26G     The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains



among these people, and a funeral has its cheerful side in the op-
portunity of social intercourse it affords. Sometimes a long arrear
of funerals has to be observed, if adverse circumstances for several
years have prevented a family gathering. At one cabin we visited,
the woman of the house told us she was getting ready for a big
gathering at her place on the first of October, when the funerals of
five of her relatives were to be preached. A university man, travel-
ling through the mountains to make some scientific research, told us
he had recently heard a sermon preached in honor of an old man
who had died a year before and of a baby girl who had departed
this life in i868. The prominence given to funeral sermons in the
season of good roads lends a sombre cast to the religion of the
mountaineer, and strengthens in him a fatalistic tendency which is
already one of his prominent characteristics, born doubtless of the
hopelessness of his struggle with natural conditions. This feeling
is so strong that it goes to astonishing lengths. It-frankly condemns
missions and Sunday schools as gratuitous meddling with the affairs
of Providence.  An Episcopal bishop recently, on arriving in a
mountain village, heard that one of the families there was in great
distress, and went immediately to make a visit of condolence. When
he inquired as to the cause of their grief, he learned that a ten-year-
old son had disappeared the evening before, and they had reason to
suppose he had been lost in a large limestone cave which ran back two
miles under the mountain not far away. In answer to his ques-
tion if their search had been fruitless, he learned they had made no
attempt at search, but "if he's to die, he's to die" came the wail,
with pious ejaculations as to the will of God. In a few moments
the man of God was striding along the trail to the cave, a posse of
men and boys armed with candles and lanterns pressing close upon
his heels, and in two hours the lost child was restored to the bosom
of its family.
  The morals of the mountain people lend strong evidence for the
development theory of ethics. Their moral principles are a direct
product of their environment, and are quite divorced from their
religion, which is an imported product. The same conditions that
have kept the ethnic type pure have kept the social phenomena
primitive, with their natural concomitants of primitive ethics and
primitive methods of social control. Such conditions have fostered
the survival of the blood-feud among the Kentucky mountaineers.
As an institution, it can be traced back to the idea of clan responsi-
bility which held among their Anglo-Saxon forefathers; and it is