64 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



unadjusted. They are not decadents like the country people in 

 the densely populated industrial areas of the North and East. 

 They are a coming, not a vanishing race. Their thews and 

 sinews are strong, their brains are nimble and capable, and at 

 bottom they are sane and sound, healthsome and wholesome, in 

 wind and limb, body and soul. They are a hopeful element in 

 developing democracy in North Carolina. There is immense 

 lifting power in the people of our hill country. They need, to 

 be sure, to be organized for economic, civic, and social efficiency ; 

 but this need is state-wide, not merely regional. 



The Highlanders have long been a segregated, unmixed ethnic 

 group a homogeneous mass without organic unity. Miss 

 Emma Miles, herself a mountaineer, says in "The Spirit of the 

 Mountains," "There is no such thing as a community of moun- 

 taineers. Our people are almost incapable of concerted action. 

 We are a people yet asleep, a race without consciousness of its 

 own existence." All of which means that here is a social mass 

 that lacks social solidarity. It lacks the unity in variety and 

 the variety in unity that social development demands in any 

 group of people. 



A fundamental need in the mountains is an influx of new 

 people with new ideas and enterprises. The homogeneity of our 

 Highlanders has long been a liability, not an asset. Appalachia 

 needs the mingling of race types. The English Midlands offer 

 an illustration in point. Here is where the Cymric, Pictish, and 

 Irish tribes of Celts struggled for long centuries with the Anglo- 

 Saxons, Danes, and Scandinavians. Here they finally coalesced, 

 and here is the seed-bed of national supremacy in intellect. 

 Here is the England of Shakespeare, Macaulay, Ruskin, and 

 George Eliot, Hogarth, Turner and Burne-Jones, Watt, Hamil- 

 ton, and Farraday. 



But a new era is at hand in our hill country. Industrialism 

 is rapidly invading and occupying this region. The timber, min- 

 eral, and water power treasures of the mountains have at last 

 challenged the attention of organized big business. The blare 

 of steam whistles, the boom of dynamite, the whir of machinery, 

 the miracle of electric lights and telephones, the bustle of busi- 

 ness in growing cities announce an economic revolution in our 

 mountain country. Industrial enterprises will introduce the 



