FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 5:  A memorandum of an old Atlantic balance sheet discloses that James Russell Lowell’s salary as editor was $1,500 a year.]

[Footnote 6:  A member of the firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]

CHAPTER IV

THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS

I

It was Page’s interest in the material and spiritual elevation of the masses that first directed his attention to the Presidential aspirations of Woodrow Wilson.  So much history has been made since 1912 that the public questions which then stirred the popular mind have largely passed out of recollection.  Yet the great rallying cry of that era was democracy, spelled with a small “d.”  In the fifty years since the Civil War only one Democratic President had occupied the White House.  The Republicans’ long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses.  The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great national organizations.  The Republican party, especially under the enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the railroads, and the warfare on the trusts, and had shown successful interest in such evidences of the new day as child labour laws, employer’s liability laws, corrupt practice acts, direct primaries and the popular election of United States Senators—­not all perhaps wise as methods, but all certainly inspired with a new conception of democratic government.  Roosevelt also had led in the onslaught on that corporation influence which, after all, constituted the great problem of American politics.  But Mr. Taft’s administration had impressed many men, and especially Page, as a discouraging slump back into the ancient system.  Page was never blind to the inadequacies of his own party; the three campaigns of Bryan and his extensive influence with the Democratic masses at times caused him deep despair; that even the corporations had extended their tentacles into the ranks of Jefferson was all too obvious a fact; yet the Democratic party at that time Page regarded as the most available instrument for embodying in legislation and practice the new things in which he most believed.  Above all, the Democratic party in 1912 possessed one asset to which the Republicans could lay no claim—­a new man, a new leader, the first statesman who had crossed its threshold since Grover Cleveland.