An article in the Columbia State to the effect “nowhere in
America are the results of ignorance so painfully illustrated as among the
Republicans of the western North Carolina mountains” has caught of the eye of the
editor of The Richmond Virginian, who
very promptly comes to the defense of the mountain people. At the conclusion of
an exceedingly fair and forceful analytical article, he says:
“An investigation is all too apt to discover that for which
he searches. Here and there in the mountains survives the typical cabin of the
pioneer, equipped with antler and long-barreled rifle, with slattern wife and
skulking children. It is, however, but the quaint memento of a vanished past;
and it is not remotely the illustration of a type., In the hustling mountain towns,
on the well-kept mountain farms in the modern development of mountain
resources, the men of the big hills are actors instead of onlookers. Republican
or Democrat, the average man of the mountains holds, along with an equal
intellectual ability with the average man of the low lands, the tang of
interest pertaining to a more or less mysterious history. And that is all. Let
us be fair to the mountaineer.”
It is an old story—this throw-off on the mountain people—but
we had not expected the time to come to pass when a Southern paper would have
to defend them from the statements of another Southern paper.
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