within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of
testing their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had
no mind; he had temperament He was not a scholar; he had no
intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could
not even conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get
along very well without ideas, if one had only the social
instinct. Dozens of eminent statesmen were men of Lee's type, and
maintained themselves well enough in the legislature, but college
was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself, though
the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of neither
were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives; but
the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst
stages, while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous.
When a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief
and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could be
sure that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife
or pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium
tremens; and when things reached this condition, Lee had to
exhaust his authority over his own staff. 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