I am a Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." The Provencal speaks of France as if she were a foreign country, and fights for her as if she were his alone. What is true of France is true in a measure of England. Devonshire men are notoriously Devonshire men first and last. If this is true of what have become integral parts of kingdom or republic by centuries of incorporation, what is to be said of the States that had never renounced their sovereignty, that had only suspended it in part? The example of state pride set by the older States was not lost on the younger Southern States, and the Alabamian and the Mississippian lived in the same faith as did the stock from which they sprang; and the community of views, of interest, of social order, soon made a larger unit and prepared the way for a true nationality, and with the nationality a great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the elements that made up the Confederacy did not prove the great source of weakness that was expected. The Border States looked on the world with different eyes from the Gulf States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole planter of Louisiana were of different strains; and yet there was a solidarity that has never failed to surprise the few Northerners who penetrated the South for study and pleasure. There was an extraordinary ramification of family and social ties throughout the Southern States, and a few minutes' conversation sufficed to place any member of the social organism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, like the University of Virginia, within the Southern border did much to foster the community of feeling, and while there were not a few Southerners at Harvard and Yale, and while Princeton was almost a Southern college, an education in the North did not seem to nationalize the Southerner. On the contrary, as in the universities of the Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points, were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of view; there was no weakening of the home ties. West Point made fewer converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands. All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All that I vouch for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.