the cart’s tail—­all in an attempt to arouse their lethargic countrymen to the duty of laying a small tax to save their children from illiteracy.  Some day the story of McIver and Alderman will find its historian; when it does, he will learn that, in those dark ages, one of their greatest sources of inspiration was Walter Page.  McIver, a great burly boy, physically and intellectually, so full of energy that existence for him was little less than an unending tornado, so full of zeal that any other occupation than that of training the neglected seemed a trifling with life, so sleepless in his efforts that, at the age of forty-five, he one day dropped dead while travelling on a railroad train; Alderman, a man of finer culture, quieter in his methods, an orator of polish and restraint, but an advocate vigorous in the prosecution of the great end; and Page, living faraway in the North, but pumping his associates full of courage and enthusiasm—­these were the three guardsmen of this new battle for the elevation of the white and black men of the South.  McIver’s great work was the State Normal College for Women, which, amid unparalleled difficulties, he founded for teaching the teachers of the new Southern generation.  It was at this institution that Page, in 1897, delivered the address which gave the cause of Southern education that one thing which is worth armies to any struggling reform—­a phrase; and it was a phrase that lived in the popular mind and heart and summed up, in a way that a thousand speeches could never have done, the great purpose for which the best people in the state were striving.

His editorial gift for title-making now served Page in good stead.  “The Forgotten Man,” which was the heading of his address, immediately passed into the common speech of the South and even at this day inevitably appears in all discussions of social progress.  It was again Page’s familiar message of democracy, of improving the condition of the everyday man, woman, and child; and the message, as is usually the case in all incitements to change, involved many unpleasant facts.  Page had first of all to inform his fellow Southerners that it was only in the South that “The Forgotten Man” was really an outstanding feature.  He did not exist in New England, in the Middle States, in the Mississippi Valley, or in the West, or existed in these regions to so slight an extent that he was not a grave menace to society.  But in the South the situation was quite different.  And for this fact the explanation was found in history.  The South certainly could not fix the blame upon Nature.  In natural wealth—­in forests, mines, quarries, rich soil, in the unlimited power supplied by water courses—­the Southern States formed perhaps the richest region in the country.  These things North Carolina and her sister communities had not developed; more startling still, they had not developed a source of wealth that was infinitely greater than all these combined; they had not developed their men