itself to preaching the Cleveland ideals, and, above all, to
exerting an influence on the development of a new Southern spirit. No
task could have been more grateful to Page and there was no place in
which he would have better liked to undertake it than in the old state
which he loved so well. The result was the _State Chronicle_ of Raleigh,
practically a new paper, which for a year and a half proved to be the
most unconventional and refreshing influence that North Carolina had
known in many a year. Necessarily Page found himself in conflict with
his environment. He had little interest in the things that then chiefly
interested the state, and North Carolina apparently had little interest
in the things that chiefly occupied the mind of the youthful journalist.
Page was interested in Cleveland, in the reform of the civil service;
the Democrats of North Carolina little appreciated their great national
leader and were especially hostile to his belief that service to a party
did not in itself establish a qualification for public office. Page was
interested in uplifting the common people, in helping every farmer to
own his own acres, and in teaching the most modern and scientific way of
cultivating them; he was interested in giving every boy and girl at
least an elementary education, and in giving a university training to
such as had the aptitude and the ambition to obtain it; he believed in
industrial training--and in these things the North Carolina of those
days had little concern. Page even went so far as to take an open stand
for the pitiably neglected black man: he insisted that he should be
taught to read and write, and instructed in agriculture and the manual
trades. A man who advocated such revolutionary things in those days was
accused--and Page was so accused--of attempting to promote the "social
equality" of the two races. Page also declaimed in favour of developing
the state industrially; he called attention to the absurdity of sending
Southern cotton to New England spinning mills, and he pointed out the
boundless but unworked natural resources of the state, in minerals,
forests, waterpower, and lands.

North Carolina, he informed his astonished compatriots, had once been a
great manufacturing colony; why could the state not become one again?
But the matter in which the buoyant editor and his constituents found
themselves most at variance was the spirit that controlled North
Carolina life. It was a spirit that foun