Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/22

20 noteworthy volumes of the Life and Letters of Walter H. Page. He had enjoyed the educational opportunities that he craved for the untold thousands of boys and girls of the South. He had held a fellowship first in philology and then in Greek at the Johns Hopkins University at the opening of the institution in 1876. He had been too eager and active for a life of cloistered scholarship, and he had broken away from the university to work as a journalist in the new cities of the Missouri Valley. He had come back to North Carolina as a journalist, and later had gone to New York as a newspaper writer and editor.

When I first knew him, just thirty-three years ago, he was connected with a periodical of national influence of which in due time he became the chief editor. Almost at once I became associated with him in certain activities in New York growing out of our common interest in the welfare and progress of the country. Through his subsequent years as an editor in Boston, and his long and successful experience as a member of an important publishing firm in New York and the editor of World's Work, it was also my privilege to be well acquainted with him. Throughout all of his services in the Southern and General Education Boards, also, it was my good fortune to be associated with him as a fellow member. His editorial work was of the kind that kept him in touch with men and movements throughout the United States, and it compelled him also to keep track of the course of events throughout the world. He was by far more concerned about the movements in which he believed than about his own popularity or reputation. He was too busy as an editor who was dealing with the literary work of his contributors to give much time or thought to writing on his own account. Yet what he paused to write was admirable in English style, challenging in its forward-looking appeal, and always critical because of its impatient kind of hopefulness for better things.

I shall say only a little about the international service that formed the climax of the career of this eminent and typical son of your State. Whether a man holds high office or not, in our Republic, is in most cases a matter of chance. The thing to be remarked is that training through experience in private callings