THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW 57 



country as offering all that was highest and most interesting 

 in life to people of birth and culture. In the course of the last 

 quarter of a century many fortunes have been made by repre- 

 sentatives of the old rural gentry who have emigrated to the 

 towns,, but there has been no disposition in these representatives 

 to return to the life of their ancestors; some have purchased 

 rural estates, but it has been for pleasure and recreation during 

 the summer, and not for occupation throughout the year. 



The social life of the South now rests upon the same general 

 foundation as the social life of the North, and as time passes the 

 character of the one will be wholly indistinguishable from the 

 character of the other. The country districts will be occupied 

 exclusively by a great body of small farmers, planters, and their 

 assistants in the field. The whole extent of the soil will become, 

 in less than a century, so subdivided that two or three hundred 

 acres will form the average estate. The owners of the land, by 

 the vast increase in the rural population which will follow this 

 subdivision, will enjoy to a far greater degree than they do at 

 the present time all the advantages springing from a teeming 

 community a, more frequent and more diversified social inter- 

 course, more varied and refined amusements, a larger number of 

 public schools, and a more thoroughly organized and more effi- 

 cient system of public education. The towns and cities of the 

 South, on the other hand, will become, as they have done in the 

 North, the centers of the greatest accumulations of wealth and 

 the seats of the highest culture and refinement. Here, as in the 

 Northern towns and cities, society will be controlled, to an ever 

 increasing degree, by families whose rise to social prominence has 

 been brought about by the extraordinary talents of the men at 

 their head for building up great fortunes. The influence of mere 

 ancestry going back many generations, perhaps several hundred 

 years, will grow less socially powerful in the Southern centers 

 of population, where the ability to accumulate money already 

 gives the highest personal consideration, just as it does in the 

 like Northern communities to-day. The material spirit will 

 govern the forces in Southern urban society precisely as it has 

 always done in urban society of the North. Indeed, time will 

 only show more clearly that the defeat of the South in the War 

 of Secession meant the complete social unification of the United 



