BASIS OF INVESTIGATION. 7! 



the South an exactly opposite policy was pursued, except in the case 

 of a few who were slave-holders. In 1671, when the population of 

 Virginia was estimated at 40,000, Sir William Berkeley, the then 

 governor, wrote: 



"I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope 

 we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought 

 disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has 

 divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us 

 from both." Of the great men produced in the United States, very 

 few indeed have come from the South, and those who have come 

 from there have had ancestries which were exceptions to the general 

 rule. An invention is the product of a mind capable of moving un- 

 aided through unexplored realms. It is an evidence of intellectual 

 power and is largely independent of the educational opportuni- 

 ties of the individual who made it. The inventions produced in the 

 Northern and Southern portions of the United States are a very 

 good index of the mental ability of the inhabitants of the two sec- 

 tions. In the South there is annually produced one invention for 

 each 17,000 of the population; in the Northern states the produc- 

 tion is annually ten inventions for each 17,000, and in Connecticut 

 it is nineteen. And yet the people of the South are of the same 

 stock as those from the North. The ancestors of both came from 

 England. If there was any original difference in the mental powers 

 of the two, that difference was in favor of the Southern immigrants. 

 It is true that England dumped some of her pauper stock on Vir- 

 ginia in the seventeenth century, but the "F. F. Vs." also contained 

 such men as Washington, the Randolphs, the Lees, and the Mar- 

 shalls, families which had achieved fame before coming to America, 

 and which were the peers of anything that New England could 

 show. 



