The result of the crowd principle is the inevitable result.  Our journals have fallen off as a matter of course, not only in moral ideals (which everybody realizes), but in brain force, power of expression, imagination, and foresight—­the things that give distinction and results to utterance and that make a journal worth while.  The editorial page has been practically abandoned by most journals, because most journals have been abandoned by their editors:  they have become printed counting-rooms.  With all their greatness, their crowds of writers, and masses of readers, and piles of cablegrams, they are not able to produce the kind of man who is able to say a thing the kind of way that will make everybody stop and listen to him, cablegrams and all.  Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every day is trampling on their graves.  The newspaper is the mass machine, the crowd thinker.  To and fro, from week to week and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, imperious Personality—­is it not at an end?  It were a dazzling sight, perhaps, to gaze at night upon a huge building, thinking with telegraph under the wide sky around the world, the hurrying of its hundred pens upon the desks, and the trembling of its floors with the mighty coming of a Day out of the grip of the press; but even this huge bewildering pile of power, this aggregation, this corporation of forces, machines of souls, glittering down the Night—­does any one suppose It stands by Itself, that It is its own master, that It can do its own will in the world?  In all its splendour It stands, weaving the thoughts of the world in the dark; but that very night, that very moment, It lies in the power of a little ticking-thing behind its doors.  It belongs to that legislature of information and telegraph, that owner of what happens in a day, called the Associated Press.

If the One who called Himself a man and a God had not been born in a crowd, if he had not loved and grappled with it, and been crucified and worshipped by it, He might have been a Redeemer for the silent, stately, ancient world that was before He came, but He would have failed to be a Redeemer for this modern world—­a world where the main inspiration and the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great problem and every great hope is one that deals with crowds.  It is a world where, from the first day a man looks forth to move, he finds his feet and hands held by crowds.  The sun rises over crowds for him, and sets over crowds; and having presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last, in a crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God.  Ten human lives deep they have them—­the graves in Paris; and whether men live their lives piled upon other men’s lives, in blocks in cities