The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains



real disgrace attached to killing an enemy or a government officer
who attempts to raid a moonshine still. There is little regard for
the law as such, little regard for human life; but property is sacred.
If a mountaineer is asked what, in the eyes of the mountain people,
is the worst crime a man can commit, the answer comes, "Horse-
stealing. If a man up here steals a horse, his best friend would not
trust him again with fifty cents." Here speaks the utilitarian basis
of his ethics in the almost impassable roads and trails of a pioneer
country. To further inquiry he replies, "And the next worst thing
is to steal logs out of a stream-indeed, to steal anything." The
mountaineer is honest, scrupulously so. If a log from a lumber-
camp is stranded on his field from a subsiding flood in the river, lie
rolls it into the water at the next rise; or if this is impossible on
account of its weight, he lets it lie and rot as a matter of course, for
it never occurs to him to cut it up for his own use. He never locks
his door. If a robbery occurs, the punishment is swift and sure,
for the hue-and-cry is raised up and down the valley or cove, and
the escape of the culprit is almost impossible. Primitive in their
shortcomings, these mountain people are primitive also in their
virtues. The survival of the clan instinct has bred in them a high
degree of loyalty; and their free, wild life, together with the remote-
ness of the law, has made them personally brave. They carry
themselves with a certain conscious dignity which peremptorily
forbids all condescension. Every man recognizes man's equality;
there are no different. classes. The consequence is the prevalence
of that democratic spirit which characterizes the mountains of
Switzerland and Norway.
   In only one respect do the mountain people show marked moral
degradation. There seems to be no higher standard of morality
for the women than for the men, and for both it is low. This is
true throughout the Southern Appalachians.   The women are
modest, gentle, and refined in their manners, but their virtue is frail.
The idealism of youth generally keeps the girls pure, but when they
marry and take up the heavy burdens that mountain life imposes upon
them, their existence is sunk in a gross materialism, to which their
environment offers no counteracting influence. Furthermore, the
one-room cabin harbours old and young, married and single, of both
sexes.
   The Kentucky mountaineers are shut off from the inspiration to
higher living that is found in the world of books. Isolation, poverty,
sparsity of population, and impassability of roads make an education



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