SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI I. No. f 



underpaid, he is of small social conse- 

 quence, he is kept at menial employments 

 and the leisure to do good work is denied 

 him. A change is certainly needed in all 

 of these aspects of the American pro- 

 fessors' life. My own opinion is that this 

 change can only come about through the 

 enlightenment of the great public. The 

 public must be appealed to by the professor 

 himself in all ways and upon all occasions. 

 The professor must teach the nation to 

 respect learning; he must make the nation 

 understand the function and the rights of 

 the learned classes. He must do this 

 through a willingness to speak and to fight 

 for himself. In Germany there is a great 

 public of highly educated, nay of deeply 

 and variously learned people whose very 

 existence secures pay, protection and rev- 

 erence for the scholar. The same is true in 

 France, England and Italy. 



It is the public that protects the pro- 

 fessor in Europe. The public alone can 

 protect the professor in America. The 

 proof of this is that any individual learned 

 man in America who becomes known to the 

 public through his books or his discoveries, 

 or through his activity in any field of 

 learning or research is comparatively safe 

 from the guillotine. His position has at 

 least some security, his word some author- 

 ity. This man has educated the public 

 that trusts him, and he can now protect his 

 more defenseless brethren if he will. I 

 have often wondered, when listening to the 

 sickening tale of some brutality done by a 

 practical college president to a young in- 

 structor, how it had been possible for the 

 eminent men upon the faculty, to sit 

 through the operation without a protest. 

 A word from any one of them would have 

 stopped the sacrifice and protected learn- 

 ing from the oppressor. But no, these 

 eminent men harbored ethical conceptions 

 which kept them from interfering with the 



practical running of the college. Merciful 

 heavens! who is to run a college if not 

 learned men? Our colleges have been 

 handled by men whose ideals were as re- 

 mote from scholarship as the ideals of the 

 New York theatrical managers are remote 

 from poetry. In the meanwhile, the schol- 

 ar have been dumb and reticent. 



At the back of all these phenomena we 

 have, as I have said, the general atmos- 

 pheric ignorance of the great public in 

 America. We are so used to this public, 

 so immersed in it, so much a part of it 

 ourselves, that we are hardly able to gain 

 any conception of what that atmospheric 

 ignorance is like. I will give an illustra- 

 tion which would perhaps never have oc- 

 curred to my mind except through the 

 accident of actual experience. If you de- 

 sire a clue to the American character in the 

 matter of the higher education, you may 

 find one in becoming a school trustee in any 

 country district where the children taught 

 are the children of farmers. The contract 

 with any country school-teacher provides 

 that he shall teach for so many weeks upon 

 such and such conditions. Now let us sup- 

 pose a teacher of genius to obtain the post. 

 He not only teaches admirably, but he in- 

 stitutes school gardens for the children ; he 

 takes long walks with the boys and gives 

 them the rudiments of geology. He is in 

 himself an uplifting moral influence and 

 introduces the children into a whole new 

 world of idea and of feeling. The parents 

 are pleased. I will not say that they are 

 grateful; but they are not ungrateful. It 

 is true that they secretly believe all this 

 botany and moral influence to be rubbish; 

 biit they tolerate it. Now, let us suppose 

 that before the year is out the teacher falls 

 sick, and loses two weeks of school time 

 through absence. Tou will find that the 

 trustees insist upon his making up this lost 

 time : the contract calls for it. This seems 



