“Our best prayer for you is, that out of the present foul transition, a good Providence may cause some new order to arise tolerable for honest men. The changes implied in the introduction of this new order may be accepted by the old confederates as old age, as infirmity, or as a not distant death. They must be accepted by me as the inevitable. But the principles of truth and righteousness are as eternal as their divine legislator. These must be upheld under all dynasties and forms. Here, in one word, is the safe pole-star for the “New South”; let them adopt the scriptural politics, assured that they will ever be as true and just under any new regime as under the one that has passed away: “That righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” That “wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation; the fear of the Lord is His treasure.” That “he that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from beholding evil; he shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks.” Some of the applications of these unchanging principles are obvious to experience guided by truth.
Permit me briefly to unfold three of these to you, which are shown to be timely and momentous by the special temptations to which a subjugated people are exposed while passing of necessity under a new and conquering system. One of these plausible temptations is to conclude that the surest way to retrieve your prosperity will be to BECOME LIKE THE CONQUERORS. This is an inference as false as it is specious; the fact that your fathers are conquered may ground a good inference perhaps, that you should seek to be in some respect UNLIKE US. May you be unlike us in being more fortunate! But a very brief observation of history will teach yon that violent aggressors, in overthrowing their rivals, also usually prepare their own overthrow. Their calamities are only postponed to the second place. The Jacobins overthrew Louis XVI., but Bonaparte crushed the Jacobins, and Europe crushed Napoleon. Shall this be the best reparation for the miseries of the fall of the Confederacy; that you shall share, for a few deceitful days, the victors’ gains of oppression, to be overwhelmed along with him in his approaching retribution? Be sure of one thing, “his curses will come home to roost.” In order to escape the fearful reckoning, you must not only make yourselves unlike as but unlike them. “The North triumphed by its wealth.” Here is the temptation to the New South, to which I already see ominous symptoms of yielding, to make wealth the idol, the all in all of sectional greatness. I hear our young men quote to each other the advice of the wily diplomat Gorstchacoff, to the beaten French: “Be strong.” They exclaim: Let us develope! develope! develope! Let us have, like our conquerors, great cities, great capitalists, great factories and commerce and great populations; then we shall cope with them. Now here is a path which will require of you the nicest discrimination, and the most perspicacious virtue and self-denial. On the one hand it is indisputable that under our modern, material civilization, wealth is an essential element of national greatness. The commonwealth which presents a sparse and impoverished population, in competition with a rich and populous rival, will come by the worse in spite of her martial virtues,; and may make her account to be dependent and subordinate. Hence to develope the South is one of the plainest duties of patriotism. To increase its riches is one way to increase its power of self-protection. And a knowledge, and hardy, diligent practice of the industries of production are among the civic virtues which it behooves the New South to cultivate. So much is to be asserted on that side.
But on the other side the deduction that all our section has to do is to imitate the conquering section in that one of its qualities by which it got wealth; to make the appliances of production the all in all; to exclaim as so many do of factories, and mines, and banks, and stock boards, and horse-powers of steam, and patent machines, “These be thy gods, O Israel!” This would be a deadly mistake. Does not history teach that “wealth is the sinews of war?” yes, not seldom; but it teaches at least as often that wealth and material civilization have been the emasculators of nations and the incitements of their enemies at once, only ensuring the deeper destruction for the rich and cultivated people. Our own overthrow is near at hand to teach us this lesson, for we were the richer section subjugated by the poorer, which was shrewd enough to hire on the pauper proletaries of a hungry world upon our wealth as their prey. Do some of you exclaim: “What, the South the richer section?” Very likely many of you are already so indoctrinated in that tuition of lies,- against which I shall have to caution you anon, that this will be news to you. Nevertheless is it true: the South was by one-quarter if not one-third, the richer section, as was proved by the stubborn evidence of the census returns of the government itself, as managed by our enemies.”
Installment #3 of the New South, Discussions of R. L. Dabney, Volume 4, pages 16-18.
