Walter Hines 1855-1918 Page

PAGE, WALTER HINES (1855-1918), American writer and diplomatist, was born at Cary (N.C.), Aug. 15, 1855. His father, Allison Francis Page, was of English descent; his mother, Catherine Frances Raboteau, of Scottish and French Huguenot. At 16, in Jan. 1872, after a preparatory course at the Bingham military school at Mebane (N.C.), and a year at Trinity college, at Durham (N.C.), Page entered Randolph-Macon college at Ashland (Va.). The greatest and most lasting influence in his life at this time was Thomas Randolph Price. Prof. Price had two enthusiasms—English and Greek literature. He became deeply attached to Page, both as a boy and as a student, and obtained his appointment as one of the first 20 fellows of the new Johns Hopkins university at Baltimore. There under America's greatest classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, Page acquired a knowledge of antiquity and a feeling for Greek literature which influenced all his subsequent habits of thought as well as his own literary style. Page's health, always frail, caused him to leave Johns Hopkins without a degree. A winter (1878-79) spent in teaching English at the high school at Louisville convinced him that he wanted an active life among men, and in 1880 he became editor of the St. Joseph Gazette. The Missouri town did not hold his interest long. He left in the summer of 1881 to make a tour of the southern states, writing a series of brilliant articles that were simultaneously printed in several leading American newspapers. The next two years Page spent as literary editor of the New York World, but in 1883 he resigned and returned to Raleigh (N.C.). For two years he edited the State Chronicle, a weekly newspaper, as distinguished for the vivacity of its editorial style as for the unconventionality of its opinions. Page ridiculed the tendency to regard a Confederate war record as almost the exclusive quali fication for public office ; he advocated primary education for both the white and the black, the development of scientific agriculture, the building of modern highways, and the creation of local indus tries. All these changes North Carolina has since introduced; the youthful Page, however, was ahead of his time, and of ter two rather tempestuous years, in which he found himself denounced as a "Southern Yankee," he had to confess failure, dispose of his paper and resume his life in New York.

His Literary Career.

Page's opportunity came in 1887, when he joined the staff of the Forum. In four years he trans formed a bankrupt property into a profitable one and made it an influential organ of public discussion. He resigned his editor ship in 1895 and entered the Boston publishing house of Hough ton, Mifflin & Co. For two years he was literary adviser and associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and in 1898 became editor-in-chief. In 1899 he joined Frank N. Doubleday in estab lishing the publishing house of Doubleday, Page & Co. and found ing the World's Work magazine, on which he served as editor from 1900 to 1913. Both in his writing and in his lectures, he con tinued to advocate his favourite causes. Of these the leading one was popular education, especially in the backward South. As a member, first of the Southern Education Board and afterwards of the General Education Board, he aided in distributing the Rockefeller millions for this purpose. By initiating the movement for the eradication of the hookworm, he started the work that has since taken shape in the International Health Board. He served on President Roosevelt's Country Life Commission, and was a leader in introducing Dr. Seaman A. Knapp's demonstra tion work in agricultural areas. All these years he closely followed political affairs, and in 191I he was one of the first to proclaim the presidential qualifications of Woodrow Wilson. One of Wilson's first acts, after his inauguration, was to appoint Page ambassador to Great Britain.

Ambassador in London.

For his five years in London Page's life had been a preparation. His passion for democracy, his belief that British institutions and literature formed the most solid basis of civilization, his long advocacy of British-American co operation as the most satisfactory method of solving world prob lems—all were put to the severest test in the arduous years of his ambassadorship. He had established familiar and congenial relations with the British public and British officialdom when the World War began. Up to that time Page had also worked in complete harmony with President Wilson. It was owing mainly to Page's prompting that President Wilson persuaded Congress to repeal the discriminating Panama tolls.