Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/20

18 of North Carolinians who believed in universal education as essential to modern economic development. We had come into an age of machinery, and of production vastly increased through invention and discovery. The ordinary man must be trained to use the new mechanisms, and his increased efficiency must benefit everybody else as well as himself. Page had seen enough of the results of general and special training to be convinced that opportunities for the right kind of education should be made universal and that the training of children should be compulsory.

It was my privilege to know a number of men who were carrying on this educational propaganda in North Carolina more than twenty-five years ago, and I have never known anywhere a more powerful group of social leaders. It happened that Walter Page was able to coöperate with them more efficiently from without than if he had remained in the State as a teacher or journalist or politician. At the instance of some of these North Carolina leaders, in association with the late Dr. Curry, who was director of the Peabody Fund, and others interested in the same kinds of endeavor, there was formed the old Southern Education Board, and there was held a series of annual conferences for the promotion of education in the South. Out of these Conferences and the work of the Southern Education Board, other agencies grew apace, the most conspicuous of them being the General Education Board. Work of these agencies could by no means be a substitute for what the States themselves had begun to do. They would have carried on the educational movement to full fruition in due time, even without the coöperation of the Boards that I have named.

But the services of these agencies are recognized by all who knew their purposes and their methods as having been almost invaluable. As an active member of the Educational Boards, and of the groups closely associated with them, Page was able to render greater assistance to the cause of education in the South than if his life and work had been more strictly local. Almost twenty years ago, in April, 1904, he made an address at the Seventh Conference for Education in the South at Birmingham, Alabama, that was address to the men of the South