Once more it becomes necessary to recognize the division of our country into sections, as in the days before the Revolution welded it into one nation. The time was fast coming when there should be division in good earnest, when there should be even overt separation; and to understand the effects and tendencies of this time among the women of America it is needful that we take into fuller consideration than we have yet done the differences of custom and thought that existed between the women of the South and the women of the North. For though these met upon common ground and blended in a society which saw but little variation in the types presented to it, there had been constantly growing, since the time of the first amalgamation of the colonies into one nation, differences between the Northern and the Southern cultures that were little less than radical in their ultimate nature and expressions. The distinctiveness of type had come about gradually; but it had always existed as a possibility, even in the youngest days of the republic. The conditions of civilization North and South were in themselves divergent, and they were sure to produce an ever-increasing effect. The North was the land of affairs; the South was the home of luxury. The North worked for itself and won its sustenance by the labor of its own hands or brain; the South watched its wealth accumulate by the toil of its slaves, and thus had time and to spare for the cultivation of the graces which come of leisure. Up to the inception of the Civil War it cannot be denied that the South was preeminently the fountain of American society. Even as Virginia was the Mother of Presidents, so was the whole South the parent of the most charming, the most refined, the most cultured of the dames and damsels who held society aloft upon their lovely shoulders. The superiority was not of kind, for in this the North steadily held its own, as was but natural; it was of numbers. For every recognized ornament to society sent by the North to grace the circles of Washington, the South sent two.