In a lately printed article, Mr. George W. Cable, writing in the name of the Southern people, confesses judgment on points that they still defend, and commits them to a line of thought from which they must forever dissent. In this article, as in his works, the singular tenderness and beauty of which have justly made him famous, Mr. Cable is sentimental rather than practical. But the reader, enchained by the picturesque style and misled by the engaging candor with which the author admits the shortcomings of “We of the South,” and the kindling enthusiasm with which he tells how “We of the South” must make reparation, is apt to assume that it is really the soul of the South that breathes through Mr. Cable’s repentant sentences. It is not my purpose to discuss Mr. Cable’s relations to the people for whom he claims to speak. Born in the South, of Northern parents, he appears to have had little sympathy with his Southern environment, as in 1882 he wrote, “To be in New England would be enough for me. I was there once,—a year ago,—and it seemed as if I had never been home till then.” It will be suggested that a man so out of harmony with his neighbors as to say, even after he had fought side by side with them on the battle-field, that he never felt at home until he had left them, cannot speak understandingly of their views on so vital a subject as that under discussion. But it is with his statement rather than his personality that we have to deal. Does he truly represent the South? We reply that he does not! There may be here and there in the South a dreaming theorist who subscribes to Mr. Cable’s teachings. We have seen no signs of one. Among the thoughtful men of the South,—the men who felt that all brave men might quit fighting when General Lee surrendered,—who, enshrining in their hearts the heroic memories of the cause they had lost, in good faith accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which they had appealed,—who bestirred themselves cheerfully amid the ruins of their homes, and set about the work of rehabilitation,—who have patched and mended and builded anew, and fashioned out of pitiful resource a larger prosperity than they ever knew before,—who have set their homes on the old red hills, and staked their honor and prosperity and the peace and well-being of the children who shall come after them on the clear and equitable solution of every social, industrial, or political problem that concerns the South,—among these men, who control and will continue to control, I do know, there is general protest against Mr. Cable’s statement of the case, and universal protest against his suggestions for the future. The mind of these men I shall attempt to speak, maintaining my right to speak for them with the pledge that, having exceptional means for knowing their views on this subject, and having spared no pains to keep fully informed thereof, I shall write down nothing in their name on which I have found even a fractional difference of opinion.