The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1903-04-28
TWO KINDS OF sECTIoNALIsM,

There is undoubtedly much sectional narrow.
ness in the South-we had occasion last week to
comment on some outcroppings of this spirit
but it is not true that our people are sinners
above all that dwell in Jerusalem in this respect.
The n~arrowest, most provincial book that has
come to our notice in the last two years came not
out of the South, but out of Boston, the reputed
home of culture, observation-disclosures and patriot
ism. In his "Memories of a Hundred Years" DR.,
Edward Everett Hale not only seizes every nat
ural opportunity to berate the South and it's
statesmen; he goes out of his way in order to
find excuses to vent his spleen. No one deplores
sectiOnalism in the South more than we, but this
New England sectionalism that affects such I'M
s~peakable contempt for our Southern shortcom-
ings, this cultured, Pharisaical conceit that would
pull the mote from another's eye while uncon-
scious of the beam in it's own, is more contempti-
bic than the stubborn narrowness with which
parts of the South are afflicted. But DIR. G. B.
Winton, of the Nashville Christian Advocate, has
so neatly excoriated this IittleA band of self
righteous CRITICS that we shall not attempt to
improve on his effort. Here is his opinion:
"The future student of American life will find
no phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteeth
centuries more striking (and we trust more anus
ing) than the conceit which prevailed in New
England during that period, that all the con-
science, most of the brains, and the bulk of the
culture of this continent were concentrated in
that small section of it. The smiling assurance
with which this belief has held it's own, and does
to this day in the face of robust facts, is wonder
full to see. Culture we will not dispute about; it
has too many definitions. But as to brains and
conscience, we protest that the record must serve
us as an excuse for hesitating. For, with every
possible qualification, one or the other of these
must be at fault among a people whose theology
can find no middle ground between Puritan Cal
vinism and Mother Eddy, who love the negro.
first and chiefly as an investment, and second as
an excuse for meddling with their neighbors, who
to this day destroy more black men with their
rum in Africa than they save with their mission
aries in the South, and who supply the sharpest
contrast in America between preaching and prac-
on the subjects of temperance and domestic
morality. These are matters of common knOWI-
edge, though not often mentioned. Other sec
tons of our great commonwealth usually respect
the aforementioned serene cOmplacency, the
more so as it is now mostly confined to elderly
people. One of these is giving the public Mem
cries of a Hundred Years. though we believe he
does not claim to have lived quite so long. HIS
exhibition of the %sublimely self-centered
spirit of his section would be ludicrOus if 1t were
not pathetic. He tells in a recent installment,
without seeming to see the sarcasm of it, how the
New England Senators and others b~adgered Pres
ident Lincoln and his generals beyond all human
tolerance, and glows with as fine a scorn OF 'reb-
els as though no readjustment of national per-
had taken place since 1865. We are com
forted with the hope that when this century IS
the generation who think and feel as ne