THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS I It was Page's interest in the material and spiritual elevation of the masses that first directed his attention to the Presidential aspirations of Woodrow Wilson.

So much history has been made since 1912 that the public questions which then stirred the popular mind have largely passed out of recollection.

Yet the great rallying cry of that era was democracy, spelled with a small "d." In the fifty years since the Civil War only one Democratic President had occupied the White House.

The Republicans' long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great national organizations.

The Republican party, especially under the enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the railroads, and the warfare on the trusts, and had shown successful interest in such evidences of the new day as child labour laws, employer's liability laws, corrupt practice acts, direct primaries and the popular election of United States Senators--not all perhaps wise as methods, but all certainly inspired with a new conception of democratic government.