as 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 and
their women. The Southern States represented the purest "Anglo-Saxon"
strain in the United States; to-day in North Carolina only one person in
four hundred is of "foreign stock," and a voting list of almost any town
contains practically nothing except the English and Scotch names that
were borne by the original settlers. Yet here democracy, in any real
sense, had scarcely obtained a footing. The region which had given
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to the world was still, in the
year 1897, organized upon an essentially aristocratic basis. The
conception of education which prevailed in the most hide-bound
aristocracies of Europe still ruled south of the Potomac. There was no
acceptance of that fundamental American doctrine that education was the
function of the state. It was generally regarded as the luxury of the
rich and the socially high placed; it was certainly not for the poor;
and it was a generally accepted view that those who enjoyed this
privilege must pay for it out of their own pockets. Again Page returned
to the "mummy" theme--the fact that North Carolina, and the South
generally, were too much ruled by "dead men's" hands. The state wa