To be sure they believe, partly through knowledge but more
largely through absorption, that the Confederate soldier was the best
fighting man ever known and that the War might have been won if the
civil government had been wiser, but on the whole they are not sorry that
secession failed. They thrill even today to _Dixie,_ and _The Bonnie Blue
Flag,_ but this feeling is now purely emotional.
All the Southern States have felt, though unequally, the effects of
industrialism. The South Atlantic States have been most influenced by
this movement, but even Mississippi and Arkansas have been affected. In
many sections the traveler is seldom out of sight of the factory
chimney. Some towns, in appearance and spirit, might easily seem to
belong to a Middle Western environment but for the presence of the negro
and the absence of the foreign born. The population in these Southern
towns is still overwhelmingly American. In no States except Maryland and
Texas did the foreign born number as many as 100,000 in 1910, and
Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina each had less than 10,000
at that time. The highest percentage of foreign born was 8.6 per cent in
Delaware, the lowest 0.3 per cent in North Carolina. In the South as a
whole the proportion of foreign born whites was only 2.5 per cent.
The laborers in the Southern shops and mills today are not only native
born but almost altogether Southern born.
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