[Footnote 2: "The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths." (1902.)]

[Footnote 3: "The Southerner," Chapter I.]




CHAPTER II

JOURNALISM

I


The five years from 1878 to 1883 Page spent in various places, engaged,
for the larger part of the time, in several kinds of journalistic work.
It was his period of struggle and of preparation. Like many American
public men he served a brief apprenticeship--in his case, a very brief
one--as a pedagogue. In the autumn of 1878 he went to Louisville,
Kentucky, and taught English for a year at the Boys' High School. But he
presently found an occupation in this progressive city which proved far
more absorbing. A few months before his arrival certain energetic
spirits had founded a weekly paper, the _Age_, a journal which, they
hoped, would fill the place in the Southern States which the very
successful New York _Nation_, under the editorship of Godkin, was then
occupying in the North. Page at once began contributing leading articles
on literary and political topics to this publication; the work proved so
congenial that he purchased--on notes--a controlling interest in the new
venture and became its directing spirit. The _Age_ was in every way a
worthy enterprise; in the dignity of its make-up and the high literary