nformed that the British Government was only too ready to cooeperate
with the Health Board. When the discussion was ended the Right
Honourable Lewis Harcourt, the Secretary of State for the Colonies,
concluded an eloquent address with these words:

"The time will come when we shall look back on this evening as the
beginning of a new era in British colonial administration."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A memorandum of an old _Atlantic_ balance sheet discloses
that James Russell Lowell's salary as editor was $1,500 a year.]

[Footnote 6: A member of the firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]

CHAPTER IV

THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS

I

It was Page's interest in the material and spiritual elevation of the
masses that first directed his attention to the Presidential aspirations
of Woodrow Wilson. So much history has been made since 1912 that the
public questions which then stirred the popular mind have largely passed
out of recollection. Yet the great rallying cry of that era was
democracy, spelled with a small "d." In the fifty years since the Civil
War only one Democratic President had occupied the White House. The
Republicans' long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which
their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor
political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great
national organizations. The Republican party, especially under the
enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as
conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the
railroads, and the warfare on the trusts, and had shown successful
interest in such evidences of the new day as child labour laws,
employer's liability laws, corrupt practice acts, direct primaries and
the popular election of United States Senators--not all perhaps wise as
methods, but all certainly inspired with a new conception of democratic
government. Roosevelt also had led in the onslaught on that corporation
influence which, after all, constituted the great problem of American
politics. But Mr. Taft's administration had impressed many men, and
especially Page, as a discouraging slump back into the ancient system.
Page was never blind to the inadequacies of his own party; the three
campaigns of Bryan and his extensive influence with the Democratic
masses at times caused him deep despair; that even the corporations had
e