And as to the accuracy of his vision in these respects there could be no question.

The volume was a welcome antidote to the sentimental Southern novels that had contented themselves with glorifying a vanished society which, when the veil is stripped, was not heroic in all its phases, for it was based upon an institution so squalid as human slavery, and to those even more pernicious books which, by luridly portraying the unquestioned vices of reconstruction and the frightful consequences which resulted from giving the Negro the ballot, simply aroused useless passions and made the way out of the existing wilderness still more difficult.

So the best public opinion, North and South, regarded "The Southerner," and decided that Page had performed a service to the section of his birth in writing it.
Indeed the fair-minded and intelligent spirit with which the best elements in the South received "The Southerner" in itself demonstrated that this great region had entered upon a new day.
V Nor was Page's work for the South yet ended.

In the important five years from 1905 to 1910 he performed two services of an extremely practical kind.

In 1906 the problem of Southern education assumed a new phase.