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.

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