And these were the things that hurt.  Yet the stories of the anger caused by “The Southerner” have been much exaggerated.  It is said that a certain distinguished Southern senator declared that, had he known that Page was the author of “The Southerner,” he would have blocked his nomination as Ambassador to Great Britain; certain Southern newspapers also severely denounced the volume; even some of Page’s friends thought that it was a little unkind in spots; yet as a whole the Southern people accepted it as a fair, and certainly as an honest, treatment of a very difficult subject.  Possibly Page was a little hard upon the Confederate veteran, and did not sufficiently portray the really pathetic aspects of his character; any shortcomings of this sort are due, not to any failing in sympathy, but to the fact that Page’s zeal was absorbingly concentrated upon certain glaring abuses.  And as to the accuracy of his vision in these respects there could be no question.  The volume was a welcome antidote to the sentimental Southern novels that had contented themselves with glorifying a vanished society which, when the veil is stripped, was not heroic in all its phases, for it was based upon an institution so squalid as human slavery, and to those even more pernicious books which, by luridly portraying the unquestioned vices of reconstruction and the frightful consequences which resulted from giving the Negro the ballot, simply aroused useless passions and made the way out of the existing wilderness still more difficult.  So the best public opinion, North and South, regarded “The Southerner,” and decided that Page had performed a service to the section of his birth in writing it.  Indeed the fair-minded and intelligent spirit with which the best elements in the South received “The Southerner” in itself demonstrated that this great region had entered upon a new day.

V

Nor was Page’s work for the South yet ended.  In the important five years from 1905 to 1910 he performed two services of an extremely practical kind.  In 1906 the problem of Southern education assumed a new phase.  Dr. Wallace Buttrick, the Secretary of the General Education Board, had now decided that the fundamental difficulty was economic.  By that time the Southern people had revised their original conception that education was a private and not a public concern; there was now a general acceptance of the doctrine that the mental and physical training of every child, white and black, was the responsibility of the state; Aycock’s campaign had worked such a popular revolution on this subject that no politician who aspired to public office would dare to take a contrary view.  Yet the economic difficulty still remained.  The South was poor; whatever might be the general desire, the taxable resources were not sufficient to support such a comprehensive system of popular instruction as existed in the North and West.  Any permanent