It all reverts in the
end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other
and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a
class, we college graduates should look to it that _ours_ has spreading
power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.
In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have
formidable competitors outside. _McClure's Magazine,_ the _American
Magazine, Collier's Weekly_, and, in its fashion, the _World's Work_,
constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It
would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like
these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions
of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United
States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had
proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare
enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new
educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies
and elevation of their human preferences, the people at large acquired
the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private
literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the
affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.
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