it, "was that he was forty years ahead
of his time." They recall with satisfaction the satiric accounts which
Page used to publish of Democratic Conventions--solemn, long-winded,
frock-coated, white-neck-tied affairs that displayed little concern for
the reform of the tariff or of the civil service, but an energetic
interest in pensioning Confederate veterans and erecting monuments to
the Southern heroes of the Civil War. One editorial is joyfully
recalled, in which Page referred to a public officer who was
distinguished for his dignity and his family tree, but not noted for any
animated administration of his duties, as "Thothmes II." When this
bewildered functionary searched the Encyclopaedia and learned that
"Thothmes II" was an Egyptian king of the XVIIIth dynasty, whose
dessicated mummy had recently been disinterred from the hot sands of the
desert, he naturally stopped his subscription to the paper. The metaphor
apparently tickled Page, for he used it in a series of articles which
have become immortal in the political annals of North Carolina. These
have always been known as the "Mummy letters." They furnished a vivid
but rather aggravating explanation for the existing backwardness and
chauvinism of the commonwealth. All the trouble, it seems, was caused by
the "mummies." "It is an awfully discouraging business," Page wrote, "to
undertake to prove to a mummy that it is a mummy. You go up to it and
say, 'Old fellow, the Egyptian dynasties crumbled several thousand years
ago: you are a fish out of water. You have by accident or the
Providence of God got a long way out of your time. This is America.' The
old thing grins that grin which death set on its solemn features when
the world was young; and your task is so pitiful that even the humour of
it is gone. Give it up."

Everything great in North Carolina, Page declared, belonged to a
vanished generation. "Our great lawyers, great judges, great editors,
are all of the past. . . . In the general intelligence of the people, in
intellectual force and in cultivation, we are doing nothing. We are not
doing or getting more liberal ideas, a broader view of this world. . . .
The presumptuous powers of ignorance, heredity, decayed respectability
and stagnation that control public action and public expression are
absolutely leading us back intellectually."

But Page did more than berate the mummified aristocracy which, he
declared, was driving the best talent and initiative fro