in putting together a
brochure on _Congressional Government_ which immediately gave him a
national standing. The name of this sympathetic acquaintance was Woodrow
Wilson.

[Illustration: Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.]

[Illustration: Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins
University, 1876-1915]

Another important event had taken place, for, at St. Louis, on November
15, 1880, Page had married Miss Willia Alice Wilson. Miss Wilson was the
daughter of a Scotch physician, Dr. William Wilson, who had settled in
Michigan, near Detroit, in 1832. When she was a small child she went
with her sister's family--her father had died seven years before--to
North Carolina, near Cary; and she and Page had been childhood friends
and schoolmates. At the time of the wedding, Page was editor of the St.
Joseph _Gazette_; the fact that he had attained this position, five
months after starting at the bottom, sufficiently discloses his aptitude
for journalistic work.

Page had now outgrown any Southern particularism with which he may have
started life. He no longer found his country exclusively in the area
south of the Potomac; he had made his own the West, the North--New York,
Chicago, Denver, as well as Atlanta and Raleigh. It is worth while
insisting on this fact, for the cultivation of a wide-sweeping
Americanism and a profound faith in democracy became the qualities that
will loom most largely in his career from this time forward. It is
necessary only to read the newspaper letters which he wrote on his
Southern trip in 1881 to understand how early his mind seized this new
point of view. Many things which now fell under his observant eye in the
Southern States greatly irritated him and with his characteristic
impulsiveness he pictured these traits in pungent phrase. The atmosphere
of shiftlessness that too generally prevailed in some localities; the
gangs of tobacco-chewing loafers assembled around railway stations; the
listless Negroes that seemed to overhang the whole country like a black
cloud; the plantation mansions in a sad state of disrepair; the old
unoccupied slave huts overgrown with weeds; the unpainted and
broken-down fences; the rich soil that was crudely and wastefully
cultivated with a single crop--the youthful social philosopher found
himself comparing these vestigia of a half-moribund civilization with
the vibrant cities of the North, the be