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