The country increased in population and in wealth, and attained before the War Between the States a civilization scarcely excelled, even in the mother countries. There came in 1861 our terrible fratricidal war, our one great national catastrophe up to that time. All progress was stopped, slaves were freed, and life in the South had to take a fresh start under difficulties rivaling those in the beginning. The one great loss, however, from which we have not recovered, and probably never will completely, was that forty per cent of our choicest young manhood went out from our Virginia and North Carolina homes never to return. These would have been the future fathers of our race and the builders of our great civilization. With these noble young men perished the hopes of an equal number of young women, who were left without mates and without the opportunity of securing them except from a lower circle. It must not be forgotten that the greatest loss in this as in all wars was that the finest and best were the first to rush to the front, and to lay down their lives for what they deemed to be right. While, of course, many of the best survived, yet a far greater proportion of survivors were those who were lacking in vision, in courage, and in fitness, and who upon one pretext or another, or because of their very unfitness, escaped the dangers of the battle line. Thus these in a greater proportion than before became the fathers of the next generation, and this for the future of the race is war's greatest horror. The inherent ability of our people was shown by the speed with which new adjustments were made, and the manner in which the survivors passed through the horros of reconstruction and caused prosperity to spring up from ruin. [6] [right side] Those of the young women for whom there were husbands obeyed the Scriptural injunction to "be fruitful and multiply." Families of good size, both amongst the high and the low, were the almost invariable rule, from six to twelve children being usually found to a household. In this manner our heroic women rendered an even greater service to the State, and certainly greater to their race, than the brave men who perished in battle. All must agree that the white race, and particularly the better part of it, that from which our leaders in every sphere of life were to come, suffered a loss in this great war which has not yet been and perhaps never will be, made good. Conditions were naturally more favorable for the rapid increase in numbers and in influence of the negroes, and the type of whites who by their absence from the front suffered but little loss from their numbers. This disproportion, even under the more favorable conditions of forty or fifty years ago, when all classes were increasing at a normal rate, was certainly productive of a change in the average type of our population, though only the very old and most observant may be able to point it out. If the more prosperous, the better educated, and the leaders, were even then being crowded out through the mere numbers of the more numerous class below them, what must be the inevitable result under the changed conditions when the rearing of large families is delegated to the feeble-minded, the poor, the uneducated and those in general who have shown by their failure to attain success that they are lacking in qualities of leadership? We have already reached the point when the lower one-fourth of our population is producing one-half the increase by births. We are in exact line with ancient Rome when the leaders who survived their numerous wars refused to relinquish the pleasures which wealth and social position gave them for the drudgery of rearing children. [7] [end]