The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

by George Cary Eggleston

  VII

  _A FAREWELL AT THE GATE_

  When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation ontheir way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friendwas thoroughly well used, called a halt.

  "Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."

  When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, themeditative youth resumed:

  "Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I passthrough yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the mostenjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Doyou realise that we may never either of us come back through that gateagain, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? Weare at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means likeunto it."

  "I confess I don't quite understand," answered the less meditative one.

  "Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has nocounterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and wehave decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a veryserious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be thebattle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of onthis continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet indreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes aregoing to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterlyexhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not herown, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of anabstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States whichVirginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence.Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic inVirginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness toit, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.

  "I don't at all know how the change is to come about, or what new thingsare destined to replace the old; but I see clearly that the old mustgive way to something new. Perhaps, after all, that is best. Ours hasbeen a beautiful life, and a peculiarly picturesque one, but it is notin tune with this modern industrial world. It has its roots in the past,and the past cannot endure. We have thus far been able to go on livingin an ideal world, but the real world has been more and more assertingitself, and even if no war were coming on to upset things, things mustbe upset. Railroads and telegraphs have come to us rather in spite ofour will than by reason of it. We have realised their convenience in afashion, but they are still foreign and antagonistic to our ideas. Theolder gentlemen among us still prefer to make long journeys on horsebackrather than go by rail, while very many of them insist resolutely uponsending their womankind always in private carriages, even when they golong distances to the mountains for the summer.

  "We are living in the past and fighting off the present, but the presentwill successfully assert itself in the end. You have yourself rejectedall the overtures of the speculators who have wanted to open coal mineson Warlock plantation, but the time will come when you'll be glad to bemade richer than any Pegram ever dreamed of being by the sinking of mineshafts among your lawn trees.

  "If you are lucky enough to survive this war, you'll see a new laboursystem established, and learn to regard the men who work for you, not asyour dependents, for whom you are responsible, and for whose welfare youfeel a sympathetic concern, but as so many 'employees,' to be dealt withthrough a trades union, and kept down to the lowest scale of wagesconsistent with their living and working.

  "I am not advocating the new, or condemning the old. I am only pointingout the fact that the new is surely destined to triumph over the old,and replace it.

  "The negroes in Virginia are beyond question the best paid, the bestfed, the best housed, and altogether the best cared for labouringpopulation on earth. They are secure in childhood and in old age and inillness, as no other labouring people on earth are. They are happy, andin important ways they are even freer than any other labouring classever was. But they are slaves, and modern thought insists that theywould be better off as free men, even though freedom should bring tothem a loss of happiness and a loss of that well-nigh limitless libertywhich they enjoy as bondsmen, under care of kindly masters.

  "Mind you, Baillie, I am not arguing for or against the claims of modernthought. I am only pointing out the fact that it is resistless, and willhave its way. All history teaches that. Even chivalry, armed as it wasfrom head to heel, and limitlessly courageous as it was, could not holdits own against commercialism, when commercialism became dominant as thethought that represented the aspirations of men. Not even prejudice orsentiment can prevail against progress.

  "John Ruskin is even now protesting in the name of aesthetics against thescarring of England with railroad embankments, and the pollution ofEngland's air with the vomitings of unsightly factory chimneys; butneither the extension of the British railway system nor themultiplication of British factories halts because of his protests.

  "Henry Clay was never so eloquent as when pleading against protectivetariffs as something that threatened this country with a system likethat of Manchester, in which men were divided into mill owners and milloperatives, with antagonistic interests; yet Henry Clay was forced bythe conditions of his time to become the apostle of industrialprotection by tariff legislation.

  "My thesis is that no man and no people can for long stand in the way ofwhat the Germans call the _zeitgeist_--the spirit of the age. Neither, Ithink, can any people stand apart from that spirit and let it pass themby. That is what we Virginians have been trying to do. The time has comewhen we are going out to fight the _zeitgeist_, and the _zeitgeist_ isgoing to conquer us."

  "You expect the South to fail in the war, then?" asked Baillie.

  "I don't know. We may fail or we may win. But in either case the oldregime in the Old Dominion will be at an end when the war is over.Virginia will become a modern State, whatever else happens, and the oldlife in which you and I were brought up will become a thing of the past,a matter of history, the memory of which the novelists may love torecall, but the conditions of which can never again be established.

  "Fortunately, none of these things needs trouble us. They make nodifference whatever in our personal duty. Virginia has proclaimed herwithdrawal from the Union, under the declared purpose of the Union tomake war upon her for doing so. It is for us to fight in Virginia'scause as manfully as we can, leaving God, or the Fates, or whatever elseit is that presides over human affairs, to take care of the result.

  "Come! The time is passing; we must hurry in order to catch that trainwhich represents the modern progress that is destined to ride over usand crush us. Good-bye, old Virginia life! God bless you for a good oldlife! May we live as worthily in the new, if we survive to see thenew!"