THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 321 



safely and with joy in hard work to its ever higher stages of study, 

 research and discovery. But our intending professor can not go back 

 into the fitting-school or into freshman year, and begin over again. He 

 enters the graduate department. Here he has, with few exceptions, as 

 colleagues in study, men who, like himself, are not well-grounded and 

 who are unable or unwilling to submit to the prolonged and severe dis- 

 cipline which is necessary for the training of the intellectual athlete. 

 He is prematurely set at " a problem " and works with an aspiring eye 

 on the degree of Ph.D. That this description is not true alone of the 

 few advanced students trained by the secondary educational system of 

 this country, who are without serious purpose, I may cite the unanimous 

 testimony of the professors and other officers at Oxford respecting the 

 Ehodes scholars in general, as it was given to me on occasion of a recent 

 visit there. They are, for the most part, fine, manly fellows, earnest in 

 work and anxious to pick up whatever might seem fit for their advan- 

 tage, but superficial in their attainments, eager to specialize minutely 

 while as yet they know little or nothing thoroughly as to elementary 

 matters in their chosen specialty, and restive under all manner of con- 

 trol, whether as touching manners, petty morals, the prompt keeping of 

 appointments, or conformity to university regulations. 



Now that our candidate is ready for his professorial career, how 

 shall he get into a place which will at least give him a foot-hold for 

 beginning a life-long race? He must be, as a rule, recommended by 

 somebody (often some president) to some president, who will, if he 

 thinks best, recommend him to the appointing board. This latter 

 recommendation is usually equivalent to an appointment, although of 

 late the sane custom of consulting some members of the faculty into 

 which the candidate is to be introduced has begun to prevail. In popular 

 parlance, he must push and be pushed. But every one who has had the 

 long experience of the writer in such matters knows perfectly well that 

 the willingness and skill to push one's self, and the vigor and success 

 with which one is pushed by others, are quite as often in inverse as in 

 direct proportion to the merits of one's case. 



When all the preliminary stages are passed through, and the candi- 

 date has really the right to call himself professor — although the young 

 ladies whom he used to meet at the summer resorts were wont to call him 

 " professor " when he was in fact only a tutor or an instructor — unless 

 he has a most self-sacrificing intellectual interest in his calling and a 

 thoroughly ethical love for the work of the teacher, he finds that his 

 position and its rewards are not at all what he fondly imagined they 

 would be. His classmates who have gone into business or into the pro- 

 fessions of law or medicine are in receipt of incomes two-fold or four- 

 fold his own. They have a higher social standing; and those they have 

 served with no higher degree of talents or of success are seemingly more 

 grateful and ready in some form or other to show appreciation of the 



