The problem of the leader in the South is also the problem of the led; shall those who concentrate and shape public opinion, who carry on the corporations, write the newspapers, teach the university students, decide law cases, and preach the sermons, shall they also set forth a lofty spirit? Will the mass, the voters, the possessors of the physical force of the community, accept their decisions? In general, the tone of the leaders in the South is sane and wholesome; commercial influences are less strong on the press and on state and municipal governments than they are in the North. There is at least a greater sentimental and abstract respect for learning, a larger part of the community is in touch with and molded by the churches. The lower Whites, though manifestly advancing, are still on the average far inferior to the similar class of white farmers of kindred English stock in the North; and also to many of the foreigners that have come in and settled the West. Education is going to help their children, but can do little for the grown people who are now the source of political power in the South; and there is a turbulence and uncontrolled passion, sometimes a ferocity, among the rural people which is to be matched in the North only in the slums. In some ways the Northern visitor is struck by a crudeness of behavior among respectable Southern Whites such as he is accustomed in the North to experience in a much lower stratum of society. A large proportion of the Poor Whites in the South and many of the better class go armed and justify it because they expect to have need of a weapon. Tobacco juice flows freely in hotel corridors, in railroad stations, and even in the vestibules of ladies' cars; profanity is rife, and fierce talk and unbridled denunciations, principally of black people. There is doubtless just the same thing in Northern places, if you look for it, but in the South it follows you. With all the aristocratic feeling classes are more mixed together, and it is a harder thing than in the North to sift your acquaintances. Still there is an upward movement in every stratum of society; as Murphy puts it: "The real struggle of the South from the date of Lee's surrender--through all the accidents of political and industrial revolution--was simply a struggle toward the creation of democratic conditions. The _real_ thing, in the unfolding of the later South, is the arrival of the common man." The North has always had confidence in the average man; in the South the upper and lower strata are in a more hopeful way of mutual understanding than perhaps in the North. CHAPTER VI SOUTHERN TEMPERAMENT