Distinctly above the traditional Poor White, though often confused with him by outsiders, is the Southern white farmer. In ante-bellum days there was in every Southern state, and particularly in the border states, a large body of independent men, working their own land without slaves, with the assistance of their sons--for white laborers for hire could not be had--and often prosperous. They were on good terms with the planters, had their share of the public honors, and probably furnished a considerable part of the Southern Whig vote. Their descendants still persist, often in debt, frequently unprogressive, but on the whole much resembling the farmer class in the neighboring Northern states. The destruction of slavery little disturbed the status of these men, and they are an important element in the progress of the South. The old leaders have lost preëminence, partly because the South now requires additional kinds of leaders. In the modern Southern cities may be found classes of wholesale jobbers, attorneys of great corporations, national bank officers, manufacturers, agents of life insurance and investment companies, engineers, and promoters, who were hardly known in the old South. In the social world these people still have to take their chance, for the foundation stones of society in every Southern state are the descendants of the leaders of the old régime, including many people whose former back-country farm with its half-dozen slaves has become magnified into a tradition of an old plantation. As a Southern writer says: "Legends had already begun to build themselves, as they will in a community that entrusts its history to oral transmission. For instance, the fortunes of many of our families before the war became enormous, in our talk and in our beliefs." Notwithstanding this presumptive right of the old families to figure in modern society many are shut out by poverty and some by moral disintegration. Of course in the South as elsewhere the newcomers have more money and set a difficult standard of social expense; but, measured by New York criterions, there are few wealthy people in the South. Leaving out the Northern men who play at being Southern gentlemen it is doubtful whether there are thirty millionaires in the whole Lower South; and it must never be forgotten that nothing in the world is so democratic within its narrow bounds as Southern society. The social leaders recognize on equal terms other Southern high-class people, and also outsiders whom they reckon as high class. There is a sharp difference between the poor farmer and the well-to-do proprietor or the city magnate; but there is not necessarily a social distinction between the family which has an income of three thousand a year and the family which disposes of thirty thousand a year.