The Opelousas journal. [volume] (Opelousas, La.) 1868-1878, 1868-06-06
The South Has mo Business
ErIfnS.

fore the Anti Slavery Society in Boston
/ asserts that the South has cuisines
, brains" Literally speaking. this is un
true, but Mr.. Phillips, who is unques
: tionably thinker, meant to speak o
the Southern people generally. and il
that large sense there is too much truth
in what he said - Bee.
[ did not mean to be understood as
denying brains to the South. AS the
Englishman said to Bonaparte when he
lay at ST.. Helena and told how yelling.
ton ought not to have beaten him, at
is not very gracious thing, to criticise
the tactics of the man that whipped you
So it would be very ungracious and
! foolish thing to say of the South, that
that has mastered US since 1901, that it
has no brains. And certainly | never
intended to say that the South had no
brains. What [ meant to say, and
thought made it reasonably plain, was
that the South had no business brains.
1t was the movement of 100000, 900
bushels of wheat from Chicago, and of
! 1,O00,000,000 feet of lumber, to which I
adverted. It was the management of
our magnificent industrial resources,
which absorbs four -ffths of our blain.
of which | spoke. It was the Yankee
element against which said that the
Sou h rebelled. The Yankee is not
warrior; he is creator. The South
never took out patent The relations
of the North and South are the relations
of Holland and Spain. Charles the
Fifth and the Duke of Alva, Phillip the
Second and his staff of soldiers, crushed
out Holland under their military mailed
heel: but where is the power of Spain
to-day Decrepid and humiliated. But
that Holland, by the vigor of an active
mechanic brain made the Hague the
centre of Europe, ofciyilization, Of Chris
tianity, of literature, of law, for two
hundred years. Holland is the New
England of European history, and Spain
is the South of that history. 1t was a
long half century before the mechanic
ingenuity # Holland made headwav
against the sword of Spain but the
blight of Gods justice and its own in
herent emptiness, covered Spain with
decreptude, and so she stands to-day
while the inherent vigor of freedom has
kept Holland in the van of Europe for
centuries. What | wanted to say this
morning was that the war was over.
Those guns to which my friend, Col.
Higginson alluded, and which were
doubtless stolen from England, for the
South never made them, laughter are
laid up in the armories. The question
to-day is, who will feed the South, who
will build its railroads, who will man.
age its mercantile affairs, who will give
it the civilization of the nineteenth CEN
tur5-telegraph, commerce, schools, the
facility of locomotion-all that goes to
make up the civilization of the century i?
I repeat what | said today, that for
thirty years the South has never pro-
duced a prominent man whose intellect
leanedin that direction. She would have
counted it a disgrace to his gentility if
it had. The South never can be recon
structed until the element enters it, and
the reason why she starves to-day is
that she will not allow that element to
stay there, Capital dare not venture
near her. When I say that the South
is not ready for reconstruction, it is not
merely because Phil. Sheridan says to
the Mayor of Boston, Sir, | never saw
anything loyal at the South that was
not covered by black skin; it is not be-
cause Grant says that Texas must still
be ruled with militur7 power. I have
a great deal better evidence than that.
The South is bankrupt. Sherman spread
his wings fifty miles wide and swept
her clean. She knows to-day that she
cannot move without that great motive
power Of the nineteenth century-capital.
She wants capital. Why does she not
get it Because it is not safe for capital
to go there. Capital will not trust itself
there. AS Websrer said, "Capital is
the most vigorous, alert and ar-sighted
element Of the century" I 60 for uni
versal suffrage.