Lee was a gentleman of
the old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of the old
school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but
this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive
violence of political feeling in those years; he kept his temper
and his friends under control.
Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them,
by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even
warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in
education so vital as the relative energy and endurance of North
and South, this momentary contact with Southern character was a
sort of education for its own sake; but this was not all. No
doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to
self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that
the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little
fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were
still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and hunting the bos
primigenius, and that every quality in which he was strong, made
him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this respect
one eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from another.
Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century
before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent.
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