borhood of
printed pages. It does so by its general tone being too hearty for the
microbe's life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not
by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces
unerringly upon the human core. If a college, through the inferior
human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the
robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops:
democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear.

"Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no
other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their
tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be
saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress
it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which
we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. 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."

Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say
anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you
see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its
application, is there any other formula