Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/546

542 as to preaching—one of them perhaps more so—and neither is possible to the jaded man. Should benevolent legislation—or professorial trades-unionism—get far enough to forbid the professor's working more than eight hours a day, or after six o'clock, or with too great rapidity, it is conceivable that in respect at least of buoyancy his work would be improved.

The college professor is working hours enough, and he is earning his salary. I am not going to make a display of statistics here. They could be made to prove a great many things—among them, that it is no wonder college professors marry late, have few children, and seem glad of the opportunity to earn a few dollars outside the college walls. But statistics are always under suspicion of perjury, so it will be just as well, and much simpler, merely to repeat that the professor is earning his salary, and to let it go at that. For my first year's instruction, in one of the many "greatest universities in the world," I received eight hundred dollars and the satisfaction of hard work in fields I liked. One hundred dollars went for books, and I was married. To qualify for this position, I had spent four years as undergraduate and four years more as graduate, two of them in Europe. Salaries may have advanced somewhat during the past fifteen years, but the prices of wives and babies, and other necessities of a really human life, have shown them a clean pair of heels.

This is not a complaint—at least, not an ill-natured complaint. There is no doubt that if college professors in general, especially those in the smaller institutions, were better paid, the level of ability in the profession would be raised. Books, travel and study abroad, are the great means of growth in the intellectual life, and there are very few who can afford them. But there is no great reason for thinking that a rise in salaries on a large scale would have the commensurate effect upon teaching. There may be some truth in the assertion sometimes made that the brightest and most capable young men in college are attracted to the more highly paid professions, with the implication that the teaching profession suffers; but there is not much cause for worry on this account. Any professor of experience will say that among all these "bright and capable" young men there is only once in a while a real mind, and that the peculiar combination of mind and soul that constitutes the ideal of the teacher is even more rare; and that the young man who possesses the combination rarely fails to enter the teaching profession—naturally, and not for the financial reason.

It would be a sorry event for liberal education—and for technical education too—if the principles of scientific management were really applied: if the professor's preparation were formally prescribed, if hours were fixed and tasks made absolutely definite, if promotions and salaries were determined as in the business world, and all the worldly ways of inspection, stimulation, and compulsion were introduced. There is already too much of all this—too much talk of "units," of the "