But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined--as instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.
So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be studied in school under the heading "United States History," it has not, in southern eyes, become altogether "book history," but is history that lives--in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields, and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.
Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not forget.

The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever.

If to err is human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same token, attained something like divinity.
Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.
Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in those States which suffered the greatest hardships.

I know, for instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to enter the Massachusetts Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and there are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and Stripes.

The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the South.