It was as natural as it
was for Louis XIV. to give an asylum to the Stuarts. The traveller who
should have gone, seven years ago, straight from an English
agricultural county to a cotton district of South Carolina, or a
tobacco county of Virginia, would have felt that the differences
between the two places were merely external. The system in both places
and the spirit of both were strikingly similar. In the old parts of
Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, you had only to get
ten miles from a railroad to find yourself among people who were
English in their feelings, opinions, habits, and even in their accent.
New England differs from Old England, because New England has grown:
Virginia was English, because she had been stationary. Happening to be
somewhat familiar with the tone of feeling in the South,--the _real_
South, or, in other words, the South ten miles from a railroad,--we
were fully prepared for Mr. Russell's statement with regard to the
desire so frequently expressed in 1861 for one of the English princes
to come and reign over a nascent Confederacy.
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