for the ideas and convictions it presents
had formed the mental life of Page from his earliest days.

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