays were delivered as addresses before literary Alumni Societies, and revision has not wholly availed to clear them from the rhetoric which insensibly crept into them. Being, however, upon topics as to which there is much diversity of sentiment, this form of expression will at least serve to show the state of feeling where they were delivered and thus may not be without its use. The substance of the papers is what the author earnestly believes and what he is satisfied history will establish.

The essays are given to the public in the hope that they may serve to help awaken inquiry into the true history of the Southern people and may aid in dispelling the misapprehension under which the Old South has lain so long.