Diversities of American Life | Page 9

is stagnation.
While this is true, and always has been true in history, it is also true, in
regard to the beneficent diversity of American life, which is composed
of so many elements and forces, as I have often thought and said, that
what has been called the Southern conservatism in respect to beliefs
and certain social problems, may have a very important part to play in
the development of the life of the Republic.
I shall not be misunderstood here, where the claims of the higher life
are insisted on and the necessity of pure, accurate scholarship is
recognized, in saying that this expectation in regard to the South
depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in
all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of
scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step
with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the first
importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,--in a society
inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship for its
own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be insisted
on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway between
the North and the South, and which I may speak of without suspicion of
bias, an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the philosophy of
history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted on as the
study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, the
question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship, is
not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one
army or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a
Republican or a Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to,
but is he a scholar and has he a high character? There is no
provincialism in scholarship.

We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one
society or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain
conditions at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm
sometimes in isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to
ask, what effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an
industrial and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more
domestic. But the South is now face to face with certain problems
which relate her, inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of
these is the development of her natural resources and the change and
diversity of her industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need
of institutions of technology, of schools of applied science, for the
diffusion of technical information and skill in regard to mining and
manufacturing, and also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be
reclaimed and good lands be kept up to the highest point of production.
Neither mines, forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be
handled to best advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled
labor. The South is everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial
development. But just in the proportion that she gets them, and because
she has them, will be the need of higher education. The only safety
against the influence of a rolling mill is a college, the only safety
against the practical and materializing tendency of an industrial school
is the increased study of whatever contributes to the higher and non-
sordid life of the mind. The South would make a poor exchange for her
former condition in any amount of industrial success without a
corresponding development of the highest intellectual life.
But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is the
most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever in
all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it is
the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to the
action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with them.
In the nature of things it is a matter of the deepest concern to the whole
Republic, for the prosperity of every part is vital to the prosperity of the
whole. In working it out you are entitled, from the outside, to the most
impartial attempt to understand its real nature, to the utmost patience
with the facts of human nature, to the most profound and most helpful
sympathy. It is monstrous to me that the situation should be made on
either side a political occasion for private ambition or for party ends.

I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what
to say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I
study it the less I know, and those among