Twelve Southerners Introduction 'An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, or professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption labor becomes mercenary and servile, and it is no wonder if many forms of modern labor are accepted without resentment though they are evidently brutalizing.
Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society.
It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. There are a good many faults to be found with the old South, but hardly the fault of being intemperately addicted to work and to gross material prosperity. The South took like easy, which is itself a tolerably comprehensive art.