LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Walter H. Page Frontispiece

Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H. Page 20

Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H. Page 21

Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, Md. 36

Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins
University, 1876-1915 37

Walter H. Page (1899) from a photograph taken when he was
editor of the Atlantic Monthly 100

Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education Board 101

Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a leader in
the cause of Southern Education 116

Woodrow Wilson in 1912 117

Walter H. Page, from a photograph taken a few years before he
became American Ambassador to Great Britain 292

The British Foreign Office, Downing Street 293

No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under Mr. Page 308

Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at London,
1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919 309

THE

LIFE AND LETTERS

OF

WALTER H. PAGE

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE

CHAPTER I

A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD

I

The earliest recollections of any man have great biographical interest, and this is especially the case with Walter Page, for not the least dramatic aspect of his life was that it spanned the two greatest wars in history.  Page spent his last weeks in England, at Sandwich, on the coast of Kent; every day and every night he could hear the pounding of the great guns in France, as the Germans were making their last desperate attempt to reach Paris or the Channel ports.  His memories of his childhood days in America were similarly the sights and sounds of war.  Page was a North Carolina boy; he has himself recorded the impression that the Civil War left upon his mind.

“One day,” he writes, “when the cotton fields were white and the elm leaves were falling, in the soft autumn of the Southern climate wherein the sky is fathomlessly clear, the locomotive’s whistle blew a much longer time than usual as the train approached Millworth.  It did not stop at so small a station except when there was somebody to get off or to get on, and so long a blast meant that