That the enormous vogue of the Bret Harte and the _Pike County Ballads_ literature of the early seventies could have passed unnoticed even in the remotest sections of America seems improbable, but to attempt to trace the influence it exerted on the group of Southern writers that sprang up shortly after it had made its appearance is useless and worse than useless. Not for a moment must it be forgotten that this earlier Western outburst was not a local evolution that succeeded in attracting the attention of the nation; it was rather the first result of a condition which was general and nation wide. It was the new after-the-war demand for life and reality and democracy, and it broke out first in the West because the West at that moment had material which was peculiarly fitted to make an appeal. Had the West at that crisis had no writers ready to exploit this material, the outburst undoubtedly would have come from the South. Cable and Lanier and Johnston and Russell would have written very much as they did write had Bret Harte and Mark Twain and Edward Eggleston never lived. There were influences and conditions in the South that were peculiarly favorable to the production of the type of literature demanded by the time. Georgia in particular offered congenial soil. The middle region of the State was the most democratic part of the South. It had been settled by a sturdy race which separation from the more aristocratic areas had rendered peculiarly individual. At one extreme was the mountain cracker, a type which had been made peculiar only by isolation, at the other were such remarkable men as Alexander H. Stephens, Atticus G. Haygood, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, and Henry W. Grady. The social system was peculiar. Relations between master and slave were far different from those found on the larger plantations where overseers were employed. The negroes were known personally; they were a part of the family. Relations like those described so delightfully by Joel Chandler Harris were common. "There was no selling," as Johnston expressed it; "black and white children grew up together. Servants descended from father to son." The result of this democracy was a natural tendency toward the new realistic type of localized literature. While the rest of the South had been romantic and little inclined to use its own backgrounds and its own local types of character, Georgia had been producing since the mid years of the century studies of its own peculiar types and institutions.