Like many scholarly Americans, Page had been charmed by the intellectual brilliancy of Woodrow Wilson.  The utter commonplaceness of much of what passes for political thinking in this country had for years discouraged him.  American political life may have possessed energy, character, even greatness; but it was certainly lacking in distinction.  It was this new quality that Wilson brought, and it was this that attracted thousands of cultivated Americans to his standard, irrespective of party.  The man was an original thinker; he exercised the priceless possession of literary style.  He entertained; he did not weary; even his temperamental deficiencies, which were apparent to many observers in 1912, had at least the advantage that attaches to the interesting and the unusual.

What Page and thousands of other public-spirited men saw in Wilson was a leader of fine intellectual gifts who was prepared to devote his splendid energies to making life more attractive and profitable to the “Forgotten Man.”  Here was the opportunity then, to embody in one imaginative statesman all the interest which for a generation had been accumulating in favour of the democratic revival.  At any rate, after thirty years of Republican half-success and half-failure, here was the chance for a new deal.  Amid a mob of shopworn public men, here was one who had at least the charm of novelty.

Page had known Mr. Wilson for thirty years, and all this time the Princeton scholar had seemed to him to be one of the most helpful influences at work in the United States.  As already noted Page had met the future President when he was serving a journalistic apprenticeship in Atlanta, Georgia.  Wilson was then spending his days in a dingy law office and was putting to good use the time consumed in waiting for the clients who never came by writing that famous book on “Congressional Government” which first lifted his name out of obscurity.  This work, the product of a man of twenty-nine, was perhaps the first searching examination to which the American Congressional system had ever been subjected.  It brought Wilson a professorship at the newly established Bryn Mawr College and drew to him other growing minds like Page’s.  “Watch that man!” was Page’s admonition to his friends.  Wilson then went into academic work and Page plunged into the exactions of daily and periodical journalism, but Page’s papers show that the two men had kept in touch with each other during the succeeding thirty years.  These papers include a collection of letters from Woodrow Wilson, the earliest of which is dated October 30, 1885, when the future President was beginning his career at Bryn Mawr.  He was eager to come to New York, Wilson said, and discuss with Page “half a hundred topics” suggested by “Congressional Government.”  The atmosphere at Bryn Mawr was evidently not stimulating.  “Such a talk would give me a chance to let off some of the enthusiasm I am just now painfully stirring up in enforced