priggishness is just like painters' colic or any other trade disease.
But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of
which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by
its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. Real culture
lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains--under
all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a
college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant
there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for
its social function stops: democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward
it a deaf ear.

"Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no
other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their
tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be
saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it
with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we,
in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the
end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other
and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a
class, we college graduates should look to it that _ours_ has spreading
power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.

In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have
formidable competitors outside. _McClure's Magazine,_ the _American
Magazine, Collier's Weekly_, and, in its fashion, the _World's Work_,
constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It
would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like
these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions
of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United
States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had