The reasoning in them is very subtle, not to say metaphysical, and it runs like this: History is an imperative creative force (from Hegel again!) and man is its vassal. It is beyond the reach and the control of conscience and also beyond direction and prophecy. It created slavery, the southwestward migration, the Civil War, Ku-Kluxism. History does not conform to man’s will; it compels conformity, and under this compulsion man and his society and his institutions are shaped into what they are and into what they become by categorical directives as potent as the word of God. History is above moral judgment and history’s errors are beyond redress. Man’s world is mechanistic. This is not mere error; it, too, is symptomatic of a trauma all the more dangerous because this concept of history is what most Southern whites believe when they are being reasonable about the race question; when they are writing books about it, or talking quietly in their living rooms; or when they come together and “gladly agree to co-operate ... in any _sound_ program aimed at the improvement of race relations.” This reasoning, at once defensive and defiant, expresses itself in clichés, which are the hardened arteries through which thought flows. “The white South is _inexorably_ conditioned by cultural complexes.” “In both the physical and cultural heritage of the South there are certain cumulative and tragic handicaps that represent _overpowering_ factors in the situation.” There are “legal and customary patterns of race relations in the South, whose _strength and age_ we recognize.”[2] The idealism of these people of good will is negated by the meanings of their own phrases. The pattern of reason these phrases express has been the most influential factor in race relations for nearly a hundred years. And if Hodding Carter, one of the young Southern liberals, is representative (“The spirit [of which these stories are symbols] is harmless enough; a little pathetic perhaps, and naïve and provincial. Let alone, it will, of course, wear itself out some day. Not tomorrow or next year or the next year. But some day.”[3]), it promises to remain so for another century.