and their women.  The Southern States represented the purest “Anglo-Saxon” strain in the United States; to-day in North Carolina only one person in four hundred is of “foreign stock,” and a voting list of almost any town contains practically nothing except the English and Scotch names that were borne by the original settlers.  Yet here democracy, in any real sense, had scarcely obtained a footing.  The region which had given Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to the world was still, in the year 1897, organized upon an essentially aristocratic basis.  The conception of education which prevailed in the most hide-bound aristocracies of Europe still ruled south of the Potomac.  There was no acceptance of that fundamental American doctrine that education was the function of the state.  It was generally regarded as the luxury of the rich and the socially high placed; it was certainly not for the poor; and it was a generally accepted view that those who enjoyed this privilege must pay for it out of their own pockets.  Again Page returned to the “mummy” theme—­the fact that North Carolina, and the South generally, were too much ruled by “dead men’s” hands.  The state was ruled by a “little aristocracy, which, in its social and economic character, made a failure and left a stubborn crop of wrong social notions behind it—­especially about education.”  The chief backward influences were the stump and the pulpit.  “From the days of King George to this day, the politicians of North Carolina have declaimed against taxes, thus laying the foundation of our poverty.  It was a misfortune for us that the quarrel with King George happened to turn upon the question of taxation—­so great was the dread of taxation that was instilled into us.”  What had the upper classes done for the education of the average man?  The statistics of illiteracy, the deplorable economic and social conditions of the rural population—­and most of the population of North Carolina was rural—­furnished the answer.

Thus the North Carolina aristocracy had failed in education and the failure of the Church had been as complete and deplorable.  The preachers had established preparatory schools for boys and girls, but these were under the control of sects; and so education was either a class or an ecclesiastical concern.  “The forgotten man remained forgotten.  The aristocratic scheme of education had passed him by.  To a less extent, but still to the extent of hundreds of thousands, the ecclesiastical scheme had passed him by.”  But even the education which these institutions gave was inferior.  Page told his North Carolina audience that the University of which they were so proud did not rank with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other universities of the North.  The state had not produced great scholars nor established great libraries.  In the estimation of publishers North Carolina was unimportant as a book market.  “By any test that may be made, both these systems have failed even with the classes that they appealed to.”