days for the
Allied cause--"every man who had a large and firm grip on economic facts
foresaw how it would end--not when but how. Young as I was, I recall a
conversation between my father and the most distinguished judge of his
day in North Carolina. They put down on one side the number of men in
the Confederate States, the number of ships, the number of manufactures,
as nearly as they knew, the number of skilled workmen, the number of
guns, the aggregate of wealth and of possible production. On the other
side they put down the best estimate they could make of all these
things in the Northern States. The Northern States made two (or I
shouldn't wonder if it were three) times as good a showing in men and
resources as the Confederacy had. 'Judge,' said my father, 'this is the
most foolhardy enterprise that man ever undertook.' But Yancey of
Alabama was about that time making five-hour speeches to thousands of
people all over the South, declaring that one Southerner could whip five
Yankees, and the awful slaughter began and darkened our childhood and
put all our best men where they would see the sun no more. Our people
had at last to accept worse terms than they could have got at the
beginning. This World War, even more than our Civil War, is an economic
struggle. Put down on either side the same items that my father and the
judge put down and add the items up. You will see the inevitable
result."

If we are seeking an ancestral explanation for that moral ruggedness,
that quick perception of the difference between right and wrong, that
unobscured vision into men and events, and that deep devotion to America
and to democracy which formed the fibre of Walter Page's being, we
evidently need look no further than his father. But the son had
qualities which the older man did not possess--an enthusiasm for
literature and learning, a love of the beautiful in Nature and in art,
above all a gentleness of temperament and of manner. These qualities he
held in common with his mother. On his father's side Page was undiluted
English; on his mother's he was French and English. Her father was John
Samuel Raboteau, the descendant of Huguenot refugees who had fled from
France on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; her mother was Esther
Barclay, a member of a family which gave the name of Barclaysville to a
small town half way between Raleigh and Fayetteville, North Carolina.
It is a member of this tribe to whom Page once referred as the "