It gives but a poor description of the “poor-white trash” to say that they cannot read.  The very slaves cannot endure to be classed on their level.  They are inconceivably wretched and degraded.  For every rich slave-owner there are some eight or ten families of these miserable tenants.  Both sexes are almost always drunk.

There is no better man than the Anglo-Saxon man who labors; there is no worse animal than the same man when bred to habits of idleness.  When Watts wrote,

  “Satan finds some mischief still
  For idle hands to do,”

he wrote what is much truer of his own race than of any other.  This law has been the Nemesis of the young Virginian.  His descent demands excitement and activity; and unless he becomes emasculated into a clay-eater, he obtains the excitement that his ancestors got in war, and the New-Englander gets in work, in gaming, horse-racing, and all manner of dissipation.  His life verifies the proverb, that the idle brain is the Devil’s workshop.  He is trained to despise labor, for it puts him on a level with his father’s slaves.  At the University of Virginia one may see the extent of demoralization to which eight generations of idleness can bring English blood.  There the spree, the riot, and we might almost say the duel, are normal.  About five years ago we spent some time at Charlottesville.  The evening of our arrival was the occasion of witnessing some of the ways of the students.  A hundred or more of them with blackened or masked faces were rushing about the college yard; a large fire was burning around a stake, upon which was the effigy of a woman.  A gentleman connected with the University, with whom we were walking, informed us that the special occasion of this affair was, that a near relative of Mrs. Stowe’s, a sister, perhaps, had that day arrived to visit her relative, Mrs. McGuffey.  The effigy of Mrs. Stowe was burned for her benefit.  The lady and her friends were very much alarmed, and left on the early train next morning, without completing their visit.

“They will close up by all getting dead-drunk,” said our friend, the Professor.

“But,” we asked, “why does not the faculty at once interfere in this disgraceful procedure?”

“They have got us lately,” he replied, “where we are powerless.  Whenever they wish a spree, they tackle it on to the slavery question, and know that their parents will pardon everything to the spirit of the South when it is burning the effigy of Mrs. Stowe or Charles Sumner, or the last person who furnishes a chance for a spree.  To arrest them ends only in casting suspicion of unsoundness on the professor who does it.”