mighty zest.  He supported him on all occasions; he pled his cause with great eloquence before the General Education Board, whose purse strings were liberally unloosed in behalf of the Knapp work; in his writings, in speeches, in letters, in all forms of public advocacy, he insisted that Dr. Knapp had found the solution of the agricultural problem.  The fact is that Page regarded Knapp as one of the greatest men of the time.  His feeling came out with characteristic intensity on the occasion of the homely reformer’s funeral.  “The exercises,” Page once told a friend, “were held in a rather dismal little church on the outskirts of Washington.  The day was bleak and chill, the attendants were few—­chiefly officials of the Department of Agriculture.  The clergyman read the service in the most perfunctory way.  Then James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, spoke formally of Dr. Knapp as a faithful servant of the Department who always did well what he was told to do, commending his life in an altogether commonplace fashion.  By that time my heart was pretty hot.  No one seemed to divine that in the coffin before them was the body of a really great man, one who had hit upon a fruitful idea in American agriculture—­an idea that was destined to cover the nation and enrich rural life immeasurably.”  Page was so moved by this lack of appreciation, so full of sorrow at the loss of one of his dearest friends, that, when he rose to speak, his appraisment took on a certain indignation.  Their dead associate, Page declared, would outrank the generals and the politicians who received the world’s plaudits, for he had devoted his life to a really great purpose; his inspiration had been the love of the common people, his faith, his sympathy had all been expended in an effort to brighten the life of the too frequently neglected masses.  Page’s address on this occasion was entirely extemporaneous; no record of it was ever made, but those who heard it still carry the memory of an eloquent and fiery outburst that placed Knapp’s work in its proper relation to American history and gave an unforgettable picture of a patient, idealistic, achieving man whose name will loom large in the future.

During this same period Page, always on the outlook for the exceptional man, made another discovery which has had world-wide consequences.  As a member of President Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission Page became one of the committee assigned to investigate conditions in the Southern States.  The sanitarian of this commission was Dr. Charles W. Stiles, a man who held high rank as a zooelogist, and who, as such, had for many years done important work with the Department of Agriculture.  Page had hardly formed Dr. Stiles’s acquaintance before he discovered that, at that time, he was a man of one idea.  And this one idea had for years brought upon his head much good-natured ridicule.  For Dr. Stiles had his own explanation for much of the mental and physical sluggishness that