AMERICAN TITLES AND DISTINCTIONS. 319 



of being a lawyer. No harm is intended by either the victim or the 

 perpetrators of the practical joke. The explanation is perfectly simple, 

 that by the inevitable process of good-natured degradation the words 

 colonel and lawyer have in many places come to mean the same, neither 

 of them suggesting the slightest suspicion of military education. In 

 like manner, professors at first constituted a very limited class of 

 scholarly men engaged in the work of college instruction, a class sharply 

 differentiated from that of preparatory school teachers. This separa- 

 tion seems to have been maintained until the close of the civil war. 

 But prior to the war the title had been assumed by dancing masters, 

 showmen and all mountebanks. The good-natured American public, 

 believing in universal freedom, had no objection to such thievery, and 

 there was no law to prevent it. Annually the use of the title became 

 more extended. Barbers, tailors, bootblacks and prize-fighters had as 

 much right as the dancing master to assume any title that might have 

 a commercial value. Teachers of high schools prepared students for 

 advanced entrance in college. If the college teacher of geometry is 

 called professor, why should not the distinction be extended to the high 

 school teacher of the same subject? Moreover, what is the difference 

 between a college and a high school? None whatever in many south- 

 ern and western communities. If the high school teacher is a professor, 

 why should a discrimination be made against the county superintendent, 

 the grammar school principal, the primary school principal? The 

 accommodating spirit of degradation has so changed the original signi- 

 fication of the word that now it may still mean a college teacher, but 

 much more generally it means teacher without reference to the grade 

 of teaching implied. Moreover, the great majority of teachers are 

 persons with exceedingly small incomes; so that the title professor is 

 in the large cities generally recognized as a badge of poverty. 



Has the professor then no refuge from the charge of mediocrity 

 implied in his once honored title ? There is a Latin word for teacher, 

 which was given a few centuries ago by the European universities to 

 men who had proved their distinguished ability, such as Martin Luther 

 or Nicholas Copernicus. The doctor was a man of learning, fit to teach 

 medicine, or jurisprudence, or theology, or philosophy. Ambitious 

 young men coveted the title, and the universities were places where 

 doctors could lecture, and young men could enter upon the work of 

 original investigation so as to establish their theses against all oppo- 

 nents. Even now the flood of literature made up of young doctors' 

 theses in Germany is so great that no single reader can give attention 

 to a tenth part of them. In America the university standards, in 

 respect to both scholarship and scale of equipment, have risen so rapidly 

 during the last few decades, that young doctors of all kinds are annu- 

 ally put forth by the hundred. The young man who is not a doctor 



