154 SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



common use to-day. 41 The Transylvania Saxons, al- 

 though isolated from their German relatives for seven 

 hundred years in the midst of a Hungarian population 

 have preserved the Teutonic traditions of the father- 

 land. They have clung stubbornly, tenaciously, blindly 

 to each peculiarity of dress, language and custom, know- 

 ing that every concession meant increased danger of as- 

 similation into the surrounding Hungarian population. 

 If they had been left on their native soil, and surrounded 

 by friends and countrymen, they would undoubtedly have 

 changed as other nations have changed. Their isolated 

 position and the peculiar circumstances of their sur- 

 roundings have kept them what they originally were. 42 

 The mountaineers of the southern Appalachians have been 

 isolated from the experiences of the rest of America since 

 colonial times. President Frost of Berea College calls 

 these people, "Our contemporary ancestors of the 

 South. ' ' They have been undisturbed by the railway, the 

 printing-press, the electric car, the automobile, the power 

 loom and the telegraph. They retain in all their sim- 

 plicity the industrial methods of our colonial ancestors. 

 Wool is spun by the old-fashioned wheel and woven into 

 cloth by the clumsy hand loom. Here we have the sur- 

 vival of a culture which the rest of the nation has out- 

 grown. New ideas have been rapidly communicated 

 outside these isolated mountain valleys and the whole 

 length and breadth of the land has gained by the dis- 

 covery of the few. Isolation, while it may act as a pro- 

 tective influence in the early stages of civilization, retards 

 later development. 



The earlier advocates of the materialistic interpreta- 



Ibid., p. 271. 



42 Gerard, E. The Land Beyond the Forest, pp. 31-32, 33, 34. 



