The State College was a great victory for Page, but final success did not come until three years after he had left the state.  For a year and a half of hard newspaper work convinced Page that North Carolina really had no permanent place for him.  The Chronicle was editorially a success:  Page’s articles were widely quoted, not only in his own state but in New England and other parts of the Union.  He succeeded in stirring up North Carolina and the South generally, but popular support for the Chronicle was not forthcoming in sufficient amount to make the paper a commercial possibility.  Reluctantly and sadly Page had to forego his hope of playing an active part in rescuing his state from the disasters of the Civil War.  Late in the summer of 1885, he again left for the North, which now became his permanent home.

III

And with this second sojourn in New York Page’s opportunity came.  The first two years he spent in newspaper work, for the most part with the Evening Post, but, one day in November, 1887, a man whom he had never seen came into his office and unfolded a new opportunity.  Two years before a rather miscellaneous group had launched an ambitious literary undertaking.  This was a monthly periodical, which, it was hoped, would do for the United States what such publications as the Fortnightly and the Contemporary were doing for England.  The magazine was to have the highest literary quality and to be sufficiently dignified to attract the finest minds in America as contributors; its purpose was to exercise a profound influence in politics, literature, science, and art.  The projectors had selected for this publication a title that was almost perfection—­the Forum—­but which, after nearly two years’ experimentation, represented about the limit of their achievement.  The Forum had hardly made an impression on public thought and had attracted very few readers, although it had lost large sums of money for its progenitors.  These public-spirited gentlemen now turned to Page as the man who might rescue them from their dilemma and achieve their purpose.  He accepted the engagement, first as manager and presently as editor, and remained the guiding spirit of the Forum for eight years, until the summer of 1895.

That the success of a publication is the success of its editors, and not of its business managers and its “backers,” is a truth that ought to be generally apparent; never has this fact been so eloquently illustrated as in the case of the Forum under Page.  Before his accession it had had not the slightest importance; for the period of his editorship it is doubtful if any review published in English exercised so great an influence, and certainly none ever obtained so large a circulation.  From almost nothing the Forum, in two or three years, attracted 30,000 subscribers—­something without precedent