“The wisdom of the New South, then, must be in pursuing the sharp line which divides the neglect from the idolatry of riches. If they be pursued as an end instead of a means, they become your ruin instead of your deliverance. If riches when acquired are employed to enervate your manhood with costly pomps and luxuries instead of being consecrated to the noble uses of charity and public spirit, the richer the New South becomes the weaker she will be. The problem you have to learn is how to combine the possession of great wealth with the personal practice of simplicity, hardihood and self-sacrifice. That people which makes selfish, material good its God, is doomed. In this world of sin the spirit of heroic self-sacrifice is the essential condition of national greatness and happiness. The only sure wealth of the State is in cultured, heroic men, who intelligently know their duty and are calmly prepared to sacrifice all else, including life, to maintain the right. Well then did the President of the Confederacy utter these golden words, that “the spirit of self-sacrifice is the crown of the civic virtues.” I know that there is a generation, “O, how lofty are their eyes and their eyelids lifted up,” who boast that their cuteness is in pursuing the “main chance,” and who flout this virtue of disinterestedness as a weak folly; and yet for lack of this virtue their prosperity is ever perishing and their material civilization is ever, like the tawdry pyrotechnics of some popular feast, burning out its own splendors into ashes, darkness and a villainous stench of brimstone. The New South then needs wealth, but it also needs men, high-minded men, undebauched by wealth, who, like the “high privates” of the Confederate ranks, shall know how to postpone ease and the delights of culture for the invincible endurance of hardship and danger.”
Installment #4 of the New South, Discussions of R. L. Dabney, Volume 4, pages 18-19.
