AMERICA'S INTELLECTUAL PRODUCT 209 



what more their sons need when provided with a college training. It is 

 useless to make a comparison with the professional studies of law and 

 medicine — these are frankly bread-studies, while it should be expressly 

 understood that the pursuit of pure science has no rewards of a mone- 

 tary nature. It must be carried on by those who love it and feel called 

 to it, and are willing to make sacrifices for it, but they need not be 

 expected to go without food and warmth, as we often find such students 

 doing. The national government provides richly for the education of 

 those who are to devote their lives to her defense; is there any less 

 reason for providing for those who are to make her intellectually great ? 

 Be assured, intending benefactors, that your money will not be wasted 

 by the devotees of science. Of wasting money there are many ways, 

 but not this. Some time ago I stood on a hill above the campus of a 

 large and rapidly growing university, as it is called. At my feet I 

 counted thirteen buildings completed and in process of erection, those 

 of the latter category representing at a crude guess over half a million 

 of dollars, to say nothing of the vast hole into which a third of a mil- 

 lion had been poured to make a Eoman holiday, a stadium rivaling 

 Harvard's. Meeting a professor, I fell into conversation with him, 

 and he began to describe to me the needs and resources of the institu- 

 tion, and with pride informed me that the endowment was — about two 

 thirds of the endowment of Clark University and College together. 

 When I thought of our three plain and modest buildings I could not 

 but feel that something was wrong, here or there, and I could not 

 avoid the conclusion that what was spread over such a large surface 

 must be rather thin. Knowing as I did the pitifully small salaries 

 paid the professors in that institution and the feeling cherished by 

 most of them toward their president, a highly successful autocrat of 

 the genus hustler, I did not feel that I had cause to envy the university 

 of X. There are no fellowships there, though there are laboratories, 

 and those valiant souls among the professors who do research do so at 

 the risk of their lives. To secure a position there one is not asked, 

 What have you accomplished? but, What is your denomination? Is 

 this a picture of the typical American university? I sincerely hope 

 not. And yet I fear that the picture is not unfamiliar. Certainly it 

 does not remind us in the least of a picture of a university in Germany 

 or France. A friend of mine, a distinguished professor of mathe- 

 matics in the University of Paris, has as his regular duties the delivery 

 of two lectures a week for one semester, that is, during four of five 

 months of the year. The rest of his time he has for research. The 

 result is that he is one of the two or three of the world's greatest 

 mathematicians. For the amount of work that I have mentioned he 

 receives what until last year was a full professor's salary at Harvard, 

 the largest, with two exceptions, of any in the United States. And 



VOL. LXXII. — 14. 



