CHAPTER II

JOURNALISM

I

The five years from 1878 to 1883 Page spent in various places, engaged, for the larger part of the time, in several kinds of journalistic work.  It was his period of struggle and of preparation.  Like many American public men he served a brief apprenticeship—­in his case, a very brief one—­as a pedagogue.  In the autumn of 1878 he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and taught English for a year at the Boys’ High School.  But he presently found an occupation in this progressive city which proved far more absorbing.  A few months before his arrival certain energetic spirits had founded a weekly paper, the Age, a journal which, they hoped, would fill the place in the Southern States which the very successful New York Nation, under the editorship of Godkin, was then occupying in the North.  Page at once began contributing leading articles on literary and political topics to this publication; the work proved so congenial that he purchased—­on notes—­a controlling interest in the new venture and became its directing spirit.  The Age was in every way a worthy enterprise; in the dignity of its make-up and the high literary standards at which it aimed it imitated the London Spectator.  Perhaps Page obtained a thousand dollars’ worth of fun out of his investment; if so, that represented his entire profit.  He now learned a lesson which was emphasized in his after career as editor and publisher, and that was that the Southern States provided a poor market for books or periodicals.  The net result of the proceeding was that, at the age of twenty-three, he found himself out of a job and considerably in debt.

He has himself rapidly sketched his varied activities of the next five years: 

“After trying in vain,” he writes, “to get work to do on any newspaper in North Carolina, I advertised for a job in journalism—­any sort of a job.  By a queer accident—­a fortunate one for me—­the owner of the St. Joseph, Missouri, Gazette, answered the advertisement.  Why he did it, I never found out.  He was in the same sort of desperate need of a newspaper man as I was in desperate need of a job.  I knew nothing about him:  he knew nothing about me.  I knew nothing about newspaper work.  I had done nothing since I left the University but teach English in the Louisville, Kentucky, High School for boys one winter and lecture at the summer school at Chapel Hill one summer.  I made up my mind to go into journalism.  But journalism didn’t seem in any hurry to make up its mind to admit me.  Not only did all the papers in North Carolina decline my requests for work, but such of them in Baltimore and Louisville as I tried said ‘No.’  So I borrowed $50 and set out to St. Joe, Missouri, where I didn’t know a human being.  I became a reporter.  At first I reported the price of cattle—­went