this birds-eye view of the general steering function of the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. if we are to be the yeast-cake for democracys dough, if we are to make it rise with cultures preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. we must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.
stevenson says somewhere to his reader: you think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind. well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain pretty poor place, possibly the whole policy of mankind. that is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.
we of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as harvard. to many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. in edith wyatts exquisite book of chicago sketches called every one his own way there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness: richard elliot and his feminine counterpart鈥攆eeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. possibly this type of culture may exist near cambridge and boston, there may be specimens there, for 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 microbes life. real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain 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.