Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/18

16 In each of its townships a careful study is being made (many of these have already been completed) of the history of the land from the date of its settlement with the names of landowners, the changes in local agriculture, and all other pertinent facts. In order to save too much repetition, it has been found desirable to prepare a general history of Wisconsin agriculture as a preliminary statement. The particular records of localities will be published from time to time. It requires no argument to show how valuable this record will be to the people of Wisconsin in future centuries. The State of Iowa, in the heart of our greatest agricultural region, has been showing as equal zeal in the compiling of the annals of its pioneers and in the study of everything relating to its social and political experiences.

There is no State perhaps that would profit more by a similarly exhaustive study of its origins and the entire course of its history in local detail than North Carolina. As I have already intimated, there is no State perhaps in the entire Union whose new hopes and ambitious rest so symmetrically and firmly upon beginnings that stretch back through almost three centuries.

I have lately been reading, in connection with one another, two statements regarding the people and the civilization of North Carolina, the latest of these by Mr. William H. Richardson, has just now made its appearance. The contrasting statement was made in 1897, a full quarter century ago, by a son of North Carolina, the late Walter Hines Page. It was an address delivered at the State Norma School at Greensboro, and several years afterwards published with two other other addresses in a little volume called The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths.

Page's theme was the intrinsic value of the common man, and his rightful claim to be educated and trained, both for his own sake and as incomparably the greatest asset of the State. It was an eloquent appeal, and it cited statistics of taxation and illiteracy in order to make the point that North Carolina was not keeping up with the American procession, especially when compared with the States of the Mississippi Valley. In order to quicken the energies of his brethren and sisters in North Carolina, and to awaken in them something of his own noble discontent with things as they are, his analysis was unsparing,