BOOKS OF THE WEEK
The Old South
By D. W. BROGAN
this book is to be most highly recommended. There is hardly a dull page, though there are a good many depressing and saddening ones. Those who enjoy reading. in comfort, of the hardships of others, can enjoy themselves here, for the South, as Olmsted saw it, was hardly more welcoming to the traveller than the Balkans of fifty years ago. And for those who are interested in social and economic history, here is the raw material .and often more than that, in great quantity and high quality. allow enough for the fact that even though the slave regime was legally harsher than it had been, the slave population, now over- whelmingly of American birth, was in fact being brought far more into American society than was possible when the plantations were full of slaves straight from Africa.
Yet he was far less wrong in his condemnation of the economic and social effects of slavery than the apologists of the South made out. It was because slavery was wasteful, a poison in the blood- stream of the South, that all the heroism of the South in the coming war was useless. True, Olmsted attributed many things to slavery which had other causes. Some of the shiftlessness of the poor whites was due to hookworm, and not to slavery. More than he allowed for was due to the southern climate, in itself a cause of that erosion of the soil which Olmsted noted. But all in all this is a first-class piece of reporting. It deserves to be widely read here, and still more in South Africa.
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