Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/19

Rh and many of his statements might well have seemed blunt and harsh.

But they were the chastening words of a man of great devotion and faith. Happily, he did not end his speech of scathing criticism in a vein of pessimism. He was making an appeal for State and local policies that would restore to illiterate, poverty-stricken, forgotten men, women, and children in North Carolina their true birthright of intelligence and economic well-being. He could not have been hopeless, or even disheartened, when he stood before that audience of enthusiastic and capable young women at Greensboro in the days of Charles D. Melver. And so he turned to prophecy in words well worth quoting:

With what surprising rapidity the new order of things has been making its way in North Carolina since Mr. Page made that address is shown in the well-authenticated picture that Mr. Richardson now gives us of educational progress, of better agriculture, of industrial growth, and of public policies that at last fully recognize in daily practice the equal rights of the common man and his family, just as they had always been recognized in theory.

Walter Page, who died in this State in the month of December, 1918, just five years ago, had lived to observe this brilliant awakening of the energies of North Carolina. Although his life work had required his residence elsewhere, he had belonged as truly as his ancestors to the land of his birth, and had never lost any of the characteristics that marked him as a son of the Old North State. The capacity of a community to produce and train its own leaders through successive generations is one of the best tests of its vitality. Page belonged to a group