The discovery of the possibilities of mass circulation has caused the advertisers to raise their demands. Some will not advertise at all in journals with a circulation of less than half a million. Advertising is withdrawn from those journals which heroically venture to maintain their quality at the expense of not increasing their circulation. Financial ruin usually results. The people are evidently getting the kind of papers they want, but in doing so they are depriving the cultured class of the sort they want, and used to get before America became so “educated.” We get foreign cables about the Prince of Wales dancing with Judy O’Grady, or the doings of sex perverts in Berlin, and the treatment of our domestic news is beneath contempt. The other night I examined what used to be one of the leading papers not only in New York but in the whole country and I found no headline on three consecutive pages which did not refer to scandal or to crime. It has been said that the new reading public has not interfered with the old, that there are simply vast numbers of new readers of a different type who are being[Pg 209] supplied with what they want. That is not wholly true, and the competition of the new market has had a heavily detrimental influence on the older journals. To-day if a man wishes to succeed in a journalistic career on the daily press he has to scrap even more of his qualities as a gentleman and a scholar than he has to in a career of politics. The democratic spread of education has also had detrimental effects in other ways. The necessity of finding instruction for the enormous numbers who now go to school, high school, and college has caused a demand for teachers which has far outrun the supply of those qualified to teach. Great numbers of these teachers have even less social and cultural background than have their students. Under them the students may learn the facts of some given subject, but they gain nothing in breadth of culture or even in manners. It is an old story that Charles Eliot Norton once began a lecture at Harvard by saying, “I suppose that none of you young men has ever seen a gentleman.” The remark was hyperbolic, as was intended, but it is only too likely to-day that many young men can go through some of our newer “institutions of learning” without seeing at least what used to be called a gentleman. In the professions, more particularly medicine and law, complaint is rampant that they are being swamped by young men who know only the facts of the profession (when they know those) and have no cultural, ethical, or professional standards. A few such could be ignored. When they come, as they are coming now, in shoals, they lower the tone of the whole profession and, without standards themselves, force an unfair competition upon those who try to maintain them. [Pg 210] V