We hear much about the dangerous foreigners that come to us, but little about the dangerous native. There is not a type, whether of poverty or ignorance, but what we can match it. Leaving out the negro, we have over ninety per cent Anglo-Saxon in the South. Here we find a strange lot of paradoxes,—the most American, the most ignorant, the most religious, the most superstitious, and the most lawless. Take the lowest class of Crackers, and we have the whole of the above combined, with millions of mountain whites to match. Yet in this same South land are the most gentlemanly, and the most lady-like, and the most hospitable people in the country. The Cracker classes are descendants of the English, but what kind of English? The offscourings of prison and dockyards, sent over to work on the plantations before slave labor was introduced.

The mountain whites are the descendants of the Scotch-Irish. As many people seem to think this means a Scotch parent on one side and an Irish upon the other, it may be well to state that the Scotch-Irish are the descendants of Scotch people who immigrated to Ireland. But it ought not to be forgotten that the mountain whites are the descendants of Scotch-Irish of two centuries ago, a very different people from the Scotch-Irish of to-day. Here in the mountains we find some three millions, often without schools, and waiting sometimes for years for a funeral sermon after the person has been buried. Towns can be found over seventy years old organized with a court-house and no church.

"Yes," they say, "the Methodists started one some years ago; but the Baptists threw the timber into the Cumberland, and sence then we ain't had no church."Here one of our minute-men had two horses shot under him, and another missionary was nearly killed.

Here you may find families of twenty and more, living in a wretchedly constructed house, on bacon and corn-meal, hoe-cakes, and dodgers. I started once to stay over night in one of these houses. As we came near to the place, I found that my host was a school-teacher. He had taught twenty-two schools. He meant by this that he had taught that many years. The kitchen was as black as smoke could make it; the butter was stringy, caused by the cows eating cotton-seed; and my seat a plank worn smooth by use, with legs which stuck up through it, which would have been better had they been worn more. I suppose in some way I involuntarily showed my feelings; for the woman noticed it, and said, "Yer oughter put up with one night what we uns have ter all the time."

I said "That's the trouble; I could when I got used to it."The room I slept in had a hole in the end that you could drive a span of horses through. It had been left for a chimney. As I found out that the day before a rattlesnake had come into the house, and the good woman had to defend herself with the fire-poker, I did not sleep so well as I might. The possibility of a rattler in the dark, and no poker handy, filled me with uneasy thoughts; but as people get up with the sun, the time passed, and I was glad to get back to civilized life.

I noticed that the cotton was ridged up with concave rows of earth, which was covered with rank weeds. This was done to keep the water from running off too quickly. I asked whether sage would not hold the ridges as good as weeds. "Oh, yes!" they said, and it brought a dollar a pound; but they had never thought of that.

Some of the States do not have seventy school-days in the year; and the whole South to-day has not as many public libraries as the State of Massachusetts. A man needs perfect health to enjoy some of the pastoral work which he must do if he intends making a success among the mountain whites. One thing should never be forgotten. The poor whites of the mountains were loyal to the Union, and out from this type came the greatest American we have had, Abraham Lincoln.

Here, then, is plenty of material to work on,—families big enough to start a small church, and who do not send to England for pug-dogs for lack of progeny. Here is the rich fields, and here must the race be lifted before the millions of blacks can have a chance. Education must be pushed; and then will come a period of scepticism, for this people are fifty years behind the times.

Several people were sitting on a large veranda; and one man, a preacher lately from Texas, was telling us of his visit. Among other things he spoke of the cyclone-pits, and said, "Seems to me, brother, a man can't have much faith in God who would go into a pit. I would not; would you?"

"No," replied mine host. "Men seem to me to be losing faith. I once raised a woman up by prayer that three doctors had given up. Aunt Sally, have ye any of that liver invigorator? I kind of feel as if I needed some."

Here was a man who had prayed a woman out of the jaws of death, calling for liver medicine. None of them seemed to see the incongruity of it. One good old deacon that I knew horrified his pastor, who was a strong temperance man, by furnishing the communion with rye whiskey. The old man meant all right; but he had neglected to replenish the wine, and thought something of a spirituous nature was needed, and so brought the whiskey.

It is a fact worth noting, that we have to-day, in the year 1895, millions of men living in conditions as primitive as those of the eighteenth century, while in the same land we are building houses which are lighted and heated with electricity; that some men worship in houses built of logs, without glass windows, and others worship in buildings that cost millions; that in the former case men have lived in this way for over two hundred years, and the latter less than fifty since the Indian's tepee was the only dwelling in sight; that to-day may be seen the prairie schooner drawn by horses, oxen, or mules, and in one case a horse, a cow, and a mule, the little shanty on wheels, the man sitting in the doorway driving, and his wife cooking the dinner. But so it is. We have all the varieties of habitation, from the dugout of the prairie to the half-million summer cottage at Bar Harbor; and from a single Indian pony, we have all kinds of locomotion, up to the vestibuled palace on wheels.

That I may not seem to be over stating the condition of the mountain whites, and the dangers among our own people, I close with a quotation from Dr. Smart's Saratoga address:—

"Let me tell you of just one experiment of letting a people alone, and its result. Shall we trust that American institutions and American ideas, that the press and schools, will ultimately Americanize them? In the eastern part of Kentucky, in the western part of North Carolina and West Virginia, there is a section of country about the size of New Hampshire and New York,—one of the darkest spots on the map of the South. The people living there have been there for over a hundred years, and are of Scotch-Irish extraction. Whole counties can be found in which there is not a single wagon-road. Most of the houses are of one story, without a window, or only a small one; and the door has to be kept open to let in the light. I have it from good authority that when the first schoolmistress went there to teach, she stipulated that she should have a room with a window in it, and a lock to the door. Very few of the people can read or write. They have no newspapers, no modern appliances for agriculture, no connection with the world outside and around them. This is the land of the 'moonshiner.' They love whiskey, and so they manufacture it. The pistol and bowie-knife are judge and sheriff. Bloodshed is common, and barbarism a normal state of society. These men were not slaveholders in the times before the war. They were as loyal to the Union as any others who fought for the old flag, and they served in the Union army when they got a chance. When Bishop Smith in a large and influential meeting spoke of them, he touched the Southern and Kentucky pride, especially when he pointed out what a moral and spiritual blot they were upon the South. Now, why are they there a hundred years behind us in every respect? Why are they sunk so low? Simply because they have been let alone. They are just as much separated from this land, without any share in its marvellous progress, as if a Chinese wall had been built around them. They have been let alone; and American institutions, American schools, and the American press, have flowed around them and beyond them without effect."