If the thinking people of the South were less willing to share the discussion with the North, it would still be a Northern concern; for the Southern race problem, like the labor unions of the manufacturing North, the distribution of lands in the far West, and the treatment of Mongolians on the Pacific Coast, is nobody's exclusive property. There must be freedom for the men of every section to discuss every such question; it is the opportunity for mutual helpfulness. For instance, how much might be contributed to an understanding of the decay of the New England hill towns by a Southern visitor who should visit them and then report upon them from his point of view. Violent, ignorant, and prejudiced discussion of any section of the Union by any other section is, of course, destructive of national harmony; but the days have gone by when it could be thought unfriendly, hostile, or condemnatory for Northern men to strive to make themselves familiar with the race questions of the South. "We are everyone members of another," and the whole body politic suffers from the disease of any member. The immigrant in the North is the concern of the Southerner for he is to become part of America. The status of the plantation hand in Alabama is likewise a Northern problem; as Murphy has recently said: "The Nation, including the South as well as the North, and the West as well as the South and the North, has to do with every issue in the South that touches any national right of the humblest of its citizens. Too long it has been assumed, both at the North and at the South, that the North is the Nation. The North is not the Nation. The Nation is the life, the thought, the conscience, the authority, of all the land." CHAPTER VII ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY The history of the United States is a rope of many strands, each of which was twisted into form before they were united into one cable. Each state marks the sites of its first landings, puts monuments on its battlefields, commemorates its liberty days, and teaches its children to remember the great years of the past. The South has a full share of these memories, which are both local events and foundation stones of the nation's history. Jamestown, St. Mary's, Charleston, Fort Moultrie, Yorktown, Mobile, belong to us all, as much as Providence, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and San Francisco.