Among many of the great distributors of ideas—­the magazine, the newspaper, the school—­it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any that do not feel what I may call an anti-civic tendency.  They have come to be supported largely by other agencies than the public, and they are naturally controlled by those agencies.  As for the public, it has become accustomed to paying less than cost for what it gets along these lines, and is thus becoming intellectually pauperized.  It is no more possible to distribute ideas at a profit, as a commercial venture, nowadays, than it would have been to run a circus, with an admission fee, in Imperial Rome.  Thus a literary magazine is possible only because it is owned by some publisher who uses it as an advertising medium.  He can afford to sell it to the public for less than cost; the public would leave a publication sold at a fair profit severely alone, hence such a venture is impossible.  A scientific magazine in like manner must have some one to back it—­a firm of patent-office brokers or a scientific society.  The daily papers depend almost wholly on their advertisements; the public would not buy a simple compilation of the day’s news at a fair profit.  Even our great institutions of higher education give their students more than the latter pay for; the student is getting part of his tuition for nothing.  A college that depends wholly on tuition fees for its support is soon left without students.  Thus all these disseminators of ideas are not dependent on the persons to whom they distribute those ideas, for whose interest it is that the ideas shall be good and true and selected with discrimination.  They depend rather for support on outside bodies of various kinds and so tend to be controlled by them—­bodies whose interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the public.  This is not true of material things.  Their distributors still strive to please the public, for it is by the public that they are supported.  If the public wants raspberry jam, raspberry jam it gets; and if, being aroused, it demands that this shall be made out of raspberries instead of apples, dock-seeds and aniline, it ultimately has its way.  But if the department store were controlled by some outside agency, benevolent or otherwise, which partly supported it and enabled it to sell its wares below cost, then if this controlling agency willed that we should eat dock-seeds and aniline—­dock-seeds and aniline we should doubtless eat.

Not that the controlling powers in all these instances are necessarily malevolent.  The publisher who owns a literary magazine may honestly desire that it shall be fearlessly impartial.  The learned body that runs a scientific periodical may be willing to admit to its pages a defense of a thesis that it has condemned in one of its meetings; the page-advertiser in a great daily may be able to see his pet policy attacked in its editorial columns without yielding to the temptation to bring pressure to bear; the creator