A few years afterward Page had an opportunity of discussing this, his favourite topic, with the American whom he most admired.  Perhaps the finest thing in the career of Grover Cleveland was the influence which he exerted upon young men.  After the sordid political transactions of the reconstruction period and after the orgy of partisanship which had followed the Civil War, this new figure, acceding to the Presidency in 1885, came as an inspiration to millions of zealous and intelligent young college-bred Americans.  One of the first to feel the new spell was Walter Page; Mr. Cleveland was perhaps the most important influence in forming his public ideals.  Of everything that Cleveland represented—­civil service reform; the cleansing of politics, state and national; the reduction in the tariff; a foreign policy which, without degenerating into truculence, manfully upheld the rights of American citizens; a determination to curb the growing pension evil; the doctrine that the Government was something to be served and not something to be plundered—­Page became an active and brilliant journalistic advocate.  It was therefore a great day in his life when, on a trip to Washington in the autumn of 1885, he had an hour’s private conversation with President Cleveland, and it was entirely characteristic of Page that he should make the conversation take the turn of a discussion of the so-called Southern question.

“In the White House at Washington,” Page wrote about this visit, “is an honest, plain, strong man, a man of wonderfully broad information and of most uncommon industry.  He has always been a Democrat.  He is a distinguished lawyer and a scholar on all public questions.  He is as frank and patriotic and sincere as any man that ever won the high place he holds.  Within less than a year he has done so well and so wisely that he has disappointed his enemies and won their admiration.  He is as unselfish as he is great.  He is one of the most industrious men in the world.  He rises early and works late and does not waste his time—­all because his time is now not his own but the Republic’s, whose most honoured servant he is.  I count it among the most inspiring experiences in my life that I had the privilege, at the suggestion of one of his personal friends, of talking with him one morning about the complete reuniting of the two great sections of our Republic by his election.  I told him, and I know I told him the truth, when I said that every young man in the Southern States who, without an opportunity to share either the glory or the defeat of the late Confederacy, had in spite of himself suffered the disadvantages of the poverty and oppression that followed war, took new hope for the full and speedy realization of a complete union, of unparalleled prosperity and of broad thinking and noble living from his elevation to the Presidency.  I told him that the men of North Carolina were not only patriotic but ambitious as well; and that they were Democrats and proud citizens