conditions had been which had shaped their development.

This plan of acquiring knowledge of later results immediately conditions the financial organization, for with an unstable class such as are found in charity institutions it would be impossible years afterward to keep track of the candidates who had been examined. In order to realize its main purpose, therefore, the institute would be obliged to deal with a provident class of which it could later get accurate information. By dealing with a provident class it would be selfsupporting, for it would be proposed to charge such fees for the examinations as would not only be sufficient to meet the running expenses, but would supply a surplus which would be devoted to acquiring collateral information and to perfecting the records. To this end the institute should be under the management of trustees. All the workers of the institute should be salaried, and none of them would be financially interested in it in any other way. The surplus should be devoted to the study of trades and professions, their requirements and rewards; to the social influences that may be counted on in different communities, to the influences of different forms of education. The institute would endeavor to co-operate with boards of education and schools of social science and would

organize classes for teachers and employers of labor. We believe it would set an example of how individual efficiency could be determined and improved, and would prove the truth of the same in a way to be convincing to private individuals, to boards of education, and to all who are unselfishly interested in the political welfare of the country. The number of examinations it could make would not, of course, be sufficient to effect any great impress upon social conditions, but it would point out the principles which as yet have not been established, for methods of dealing with individuals in a way to prevent their failure.

In this country public reforms and betterments come from the examples and demonstrations of individuals. The government is more active in prescribing penalties for offenses than in initiating preventive remedies for social defects. But there is an increasing tendency on the part of the government to adopt methods which have been proved useful by private enterprises. Such an institute would be able to demonstrate methods which would be useful to the government, and it is by such methods alone that individual character is to be raised. And after all the raising of the quality of the individual is, apparently, the only way possible for a democracy to raise the standard of public opinion.

I SAW him naked on a hill
Above a world of gold,
And coming by, so still, so still,
The sheep within his fold.

He strode along that golden air,
A rosy-bodied fool,

With wonder-dripping dreams as fair
As starlight in a pool.

He sang of old, forgotten springs Of worship in the sky,

And longing passionate with wings, And vision that must die.

His body and his spirit glowed
For joy that they were one,

And from his heart the music flowed
Into the setting sun.

I'

Lo, the Poor Professor!

T is one of the amusing anomalies of the English language that a long-drawn legal document is entitled a "brief" and that the end of the undergraduate's career in college is celebrated by a "commencement." It is also an anomaly that at this commencement some scholar in cap and gown will seize the opportunity to congratulate the graduates on the completion of their studies and to warn them as to the dangers and the duties which await them in the world outside academic walls, while at the same season some newspaper humorist in cap and bells will assure these ambitious apprentices to life that they are really lamentably ignorant and that they have everything to learn if they are ever to make places for themselves in this outside world.

While it is at commencement in the spring that the college students find themselves targets for advice of all sorts, from all sorts and conditions of men, it is at the actual beginning of the academic year, in the fall, that the college professors are likely to hear themselves discussed and to have the disadvantages of their career pointed out to them. By some critics they are told that they are shamefully underpaid; that they are deprived of freedom of speech; that they are the hirelings of brutal boards of trustees and the serfs of autocratic presidents; and that they are poor creatures at best, accepting conditions under which strong men would never be willing to work. By another group they are informed that they are incompetent; that they are not inspiring teachers; that the programme of studies for which they are responsible is not adequate or satisfactory; and that they fail in their duty to the rising generation intrusted to their charge.

The professor reads these things and other things quite as absurd, and he knows them to be so absurd that he is not moved to protest. He is aware, better than any outsider can be, that the programme of studies is not perfect, that he may have a colleague or two who is not inspiring; that the presi

dent may seem at times a little too autocratic; "that the trustees may not always take the broadest view of the immediate and of the ultimate necessities, and that his salary is not as large as he deserves and certainly not as large as he desires. He would willingly confess at all times that no university is perfect either in its organization, its administration, its equipment, or in its teaching staff. None the less has he faith and hope and charity; and he has a profound satisfaction in his own opportunity for work congenial to his tastes.

The position of the college professor in the leading American institutions has certain obvious disadvantages and limitations. In the first place, no one who accepts a professorship can ever hope to be a rich mạn; and, in the second place, he must forego, to a slight extent at least, that complete freedom of speech which is the right of every American citizen. He is condemned to petty economies for himself and his family; and he cannot express all his opinions at all times—not because he is in danger of dismissal but because he is loyal to the institution he serves, and because he feels he has no right to make that institution responsible for his utterances. An American university bulks so big in the eyes of the American public that the individual is merged in it and can speak only as a part of it. If Emerson had been a professor of Harvard, everything he said would have been credited to "Professor Emerson of Harvard"; and lesser men wisely think twice before using the university as a sounding-board. To say this is to admit that an aggressive and vehement radical is out of place in an institution, one of the chief purposes of which is to be the conserver of the heritage of the past-even if another of its chief purposes is to lead toward the bettering of the future.

The pay of the professor may be meagre, but it is certain. There is nothing aleatory about it; and he can cut his coat according to his cloth. Then there is the pension for his old age and for his widow if she should survive him. He has security of tenure

except in a few State universities where politics still meddles with education. His tenure is so secure that he is not likely to be dismissed even if he gets stale and becomes less efficient as a teacher. And this security of tenure is not likely to be affected by any expression of his individual opinions which he may make with due regard to his own obligation as a gentleman and a scholar. There have been perhaps half a dozen cases in half a score of years when a professor endangered his position by his utterances; but these instances are surprisingly few when we consider how many professors there are and how many utterances they have permitted themselves.

The professor's pay is not what it ought to be and not what it will be in the immediate future; but his tenure is secure; he is rarely overworked; he has a long annual vacation; and in the better and more solidly established institutions he can have a leave of absence for one term every seventh year without diminution of salary. Furthermore, his work is congenial and his associates are congenial. Above all, he is kept in the constant companionship of youth, which is an ever-renewed stimulus and inspiration.

I

N the address of welcome which President Butler made to the students of the summer session at Columbia in 1915 he expressed his hope that it would be borne in upon his hearers "that membership in a company of scholars, living the life of the constructive, forward-facing, proHail, the Rich ductive scholar, carrying on the Professor! life, the work, the tradition of a great university, is the most satisfying occupation that has yet been offered to the ambitious American. I know of no career that offers such compensations; I know of no companionship that offers such satisfaction and such stimulus; and I know of no tradition that carries one on farther and farther toward living, or toward the real things of life and an appreciation and an understanding of them."

If this eloquent assertion of the utility, the dignity, and the beauty of the professor's calling is well founded-and it would be supported by the testimony of all who are really competent to express an opinion-then we might expect to find in the more important universities in the more important cities an increasing group of men of independent

means who have chosen this vocation from sheer love of it, from intelligent understanding of its rewards and its opportunities. We might expect to discover in the faculties of these institutions men of inherited wealth who have deliberately preferred scholarly labor in a university to the less attractive toil of the market-place. And this is just what can be discovered. Any one who is familiar with the faculties of our leading universities is aware that each of them is likely to have among its foremost and most efficient members men of wealth-some of them even millionaires.

It is a hard choice that is put before the young man of wealth in the United States. What is he to do with himself? He can carry on the business at the old stand; but he does not really need the money, even if he often deceives himself into the belief that he does. He can go into public life, but there he is likely to find that his wealth is more or less of a handicap-unless he is content to buy himself an ambassadorship from time to time. He can, of course, acquire the art of tooling a coach-and-four; but if he happens to have a soul above the buttons of a groom he is not likely to find abiding satisfaction in this superfluous service to his fellow man. He can-and this choice is nobler and far more remunerative-he can train himself for usefulness as a trustee of libraries, hospitals, colleges, and public institutions of one kind or another, a form of service which offers unlimited opportunity for hard work with little appreciation.

If he wishes to shun luxurious ease he can essay the writing of history, as Gibbon and Prescott and Parkman did, all of them enabled to accomplish it only by the aid of the fortunes they had inherited. But authorship is not incompatible with professorship; and writing, delightful as it is, is not as delightful as teaching. To the scholar who is investigating the sources and who is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge, there is no stimulus equal to that which comes from contact with a group of graduate students, all intensely interested in the subject, all eager to receive, and all keen to discuss. And there is no discipline more profitable for the investigator than the necessity of meeting the inquiries of these alert students, of answering their piercing questions, of making sure that he is carrying the approval of his class as he goes

Three times at least within the past quarter of a century has a man of inherited wealth been called to the presidency of one or another of the older universities on the Atlantic coast, and once the experiment was satisfactory, because the new president had been promoted from a professorship in which he had distinguished himself, whereas in the other two and less successful cases he had been called from outside. It would be unfortunate if the time ever came when the possession of private means should be a condition precedent to an American professorship as it is now to an American ambassadorship. But there will be advantages both to the individual and to the university when more men of private means take up teaching as a life-work.

F

'OR a long time I have been debating as to whether the flavor of Ellen could possibly be put on paper. I wanted to try to do it because Ellen is a fast-vanishing type. Twenty years ago it would have been as superfluous to write about her as to describe a buffalo to a prairie dweller in the fifties. Almost everybody had an Ellen in the kitchen then, and did not need to be told what a sweet-natured, fresh-colored, unsophisticated bit of Ireland was like. But times have changed.

The Flavor of Ellen

Ellen has been with us over three years. I do not know why she has not become in that time like her sophisticated sisters who spend Thursday (or more likely Wednesday) afternoons comparing notes on how many duties they have been able to compel their mistresses to remove from them, and how Katie Mullaney is getting eight dollars a week, with two in the family and the washing put out, and a man to shake rugs and wash windows, and no answering of the telephone.

I think we owe part of our immunity to Ellen's aunt, for, instead of going out with the girls of a Thursday (characteristically she prefers Thursday for her day off), Ellen usually goes to see her aunt. The latter is a delightful, white-haired person, almost as fresh-colored as Ellen herself, who lived twenty-seven years in one household, and only left the position because the last of the family died. She has now retired to

Ellen's aunt knows where her niece spends every afternoon and evening off; she insists that she go to bed early instead of gallivanting on wash-day evenings; when Ellen goes shopping, her aunt goes, too, and looks to it that she does not spend too much of her earnings upon clothes or buy shoddy materials or flashy colors; and, best of all, to our thinking, she instils into Ellen that self-respecting courtesy and deference toward employers that is a lost art among most of the servants of to-day.

Ellen is not perfection nor anywhere near it. I do not mean to imply that. She is young; she is a scion of a race whose most precious heirloom is a blessed irresponsibility. No one could possibly expect her to put so much stress on cleanliness and order as a New England housewife, and she certainly fulfils that lack of expectation. She simply will not keep her kitchen utensils in any cut-and-dried place; her manner of sweeping shows that she thinks that even though the gods see everywhere they are too big and kind to look under bookcases and into remote corners for a little dust; she loves to rub the faucets and the boiler in the kitchen until the burnished copper is a feast for the eyes, but she seems to have an aversion to cleaning the silver. As my mother often complains, she never does so unless specially requested to attend to the matter, "though you would think she couldn't help seeing how tarnished it gets."

In vain do I point out to my mother that the kitchen is Ellen's home, her living-room in which she must entertain her friends, and that in burnishing the copper and thus giving the room that small measure of decoration within her power she is displaying the normal home-making instinct which my mother, being an ardent conservative, should rejoice to see; whereas, the silver being part of our home, Ellen cannot reasonably be expected to have such a personal interest in it. My mother only looks unconvinced and sometimes even makes a little incredulous noise which unmistakably resembles a sniff.

Like any child (the race to which Ellen belongs is essentially and eternally childlike-not childish, mind you), Ellen is very sensitive to praise and blame. To fail in