he Negroes it was vastly larger.

The first exhortation to reform came from the Wautauga Club, which Page
had organized in Raleigh in 1884. After Page had left his native state,
other men began preaching the same crusade. Perhaps the greatest of
those advocates whom the South loves to refer to as "educational
statesmen" was Dr. Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, N.C. McIver's
personality and career had an heroic quality all their own. Back in the
'eighties McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now President of the University
of Virginia, endured all kinds of hardships and buffetings in the cause
of popular education; they stumped the state, much like political
campaigners, preaching the strange new gospel in mountain cabin, in
village church, at the cart's tail--all in an attempt to arouse their
lethargic countrymen to the duty of laying a small tax to save their
children from illiteracy. Some day the story of McIver and Alderman will
find its historian; when it does, he will learn that, in those dark
ages, one of their greatest sources of inspiration was Walter Page.
McIver, a great burly boy, physically and intellectually, so full of
energy that existence for him was little less than an unending tornado,
so full of zeal that any other occupation than that of training the
neglected seemed a trifling with life, so sleepless in his efforts that,
at the age of forty-five, he one day dropped dead while travelling on a
railroad train; Alderman, a man of finer culture, quieter in his
methods, an orator of polish and restraint, but an advocate vigorous in
the prosecution of the great end; and Page, living faraway in the North,
but pumping his associates full of courage and enthusiasm--these were
the three guardsmen of this new battle for the elevation of the white
and black men of the South. McIver's great work was the State Normal
College for Women, which, amid unparalleled difficulties, he founded
for teaching the teachers of the new Southern generation. It was at this
institution that Page, in 1897, delivered the address which gave the
cause of Southern education that one thing which is worth armies to any
struggling reform--a phrase; and it was a phrase that lived in the
popular mind and heart and summed up, in a way that a thousand speeches
could never have done, the great purpose for which the best people in
the state were striving.

His editorial gift for title-making now served Page in good stead. "The
Forgotten Man," which w