Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/402

398 inducement. When these "Latin schools" grew into little colleges, parents and students alike knew that requirements of duty were fulfilled by payment of a small fee; the instructors were mostly clergymen who eked out their incomes by serving neighboring churches. It is said that of the first 110 colleges in this country, 100 were founded with training for the ministry as the prime object. The importance of education received full recognition, but teaching as such was not regarded as a serious matter; it was merely an incidental part of a minister's work. The belief prevailed that if a young man was willing to accept an education some one ought to give it to him.

Until 75 years ago, college teaching in the greater part of this country was controlled by clergymen, members of an ill-paid profession. Even now a large proportion of our college and university presidents are ministers, and there are many in prominent places who maintain that higher education should be under clerical supervision. The tradition continues that teaching like preaching is, or should be, altruistic work and the salaries are graded accordingly. Some time ago the president of a great university blamed this lack of appreciation on the materialistic tendencies of our time, casting all on that convenient beast of burden, commercialism. But this is without reason. Failure to appreciate the work of college professors is merely a survival of the hard materialism of early days, when pioneers struggled against a harsh climate and gained their farms by felling the forest. Genuine appreciation of intellectual work comes only in an age like this; it comes with advancing civilization, when men have been freed from bitter contest with nature, with the physical comfort found only in commercial communities, such as Athens, Babylon or Thebes, in the olden times, or the great commercial centers of modern times. Our business men recognize the power of pure intellect; they pay its possessors almost fabulous salaries; they endow colleges and universities in the hope that intellectual training will enable the coming generation to begin where they have left off and to accomplish greater things. The blame for wretched salaries and constantly increasing overwork can not be laid at their door. The scale was fixed originally by clergymen, the one class against which the vague charge of commercialism can not be laid. If the happy day should ever come when lay members of college boards awake to the sense of their responsibilities and gain personal knowledge of the kind and amount of work done by college professors, the complaint respecting small salaries will be at an end.

Conditions have undergone great change since the days of the "Latin schools." When population was sparse, when little money was in circulation, though the people lived in comfort, the modest college, with few teachers, small fees and narrow curriculum, was necessary if the professions were to be recruited. But those conditions have passed