Nor are reasons hard to find. De Tocqueville points out that the great guarantees of popular liberty in America are universal education and the general division of landed property. Now, in a purely agricultural country the education of the people is certain to be defective. The population is necessarily dispersed, for where there are no manufactories there can be few towns; and where there are few towns there are fewer and less efficient schools, and libraries and lyceums are practically unknown. Harrison’s “History of Virginia” states that that State had, in 1848, 166,000 youths between seven and sixteen years old, of whom only 40,000 attended any school. Landed property had naturally tended to fall more and more into a few hands. As John Stuart Mill said of ancient Rome: “When inequality of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in repairing, by industry, the injuries of fortune, its advances are gigantic; the great masses swallow up the smaller. The Roman Empire ultimately became covered with the vast landed possessions of a comparatively few families, for whose luxury, and still more for whose ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the cultivators of the soil were slaves or small tenants in a nearly servile condition.” The description is closely applicable to the landed aristocracy of the South in the years immediately before the war. It is a mistake--a not uncommon mistake--to suppose that the _ante-bellum_ South was poor. It was rich--considerably richer than the North, in proportion to its population. In 1860 the South had much more than its share of the assessed wealth of the nation. The total value of property in the Union was $12,000,000,000, and of this the Southern States, with only one-third of the country’s population (and less than one-fourth of the country’s _white_ population), had $5,000,000,000, or more than forty per cent. But in the agricultural South wealth was far more unevenly distributed than in the manufacturing and commercial North. In the latter great fortunes were made, but were almost sure to be distributed among several heirs, or lost in the fluctuations of trade, while the prevalence of the industrial and inventive spirit opened the path of advancement to those born at the bottom of the ladder. In the former, large landed properties were handed down from father to son, and tended to grow larger by accretion, as is the rule with great estates. The small land owner could not compete with them. The peasant, whose only calling was the tilling of the soil, had little prospect of bettering his condition.