When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied, inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all.  We see little but the massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total submergence of personality, except by accident, in all educated life.

The infinite value of the individual, the innumerable consequences of one single great teaching man, penetrating every pupil who knows him, becoming a part of the universe, a part of the fibre of thought and existence to every pupil who knows him—­this is a thing that belongs to the past and to the inevitable future.  With all our great institutions, the crowds of men who teach in them, the crowds of men who learn in them, we are still unable to produce out of all the men they graduate enough college presidents to go around.  The fact that at almost any given time there may be seen, in this American land of ours, half a score of colleges standing and waiting, wondering if they will ever find a president again, is the climax of what the universities have failed to do.  The university will be justified only when a man with a university in him, a whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it, and the soul that has room for more than one chair in it comes out of it to teach in it.

When we turn from education to journalism, the pressure of the crowd is still more in evidence.  To have the largest circulation is to have the most advertising, and to have the most advertising means to have the most money, and to have the most money means to be able to buy the most ability, and to have the most ability means to keep all that one gains and get more.  The degradation of many of our great journals in the last twenty years is but the inevitable carrying out of the syndicate method in letters—­a mass of contributors, a mass of subscribers, and a mass of advertisers.  So long as it gives itself over to the circulation idea, the worse a newspaper is, the more logical it is.  There may be a certain point where it is bound to stop some time, because there will not be enough bad people who are bad enough to go around; but we have not come to it yet, and in the meantime about everything that can be thought of is being printed to make bad people.  If it be asserted that there are not enough bad people to go around even now, it may be added that there are plenty of good people to take their places as fast as they fail to be bad enough, and that the good people who take the bad papers to find fault with them are the ones who make such papers possible.