Colonel Yancey rose to his feet and strode around the room for a few moments before replying.
"Well, Savannah has had her fill of them, I think. Perhaps I do consider the most of them damned Yankees, but believe me, captain, in the first place, we Southerners fully believe that they deserve that title, and in the second place, we don’t want them! No, nor their money either! Let them stay where they are wanted!"
"Ah-h!" breathed Winchester Lee. "Who now has been talking beautiful nonsense which he didn’t in the least subscribe to?"
"There! There!" said Colonel Yancey. "It is a temptation to me to follow the dictates of my brain, but my heart, Winchester, is as unreconstructed as ever! After all, I am no better than the rest of them!"
"But why do they--do you all feel that way?" asked Captain Lee. "I assure you from my soul that I do not."
"I know you don’t. But you have had strong meat to feed your brain upon during all these years. The rest of us have had nothing to feed our intelligence upon except the daily papers--and you know what they are. Our intellects are ingrowing, and have been for years.
"It is difficult for you to believe this, captain, and almost impossible for missy. But let me explain a bit further. For nearly forty years the South has been poor, with a poverty you cannot understand, nor even imagine. There has been no money to buy books--scarcely enough to buy food and clothes. The libraries are wholly inadequate. Consequently current fiction--that ephemeral mass of part-rubbish, part-trash, which many of us despise, but which, nevertheless, mirrors, with more or less fidelity, modern times, its business, politics, fashions, and trend of thought--is wholly unknown to the great mass of Southern people. The few who can afford it keep up, in a desultory sort of way, with the names of modern novelists and a book or two of each. But compared to the omnivorous reading of the Northern public, the South reads nothing. Therefore, in most private libraries to-day, you find the novels which were current before the war.
"Now take forty years out of a people’s mind, and what do you find? You find a mental energy which must be utilized in some manner. Therefore, after a cursory knowledge of whatever of the classics their grandfathers had collected, and which the fortunes of war spared, you find a community, like the Indians, forced to confine themselves to narratives handed down from mouth to mouth. It creates an appalling lack in their mental pabulum."
