But the leader in crowd-thinking _par excellence_ is the daily newspaper. With few exceptions our journals emit hardly anything but crowd-ideas. These great "molders of public opinion," reveal every characteristic of the vulgar mob orator. The character of the writing commonly has the standards and prejudices of the "man in the street." And lest this man's ego consciousness be offended by the sight of anything "highbrow"--that is, anything indicating that there may be a superior intelligence or finer appreciation than his own--newspaper-democracy demands that everything more exalted than the level of the lowest cranial altitude be left out. The average result is a deluge of sensational scandal, class prejudice, and special pleading clumsily disguised with a saccharine smear of the cheapest moral platitude. Consequently, the thinking of most of us is carried on chiefly in the form of crowd-ideas. A sort of public-meeting self is developed in the consciousness of the individual which dominates the personality of all but the reflective few. We editorialize and press-agent ourselves in our inmost musings. Public opinion is manufactured just as brick are made. Possibly a slightly better knowledge of mechanical engineering is required for making public opinion, but the process is the same. Both can be stamped out in the quantity required, and delivered anywhere to order. Our thinking on most important subjects to-day is as little original as the mental processes of the men who write and the machines which print the pages we read and repeat as our own opinions. Thomas Carlyle was never more sound than when railing at this "paper age." And paper, he wisely asked us to remember, "is made of old rags." Older writers who saw the ragged throngs in the streets were led to identify the mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate populace. Our mob to-day is no longer merely tramping the streets. We have it at the breakfast table, in the subway, alike in shop and boudoir, and office--wherever, in fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness is not exterior, nor is the mob confined to the class of the ill-clad and the poor. The raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, a universal presence entering into the fabric of nearly all our mental processes.