committee. Charity is an Association. Theology is a set of resolutions. Religion is an endeavour to be numerous and communicative. We awe the impenitent with crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so great a work without being on a committee is beyond our ken. What Socrates and Solomon would have come to if they had only had the advantage of conventions it would be hard to say; but in these days, when the excursion train is applied to wisdom; when, having little enough, we try to make it more by pulling it about; when secretaries urge us, treasurers dun us, programs unfold out of every mail—where is the man who, guileless-eyed, can look in his brother's face; can declare upon his honour that he has never been a delegate, never belonged to anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed on, in his life?
Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns. Nothing stays adjourned. We have reports that think for us, committees that do right for us, and platforms that spread their wooden lengths over all the things we love, until there is hardly an inch of the dear old earth to stand on, where, fresh and sweet and from day to day, we can live our lives ourselves, pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God, garner our grain, and die. Every new and fresh human being that comes upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into a machine as soon as we get at him. We have already come to the point where we do not expect to interest anybody in anything without a constitution. And the Eugenic Society is busy now on by-laws for falling in love.
What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think. He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be stirred to something. To the bigotry of the man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry on the earth—the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who, with a more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a mass meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd can give, backs his opinions with forty states, and walks the streets of his native town in the uniform of all humanity. This is a kind of fool that has never been possible until these latter days. Only a very great many people, all of them working on him at once, and all of them watching every one else working at once, can produce this kind.
Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has so mastered the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle reader, have found ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps, in a certain sheepish feeling at being caught in a small audience. Being caught in a small audience at a lecture is no insignificant experience. You will see people looking furtively about, counting one another. You will make comparisons. You will recall the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you had the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing confidently to itself before the lecture began. The hush of disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room, every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm through—all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to—to—as small a crowd as this?" Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty Chairs—we who are to be lectured to—until the poor lecturer who is to lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs begins.
When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied, inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We see little but the massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total submergence of personality, except by accident, in all educated life.
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.
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,
