○ the social value of the college-bred - 英语演讲稿 ○
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. mcclures magazine, the american magazine, colliers weekly, and, in its fashion, the worlds 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 proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies and elevation of their human preferences, the people at la
