And yet these men of the Southwest had an ideal of their own as vivid and as binding as the state ideal of the men of the eastern coast. Though half their leaders were born in the North, the people themselves were overwhelmingly Southern. From all the older States, all round the huge crescent which swung around from Kentucky coastwise to Florida, immigration in the twenties and thirties had poured into Mississippi. Consequently the new community presented a composite picture of the whole South, and like all composite pictures it emphasized only the factors common to all its parts. What all the South had in common, what made a man a Southerner in the general sense--in distinction from a Northerner on the one hand, or a Virginian, Carolinian, Georgian, on the other--could have been observed with clearness in Mississippi, just before the war, as nowhere else. Therefore, the fulfillment of the ideal of Southern life in general terms was the vision of things hoped for by the new men of the Southwest. The features of that vision were common to them all--country life, broad acres, generous hospitality, an aristocratic system. The temperaments of these men were sufficiently buoyant to enable them to apprehend this ideal even before it had materialized. Their romantic minds could see the gold at the end of the rainbow. Theirs was not the pride of administering a well-ordered, inherited system, but the joy of building a new system, in their minds wholly elastic, to be sure, but still inspired by that old system.