of Page’s Greensboro address, a small group of educational enthusiasts met at Capon Springs, West Virginia, to discuss the general situation in the South.  The leader of this little gathering was Robert C. Ogden, a great New York merchant who for many years had been President of the Board of Hampton Institute.  Out of this meeting grew the Southern Educational Conference, which was little more than an annual meeting for advertising broadcast the educational needs of the South.  Each year Mr. Ogden chartered a railroad train; a hundred or so of the leading editors, lawyers, bankers, and the like became his guests; the train moved through the Southern States, pausing now and then to investigate some particular institution or locality; and at some Southern city, such as Birmingham or Atlanta or Winston-Salem, a stop of several days would be made, a public building engaged, and long meetings held.  In all these proceedings Page was an active figure, as he became in the Southern Education Board, which directly resulted from Mr. Ogden’s public spirited excursions.  Like the Conference, the Southern Education Board was a purely missionary organization, and its most active worker was Page himself.  He was constantly speaking and writing on his favourite subject; he printed article after article, not only in his own magazine, but in the Atlantic, in the Outlook, and in a multitude of newspapers, such as the Boston Transcript, the New York Times, and the Kansas City Star.  And always through his writings, and, indeed, through his life, there ran, like the motif of an opera, that same perpetual plea for “the forgotten man”—­the need of uplifting the backward masses through training, both of the mind and of the hand.

The day came when this loyal group had other things to work with than their voices and their pens; their efforts had attracted the attention of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who brought assistance of an extremely substantial character.  In 1902 Mr. Rockefeller organized the General Education Board.  Of the ten members six were taken from the Southern Education Board; other members represented general educational interests and especially the Baptist interests to which Mr. Rockefeller had been contributing for years.  In a large sense, therefore, especially in its membership, the General Education Board was a development of the Ogden organization; but it was much broader in its sweep, taking under its view the entire nation and all forms of educational effort.  It immediately began to interest itself in the needs of the South.  In 1902 Mr. Rockefeller gave this new corporation $1,000,000; in 1905 he gave it $10,000,000; in 1907 he astonished the Nation by giving $32,000,000, and, in 1909, another $10,000,000; the whole making a total of $53,000,000, the largest sum ever given by a single man, up to that time, for social or philanthropic purposes.  The General Education Board now became the chief outside interest of Page’s life.