"Haven't you noticed," I said, "or don't you feel it, away down here in your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come over the American people?"

He wasn't sure.

"They've lost their grip on patriotism."

He smiled. "We did that here in 1861."

"Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That's just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we've lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it. Rather different, don't you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of the individual's purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.-- Of course," I added, taking myself up, "that's too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn't extinct in the North by any means. But there's such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket."