The author discusses some of these interpretations and criticises them.  There are four principal types.  There is the philosophical view, represented by Edgar Gardiner Murphy’s “The Basis of Ascendancy.”  Mr. Murphy “is one of the choicest specimens of noble character that the South has produced,” but he came under Northern influences and his book represents a struggle between Northern and Southern points of view.  “The first part of his book seems to be, in the main, pro-Southern and defensive of the South, while the latter part becomes largely Northern and critical of the South.”  He does not succeed, in the opinion of the author, in synthesizing these two divergent views.

The second type is sociological, represented by “The Southerner,” a novel written in the form of an autobiography or, perhaps, rather an autobiography written in the form of a novel.  The author is supposed to be Walter Hines Page, at present American ambassador to Great Britain.  Of this book Mr. Bailey says:  “The author is not a Southerner of the spirit, whatever he may be of the flesh.  There is something of North Carolina and something of Massachusetts in his attitude, but none of the all-inclusive Americanism that alone is able to write about the South with sympathy of the heart yet with balanced discrimination.”

To understand the South one must have lived in South Carolina, and understand the “apparent violence” of Ben Tilman, or in Mississippi, the home of Senator Vardaman.  The South, the orthodox South, is today as it was before the war, the “far South”; but the sentiments which dominate it are not now, as in slavery days, the sentiments of the “master class” but rather those of the “poor white man.”

The third type of interpretation is represented here by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  The criticsm of this book is so subtle that it is difficult to indicate the outlines of it in a single paragraph.  The difficulty with Mrs. Stowe’s interpretation of the South and the Negro is that she, just as certain Southern humanitarians of the present day, is inclined to treat the Negroes as a class.  She does not regard them as a race, a different breed, whose blood is a contamination.  “No one,” says the writer, “has come within shouting distance of the real Negro problem who does not appreciate this distinction.  Indeed, almost everything critical that can be alleged against ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ springs from the failure of its humanitarian author to sympathize with race consciousness as such.”

Finally there is the scientific interpretation of Southern sentiment, and the “race instinct” which is back of most Southern opinion in regard to the Negro.  This scientific interpretation is represented by Boas, “The Mind of Primitive Man.”  “Ultimately,” according to Professor Boas, “this phenomenon (race instinct) is a repetition of the old instinct and fear of the connubium of the patricians and the plebeians, of the European nobility and the common people, or of the castes of India.  The emotions and reasoning are the same in every respect.”