ABSTRACT
Liberals like Mr. Dabney pass lightly over such features of Jefferson's doctrine, and stress instead Jefferson's fight on the established church, his anti-slavery principles, his schemes for selective public education. Mr. Dabney and the liberals would apparently sacrifice a good deal of freedom if they could obtain the kind of society they want. If that is the effect to which the Southern liberals have read Southern history, they have read it badly, with all the prejudice that they have attributed to their opponents. For the surrender of the liberals, made, it seems, without a quiver of concern as to the virtue of the institutions they were abandoning, was a surrender of the spirit, a recantation made by converts to a new religion. The alliance between the politico-business man and the politico-liberal fell apart before the drastic necessity of expense reductions. The menacing protests of the farmer shouted down the old liberal pleas for culture.
