Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/323

Rh 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 separation 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 southern 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 signification 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 opponents. 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 annually put forth by the hundred. The young man who is not a doctor