It is quite evident that with, the multiplication of colleges, which
is very rapid, it will, before long, become impossible for the
newspapers to furnish the reports of the proceedings in and about
commencement which they now lay before their readers with such
profuseness. The long letters describing with wearisome minuteness
what has been described already fifty times will undoubtedly before
long be given up. So also, we fancy, will the reports of the
"baccalaureate sermons," if these addresses are to retain their
value as pieces of parting advice to young men. There is nothing in
the newspaper literature, on the whole, less edifying, and sometimes
more amusing, than the reporter's _précis_ of pulpit discourses,
so thoroughly does he deprive them of force find vigor and point,
and often of intelligibility. The ordinary sermon addressed on Sunday
to the ordinary congregation deals with a great variety of topics,
and from many different points of view, and with more or less
diversity of method. The baccalaureate sermon, on the other hand,
consists, from the necessity of the case, in the main of advice to
youths at their entrance on life, and the substance of such discourses
can, in the nature of things, undergo no great change from year to
year, and must be strikingly similar in all the colleges. Any
freshness they may have they must owe to the rhetorical powers of
particular preachers, and even these cannot greatly vary in dealing
with so familiar a theme. What the old man has to say to the young man,
the teacher to the pupil, the father to the son, at the moment when
the gates of the great world are flung open to the college graduate,
has undergone but little modification in a thousand years, and has
become very well known to all collegians long before they take their
degree. To make the parting words of warning and encouragement tell
on ears that are now eager for other and louder sounds, everything
that can be done needs to be done to preserve their freshness and
their pathos, and certainly nothing could do as much to deprive them
of both one and the other as hashing them up annually in a slovenly
report as part of the news of the day.
It is not, however, the advice contained in baccalaureate sermons,
but all advice to young men, that needs in our time to be dealt out
with greater circumspection and economy. Authority has within the
last hundred or even fifty years undergone a serious loss of power,
and this loss of power has shown itself nowhere more markedly than
in the work of education. It has indeed almost completely changed
the relation of parents and children, and teachers and scholars, so
that it is now almost as necessary to prove the reasonableness and
utility of any course of action which is required of boys as of
mature men. Persuasion has, in other words, taken the place of
command, and there is nobody left whose dictum owes much of its
weight to his years or his office. Boys as well as their elders now
expect advice to be based on personal experience, and do not listen
with any great seriousness or deference to admonitions the value of
which the utterer has not himself personally tested.
It follows, therefore, that the persons whom the young men of our
time hear most readily on the conduct of life are those who have had
practical acquaintance with the difficulties of living up to the
ideals which are so eloquently painted in the college chapel, and
who have found out in their own persons what it costs to be pure and
upright, and faithful and industrious, and persistent in the
struggle that goes on in the various callings which lie outside the
college walls. For this reason, probably, no addresses at
commencement have the value of those which are delivered now and
then by men who have come back for a brief day to tell the next
generation of the way life looks to those who for years have been
wrestling with its problems, and have had actual experience of the
virtues and defects of that early equipment and training on which
such enormous sums are now spent in this country. The more advice
from this quarter young men get the better. Nobody can talk so
effectively to them at the moment when they are about to face the
world on their own responsibility as the lawyers and merchants and
ministers and politicians who have been facing it for twenty-five or
thirty years with all the outward signs of success. If it were
possible for every college in the country to get one such man at
commencement whose powers of expression would do justice to his
experience, and who for this one day in the year would without fear
or favor tell what he thought about success and about the conditions
of success--about the kind of troubles which beset men in the
callings with which he is most familiar--we should probably soon
have a body of advice so impressive and fruitful that it would serve
the needs and excite the interest of more than one generation. The
young have been told to be good until they have grown weary of
hearing it, particularly as it is always represented to them as a
comparatively simple matter, and when they go out in the world and
find what a hard and complex thing duty is they are very apt to look
back to the ethical instruction of their college as when in college
they looked back to the admonitions of the nursery, and return to
their alma mater in later years with much the feeling with which a
man visits a kindly old grandmother.
But commencements certainly draw forth nothing so curious as the
newspaper article addressed to the graduating class, and which now
seems to be a regular part of the summer's editorial work. It seems
to have one object in view, and only one, and that is preventing the
graduate from thinking much of his education and his degree, or
supposing that they will be of any particular use to him in his
entrance on life, or make him any more acceptable to the community.
He is warned that they will raise him in nobody's estimation, and
prove rather a hinderance than a help to him in getting a living,
and that it will be well for him to begin his career by trying to
forget that he has ever been in college at all. Not unfrequently the
discourse closes with a suggestion or hint that the best university
is, after all, the office of "a great daily," and that the kindest
thing a fond father could do for a promising boy would be to start
him as a local reporter and make him get his first experience of
life in the collection of "city items." There is in all this the
expression, though in a somewhat grotesque form, of a widespread
popular feeling that nothing is worthy of the name of education
which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly and dexterously.
Considering with how large a proportion of the human race the mere
feeding and clothing of the body is the first and hardest of tasks,
there is nothing at all surprising in this view. But the
preservation and growth of civilization in any country depends much
on the extent to which it is able out of its surplus production to
provide some at least of its people with the means of cherishing and
satisfying nobler appetites than hunger and thirst. The immense sum
which is now spent every year on colleges--misspent though much of
it may be--and the increasing number of students who throng to them,
regardless of the fact that the training they get may make them at
first feel a little strange and helpless in the fierce struggle for
meat and drink, show that the increasing wealth of the nation is
accompanied by an increasing recognition of the fact that life,
after all, is not all living, that there are gains which cannot be
entered in any ledger, and that a man may carry about with him,
through a long and it may be outwardly unfortunate career, sources
of pleasure and consolation which are none the less precious for
being unsalable and invisible.
"ORGANS"
The untimely decease of the _Republic_, the paper which was set up
some months ago to express in a semi-official way the views of the
Administration and its immediate adherents on public questions, has
a good deal that is tragic about it, as far as its principal
conductor is concerned. That a man of as much experience of politics
and of newspapers as Mr. Norvell, the editor, had, should have
supposed it possible to start a daily morning paper in this city at
a time when a successful daily is worth millions, and when there are
four already in possession of the field, without any other claims on
popular attention than its being the mouth-piece of the leading
politicians of the party in power, and with a capital which in his
dreams only reached $500,000, and in fact only $40,000, is a curious
though sad illustration of the power of the press over the
imagination even of persons long familiar with it. The failure of
the enterprise, however distressing in some of its aspects, is
valuable as establishing more conspicuously and firmly than ever two
facts of considerable importance in relation to journalism. One is,
that when politicians so deeply desire an organ as to be willing to
set one up for the exclusive use of the party, it is a sure sign
that the party is in serious danger of extinction. The other is,
that the public mind is so fully made up that the position of a
newspaper ought to be a judicial one, that all attempts to make a
paper avowedly partisan can only be saved from commercial failure by
large capital, extraordinary ability, and well-established prestige.
"Organs" took their rise when the sole use of a newspaper was to
communicate intelligence, and when men in power found it convenient
to have a channel through which they could let out certain things
which they wished to be spread abroad. Out of this kind of relation
to the Government a small paper, which did not object to the humble
_rôle_ of a sort of official gazette, from which the earlier
newspapers indeed differed but little, could, of course, always get
a livelihood, and perhaps a little of the dignity which comes from
having or being supposed to have state secrets to keep. But the
gradual addition to the "news-letter" of the sermon known as a
"leader" or "editorial article" made the relation more and more
difficult and finally impossible. The more pompous, portentous, and
prophetic in their character the editor's comments on public affairs
became, the less disposed was the public to allow him to retain the
position of a paid agent of the State. It began to feel toward him
as it would have felt toward the town-crier if he had put on a gown
and bands, and insisted on accompanying his announcement of thefts
and losses with homilies on the vanity of life and the right use of
opportunities. The editor had, in short, to conduct his business in
a manner befitting his newly assumed duties as a prophet, and to
pretend at least that his utterances were wholly independent and
were due simply to a desire for the public good, as a prophet's
ought to be. It is now very rare indeed that a government is able to
induce a well-established newspaper of the first class to act as its
organ in the proper sense of that term, except by working on the
vanity of editors. Almost all editors are a little sensitive about
the imputation of being mere commentators or critics, and a little
desirous of being thought "practical men," by those engaged in the
actual working of political machinery. The "old editor" in this
country in fact preferred to be thought a working politician, and
liked to use his paper as a piece of political machinery for
producing solid party gains, and in this way to be received into the
circle of "workers" and "managers" as one of themselves; and to
retain this position he was always willing to "write up" any view
they suggested. His successor, though he cares less about being "a
worker," and is able to secure the attendance of politicians at his
office without running after them, is, nevertheless, more or less
flattered by the confidences of men in power, and it often takes
only a small amount of these confidences to make him surrender the
judicial position and accept that of an advocate, and stand by them
through thick and thin. But no leading journal has ever tried this
position in our day very long without being forced out of it by the
demand of the public for impartiality and the consequent difficulty
of avoiding giving offence in official quarters. Every
administration does things either through its chief or subordinates
which will not bear defence, and which its judicious friends prefer
to pass over in silence. But a journalist cannot keep silent. The
Government may require him to hold his tongue, but the reader
demands that he shall speak; and as the public supplies the sinews
of war, and pays for the prophet's robes, he is sooner or later
compelled to break with the Government and to reproach it for not
listening to the advice of its friends in time.
Moreover, in a country in which the press is free and newspapers
abound, a party which contains a majority of the people cannot fail
to have the support of a large and influential portion of the press.
Its conductors, though prophets, do not wear camel's hair, nor is
their diet locusts and wild honey. They form part of the community,
live among the voters, and share, to a greater or less extent, their
prejudices and expectations and sympathies. Every party, therefore,
is sure, as long as it has a strong hold on the public, of having a
strong hold on the press, and of having a considerable number of the
most influential editors among its defenders. One of the sure signs
that it is losing its hold on the public is the defection of the
press or its growing lukewarmness. Newspapers cannot, perhaps, build
a party up or pull one down, but when you see the newspapers
deserting a party it is all but proof that the agencies which
dissolve a political organization are at work. The successful
editors may have no originating power or no organizing power, and no
capacity for legislation, and may even want the prophetic instinct;
but a certain intuitive sense of the direction in which the tide of
popular feeling is running is the principal condition of their
success, and an anxious politician may therefore always safely
credit them with possessing it. If they had not had it, their papers
would not have succeeded.
If the incident or its lessons should result in establishing better
relations between political men and the press, the sacrifice of the
unfortunate projector of the _Republic_ will, however, be a small
price to pay for a great gain. We do not, as our readers know, set
up to be champions of the press, and have certainly never shown any
disposition to underrate its defects or shortcomings. But there is
one thing which no candid and careful observer can avoid seeing,
and that is that the press of the country, as an instrument of
discussion and popular education, has undergone within twenty years
an improvement nothing analogous to which is to be found in the
class of politicians. The newspapers are now, in the vast majority
of cases in all our leading cities, conducted by men who are
familiar with the leading ideas of our time and with the latest
advances in science and the art, including the art of government,
and who write under the influence of these ideas and these advances,
and who have consequently got a standard of efficiency in
legislative administration which has not yet made its way into the
political class. The result is that, after making all possible
allowance for the carelessness and recklessness and dishonesty of
reporters, and the personal biases and enmities of editors, the men
who carry on the Government, excepting a few experts, have become
objects of criticism on the part of the daily press, the
depreciatory tone of which is not wholly unjustifiable or unnatural,
and politicians repay this contempt with a hatred which is none the
less fierce for having no adequate means of expression.