And now also Page began to carry his activities far beyond mere print.  In his early residence in New York, from 1885 to 1895, he had always taken his part in public movements; he had been a vital spirit in the New York Reform Club, which was engaged mainly in advocating the Cleveland tariff; he had always shown a willingness to experiment with new ideas; at one time he had mingled with Socialists and he had been quite captivated by the personal and literary charm of Henry George.  After 1900, however, Page became essentially a public man, though not in the political sense.  His work as editor and writer was merely one expression of the enthusiasms that occupied his mind.  From 1900 until 1913, when he left for England, life meant for him mainly an effort to spread the democratic ideal, as he conceived it; concretely it represented a constant campaign for improving the fundamental opportunities and the everyday social advantages of the masses.

II

Inevitably the condition of the people in his own homeland enlisted Page’s sympathy, for he had learned of their necessities at first hand.  The need of education had powerfully impressed him even as a boy.  At twenty-three he began writing articles for the Raleigh Observer, and practically all of them were pleas for the education of the Southern child.  His subsequent activities of this kind, as editor of the State Chronicle, have already been described.  The American from other parts of the country is rather shocked when he first learns of the backwardness of education in the South a generation ago.  In any real sense there was no publicly supported system for training the child.  A few wretched hovels, scattered through a sparsely settled country, served as school houses; a few uninspiring and neglected women, earning perhaps $50 or $75 a year, did weary duty as teachers; a few groups of anemic and listless children, attending school for only forty days a year—­such was the preparation for life which most Southern states gave the less fortunate of their citizens.  The glaring fact that emphasized the outcome of this official carelessness was an illiteracy, among white men and women, of 26 per cent.  Among the Negroes it was vastly larger.

The first exhortation to reform came from the Wautauga Club, which Page had organized in Raleigh in 1884.  After Page had left his native state, other men began preaching the same crusade.  Perhaps the greatest of those advocates whom the South loves to refer to as “educational statesmen” was Dr. Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, N.C.  McIver’s personality and career had an heroic quality all their own.  Back in the ’eighties McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now President of the University of Virginia, endured all kinds of hardships and buffetings in the cause of popular education; they stumped the state, much like political campaigners, preaching the strange new gospel in mountain cabin, in village church, at