Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy — John Shaqi
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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