is the child, whether it be your child or the child of the dull-faced mother of the hovel.  The child of the dull-faced mother may, as you know, be the most capable child in the state. . . .  Several of the strongest personalities that were ever born in North Carolina were men whose very fathers were unknown.  We have all known two such, who held high places in Church and State.  President Eliot said a little while ago that the ablest man that he had known in his many years’ connection with Harvard University was the son of a brick mason.”

In place of the ecclesiastical creed that had guided North Carolina for so many generations Page proposed his creed of democracy.  He advised that North Carolina commit this to memory and teach it to its children.  It was as follows: 

     “I believe in the free public training of both the hands and the
     mind of every child born of woman.

“I believe that by the right training of men we add to the wealth of the world.  All wealth is the creation of man, and he creates it only in proportion to the trained uses of the community; and the more men we train the more wealth everyone may create.

     “I believe in the perpetual regeneration of society, and in the
     immortality of democracy and in growth everlasting.”

Thus Page nailed his theses upon the door of his native state, and mighty was the reverberation.  In a few weeks Page’s Greensboro address had made its way all over the Southern States, and his melancholy figure, “the forgotten man” had become part of the indelible imagery of the Southern people.  The portrait etched itself deeply into the popular consciousness for the very good reason that its truth was pretty generally recognized.  The higher type of newspaper, though it winced somewhat at Page’s strictures, manfully recognized that the best way of meeting his charge was by setting to work and improving conditions.  The fact is that the better conscience of North Carolina welcomed this eloquent description of unquestioned evils; but the gentlemen whom Page used to stigmatize as “professional Southerners”—­the men who commercialized class and sectional prejudice to their own political and financial or ecclesiastical profit—­fell foul of this “renegade,” this “Southern Yankee” this sacrilegious “intruder” who had dared to visit his old home and desecrate its traditions and its religion.  This clerical wrath was kindled into fresh flame when Page, in an editorial in his magazine, declared that these same preachers, ignoring their real duties, were content “to herd their women and children around the stagnant pools of theology.”  For real religion Page had the deepest reverence, and he had great respect also for the robust evangelical preachers whose efforts had contributed so much to the opening up of the frontier.  In his Greensboro address Page had given these men high praise.  But for the assiduous idolaters of stratified dogma