VII

A farewell at the gate

When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation on their way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friend was thoroughly well used, called a halt.

"Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."

When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, the meditative youth resumed:

"Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I pass through yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the most enjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Do you realise that we may never either of us come back through that gate again, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? We are at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means like unto it."

"I confess I don't quite understand," answered the less meditative one.

"Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has no counterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and we have decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a very serious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be the battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which Virginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence. Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic in Virginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness to it, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.

"I don't at all know how the change is to come about, or what new things are destined to replace the old; but I see clearly that the old must give way to something new. Perhaps, after all, that is best. Ours has been a beautiful life, and a peculiarly picturesque one, but it is not in tune with this modern industrial world. It has its roots in the past, and the past cannot endure. We have thus far been able to go on living in an ideal world, but the real world has been more and more asserting itself, and even if no war were coming on to upset things, things must be upset. Railroads and telegraphs have come to us rather in spite of our will than by reason of it. We have realised their convenience in a fashion, but they are still foreign and antagonistic to our ideas. The older gentlemen among us still prefer to make long journeys on horseback rather than go by rail, while very many of them insist resolutely upon sending their womankind always in private carriages, even when they go long distances to the mountains for the summer.

"We are living in the past and fighting off the present, but the present will successfully assert itself in the end. You have yourself rejected all the overtures of the speculators who have wanted to open coal mines on Warlock plantation, but the time will come when you'll be glad to be made richer than any Pegram ever dreamed of being by the sinking of mine shafts among your lawn trees.

"If you are lucky enough to survive this war, you'll see a new labour system established, and learn to regard the men who work for you, not as your dependents, for whom you are responsible, and for whose welfare you feel a sympathetic concern, but as so many 'employees,' to be dealt with through a trades union, and kept down to the lowest scale of wages consistent with their living and working.

"I am not advocating the new, or condemning the old. I am only pointing out the fact that the new is surely destined to triumph over the old, and replace it.

"The negroes in Virginia are beyond question the best paid, the best fed, the best housed, and altogether the best cared for labouring population on earth. They are secure in childhood and in old age and in illness, as no other labouring people on earth are. They are happy, and in important ways they are even freer than any other labouring class ever was. But they are slaves, and modern thought insists that they would be better off as free men, even though freedom should bring to them a loss of happiness and a loss of that well-nigh limitless liberty which they enjoy as bondsmen, under care of kindly masters.

"Mind you, Baillie, I am not arguing for or against the claims of modern thought. I am only pointing out the fact that it is resistless, and will have its way. All history teaches that. Even chivalry, armed as it was from head to heel, and limitlessly courageous as it was, could not hold its own against commercialism, when commercialism became dominant as the thought that represented the aspirations of men. Not even prejudice or sentiment can prevail against progress.

"John Ruskin is even now protesting in the name of æsthetics against the scarring of England with railroad embankments, and the pollution of England's air with the vomitings of unsightly factory chimneys; but neither the extension of the British railway system nor the multiplication of British factories halts because of his protests.

"Henry Clay was never so eloquent as when pleading against protective tariffs as something that threatened this country with a system like that of Manchester, in which men were divided into mill owners and mill operatives, with antagonistic interests; yet Henry Clay was forced by the conditions of his time to become the apostle of industrial protection by tariff legislation.

"My thesis is that no man and no people can for long stand in the way of what the Germans call the zeitgeist—the spirit of the age. Neither, I think, can any people stand apart from that spirit and let it pass them by. That is what we Virginians have been trying to do. The time has come when we are going out to fight the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist is going to conquer us."

"You expect the South to fail in the war, then?" asked Baillie.

"I don't know. We may fail or we may win. But in either case the old régime in the Old Dominion will be at an end when the war is over. Virginia will become a modern State, whatever else happens, and the old life in which you and I were brought up will become a thing of the past, a matter of history, the memory of which the novelists may love to recall, but the conditions of which can never again be established.

"Fortunately, none of these things needs trouble us. They make no difference whatever in our personal duty. Virginia has proclaimed her withdrawal from the Union, under the declared purpose of the Union to make war upon her for doing so. It is for us to fight in Virginia's cause as manfully as we can, leaving God, or the Fates, or whatever else it is that presides over human affairs, to take care of the result.

"Come! The time is passing; we must hurry in order to catch that train which represents the modern progress that is destined to ride over us and crush us. Good-bye, old Virginia life! God bless you for a good old life! May we live as worthily in the new, if we survive to see the new!"