of the past and sending it on into the future. The men of whom they are made up should be men of high endeavor. They should do their best and be their best. Every college should be a place of perfect equality in noble toil. Its great ideals should be democracy and service. But it is not so, save in theory. Democracy is given lip-recognition, but nothing more.

I

For this unnaturalness there must be some good reason, and this undoubtedly is it. Ideals and aspirations flicker low most of the time, flame brightly and light us on only when the soul is at its best. Now, the souls of college folk are not at their best. They cannot be, for man lives nobly only when he has plenty of action, and action college folk lack. Action is first-hand dealing with realities. In college the humanists deal with records of realities; of the scientists, the counters and comparers deal with dead facts, the thinkers with abstractions. Neither group is handling the realities of brakeman and banker and sailor and miner, of doctor and invalid and beggar and saint and thief. The "great" scholar may be a very pitiful creature when he has to deal with life. Lecture to unknown faces; go to your study or your laboratory and bury your own face in a book or fix it above a microscope; draw your sure salary once a month, with the knowledge that it will come every month till you die—and you may be a part of the world of action and reality, and may not. Most are not. College men on the whole rise rarely to their height, have flickering and not flaming aspirations and ideals, cannot well be strongly democratic, cannot well be strong, eager, to serve.

But how bring action into the scholar's life? Democracy and service would bring it, but it must first bring them. Where strike into that circle? Why, do away with this wretched paternalism and privilege. Assure the college man that in place of the present fixity there shall be a new free order, with the career for the talents, and there will be an instantaneous stir of generous competition. That is, there will be something like action. And even this small measure of action will quicken aspirations. The ideals that should shine in the college firmament will soon begin to brighten there. With that creed of distrust of present conditions and faith in the future, I became a college teacher once more. And here is what befell me, as comment on my distrust. My faith has had no confirmation yet, but it is still strong, none the less.

My first impression was that it was a democratic sort of place. There was democracy at the clubhouse, at any rate-social democracy. I thought that altogether charming. Then, one evening, in a speech that one of the older men made there, I heard explicit assurance that all were on a level under that roof, full professor and newest instructor! How deep is this democracy? I asked myself. I soon found how deep. I discovered that, in some departments, the head professor kept entirely to himself the pleasant task of advising the students who took their major work in his field, and conducted alone all the departmental business, and regarded the curriculum as a thing determined and not to be changed save by himself. And, too, he alone possessed the privilege of conferring freely with the president on the policy of the department and the advancement of the associate and assistant professors and instructors. The career that was open to other talents was a career of permanent and galling subordination. Young men had been appointed to these headships years before; they had grown to middle life in them; they would die in them. The greater academic rewards were given away, for good and all. But was it not to men whose ability was so preeminent that no one could dream of questioning their permanency of tenure? In some instances, yes; in others, by no manner of means. It is a business position, and some of the heads are notoriously bad in matters of administration. It calls for teaching ability, that the department shall be kept close to the varying needs of the classes and the public; but some heads are poor teachers, deeply interested in research alone. However, will not the president discover all this and correct matters soon? No; the president likes the situation; thinks it right; very naturally, too, for these men are the friends of his earlier day, whose good qualities he knows, with whom he has weathered storms, whom he trusts.

one.

After a time there came a certain ray of hope. The institution thus far had had no written constitution; the trustees invited us to form The faculty met and elected a committee for the purpose of course. Ah! not at all; the president placed the matter in the hands of one of his standing committees, made up from the very men who held the headships, and who might therefore, without unfairness, be supposed to regard the existing order as very well ordained. Such men would and did labor earnestly and honestly to do the best and wisest thing, and the president appointed them because he knew that such would be the case. But that best and wisest thing would prove, we all knew, to be not very different from the thing that they had long been used to, and liked, and found just and effective from their point of view. Did not Darwin, with all Did not Darwin, with all his insight, say that money had always seemed to him to divide itself naturally into pounds, shillings, and pence? Besides, privileges were involved here. One of the constitution-makers said to me: "The headship of my department is part of the consideration that brought me here; I should resent its being taken from me." The same man made another remark that interested me: "Some of us here do not believe in democracy." I respected his honesty and his ability to go to the root of the matter. And another member of the committee said this: "We debated and debated, and examined every possibility with the utmost care, and agreed with practical unanimity that organization about like the present one is the only thing that's safe." Safe! Why did he not see that to distrust a situation that may slip out of your own grasp is to distrust humanity? The trustees had some doubt, apparently, as to whether the entire instructing force was represented on this committee, for they accepted it as a nucleus but requested us to add an equal number of men by election. To five so appointed, though with their convictions formulated and fortified, a latter five may be added without making ten. And the trustees, furthermore, when the document was ready, met the committee and discussed it with them, and then declared the constitution in force, without giving the faculity as a whole, who were supposed to be making it, a chance to say one word about it. From beginning to end, our constitution-making was a comedy of good intentions.

an

There is one fact more to be mentioned.

All who wished were given an opportunity to hand suggestions to the committee. Several responded, and the committee were gratified, I have been told. They did not know how much was left unsaid. Many a man remarked to me, in effect: "I don't dare to say the only things that it would relieve me to say, for I'm too poor; my position here is not dependent upon my own efforts but on the opinion of me that grows up in the minds of the men of importance in the faculty." By that no one meant to accuse his superiors of vindictiveness. Every one of us knew that they would strive to be scrupulously fair. But could we feel sure that they would succeed when, right before our eyes, in this instance of the constitution, they were failing? Besides, it seems always to have been true that a man's advancement there depended on his departmental head. Indeed, that is nothing but the bare logic of the situation.

Certainly my experience at this time tended to encourage hesitancy on the part of those who knew not whether to speak or refrain. I had the convictions that I have expressed in these pages, convictions strong enough before this reinforcement; had, too, a feeling that my age and previous positions and old acquaintance with many of these older men would lift me above the suspicion of having a personal ax to grind. And, really, how could one further one's own interests by mixing in such an affair? The accusation is too subtle for me. rate, I did express my views, in conjunction with a friend who was of the same mind, and with this result, I am told: that one man, on reading what we had to say, exclaimed: “This is anarchy!" another: "The college politician never prospered here"; while a third asked: "How can men who have been here but a year or two expect to understand this situation better than those of us who have been deep in it for ten or fifteen years?"

At any

Well, we have our constitution. It is a recognition of the status that was of old, plus safeguards-provisions that increase largely the power and importance of those who were on horseback before. It gives frank expression to that distrust of average folk, folk not ourselves (including in this case the president), which is the characteristic disease of paternalism. It betters the departmental situation, in infinitesimal ways, but it is a paper betterment. For that part of the instrument could not enforce itself, and has not been

enforced. Departments that were right before are right still. Most of the others seem to have improved only in little matters of form. The consequence of all this is that the upper university is well content, the under full of discontent. Those members of the latter who must resign themselves to the situation are making the most of little gains, and trying to persuade themselves that they are keeping up their courage; those who feel that circumstances and their own powers permit them to begin over again elsewhere are watching for chances. to do so. And the institution itself is at rather low efficiency. The institution itself, and the public for whom it exists, got overlooked in the constitution-making. When it is written down, for good and all, that your fate shall be in the hands of a body of men not responsible to you but in permanent authority over you, you hardly feel like speaking up on all subjects, freely and honestly. And when freedom of speech perishes, every kind of discussion, even of mere educational problems, soon perishes, too. Then you have a dead-alive institution.

THE FUTURE COLLEGE PRESIDENT

And now what is the conclusion of the matter? Is it not this? Our colleges are in backwaters, where things go round and round and grow barnacles. They must be forced out into the current and made brisk and bright. And how get them thus into the strong stream of the nation's life? All hands are needed for that task, and this is what they must do. First, the president. He to begin withmust be of a new sort-a sort new to most of the colleges of the land; in some he is already present and at work. He must no longer be so largely a raiser of funds, a speaker at banquets, a manager of politicians, a hirer and discharger of teachers, a contented conserver of an ancient tradition. He must be an educator. An educator is not an expert in scientific pedagogy, not a professional lecturer at institutes, but a sane, wise person who has lived long enough in the world and well enough to know mankind and see society as from a height; who, besides, has tasted many books and acquired many knowledges, so that he sees the scope and tendency of all the more important disciplines; and who, knowing both man and knowledge so well, will know how to bring them into closer and closer partnership with one another-making knowledge in the classroom and the laboratory adapt itself to man's real wants

and not to the needs of "teaching" or some other unreality, and making society see that the college, at last, is doing altogether vital things, and will surely enrich every life that is entrusted to it for a time.

That is the great task of the new college president. It involves minor tasks. First, faculties must be reorganized, the system of under-dog and upper-dog be done away with, all teachers made free and encouraged to do their most as against the present condemnation of many to do their least. Men, moreover, must be freed, not from those mean sorrows of an unfair lot alone, but from the mean cares of poverty. Then, the highest potential efficiency having thus been obtained, the president must see that it is made actual efficiency, and kept so; must get service, service, from his teachers, keeping each man, by appreciation and suggestion, at the height of his achievement, and each department, each group of allied departments, all departments together, at careful, patient team-work. Then, too, he must keep all teachers well aware of the fact that there is a due and difficult relation between teaching and research, and that teaching is not mere instructing but instructing for a purpose, and that not a bread-and-butter purpose but a life purpose. Finally, being absorbed and fascinated himself by this great business of adjusting knowledge to life and helping individuals to the specific knowledge that shall enable them to live best, he will communicate this enthusiasm to his teachers and keep them constantly interested in the great shifting problem, and glad to discuss it endlessly. He will learn to measure his strength and success, in large part, by his ability to bring men to faculty meetings and interest them there in the business of education-the question "How by our scholarship shall we best serve our country and our time?"

And then the faculty; what of them, besides the foregoing? This-that they will no longer look upon themselves as scholars pleasantly endowed, giving a little instruction in return for their endowment. This is virtually their view at present, though most would honestly deny it. They must look upon themselves as public servants. Scholars they still will be, and sounder scholars than before, for the reason that day by day their work will be tested by the high standard of service rendered. Now, their standard is the low one of contribution to science or to truth. Science is not

a divinely determined pattern of things, whose lacking portions we have only to find and fit into their proper places. Truth is not a gold that has no pyrites to mislead dull seekers. Toilers for truth waste an immense amount of effort. The discipline that I know most of, philology, is a great dust-heap of results, ninetenths of which we were better off without, and all piled up in the name of truth. And those who resort there say that there is dust blowing about many scientific fields as well. Let me add, from philological sources, a specific illustration of the waste of our present ways. We will suppose that Mr. Bryce sits. down to read Thucydides. He reads as he would read Burke, though it may be at a slower pace. He knows the words, not as little reminders, each one calling up its English equivalent that he once extracted from a lexicon, but as Greek words, much as Thucydides' contemporaries knew them. Knowing the words, he knows, after due reflection, the sentence. Knowing the sentences, he knows the book. He relishes, as he reads, the Greek idiom, or Greek way of putting the thing -the workings of the general Greek mind and Thucydides' particular mind. Neither he nor any other reader who is acute needs to have those workings classified and defined in an elaborate book inscribed "Greek Syntax." Nor, in reading his Virgil, does he need a metrical handbook at his side. He finds the music of the verse for himself, precisely as he followed for himself the turns of Thucydides' thought. And yet endless manuals of syntax are being turned out, endless metrical manuals, endless manuals of countless other kinds. What shall we conclude? If to-day's statesman and thinker can get from that actor and thinker of old, or that poet, all that he cares for without manuals and manuals and manuals, where does that put the manual-maker? Is it for Mr. Bryce to apologize, that in a busy life he has not time for all their valuable helps over hard places: or for them to tell us what, with these helps, they get from Virgil and Thucydides

that he has missed?

It is a clear case. Mr. Bryce's needs and standards are those of the world, and of colleges as they are to be; the manual-makers are of the colleges of to-day. They maintain themselves because they are in a position of unfair vantage. There was a certain Gratiano, in Venice, whose "reasons were as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall

seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them they are not worth the search." Straight wheat is what the world wants, but to-day, if Gratiano is in a college chair, he can force on it that mixture of his instead. He can find a certain sort of student who will take it, and then, by means of entrance examinations, can force the schools to take that student for their teacher of literature. But when the scholar becomes a public servant, instead of a person endowed and privileged and largely irresponsible, we shall see in the wheat-market wheat.

And then the trustees. Are they always remembering that to be a trustee is to administer something more than a financial trust? Ought not a trustee either to make himself an expert in this matter of making the college serve mankind, or resign in favor of someone else who has the time and will to do it? Today, many boards of trustees merely watch the purse and leave the college to the president. If he is inefficient-that is, below the present low standard of efficiency-they endure it as long as they can and then do the best that they can in a situation that they do not understand. The day will come when they will know what a president should do, and choose the man who is most likely to do that precise thing, and make very sure that he does do it; giving him the freest possible hand so long as he proves himself master of the situation, removing him instantly when he fails.

Again, ought not the handling of the purse to be more intelligent? Do they know, in the case of the salaries they pay, whether they are giving dollars enough to get the dollars' full worth? Men are starving their bodies, starving their souls, starving the souls of wife and children, in many of the colleges. Do trustees find it good policy to treat employees so in their own businesss?

I feel, as I close, how sad a showing this is. But it is just; not alone exactly true of the institutions that I know well, but essentially true of most others in the land. The nation has not been devoting its best thought and energy to its colleges, and they have fallen far behind. The nation must give thought to them, or they will grow even worse. That they are growing worse, all who study them with keenness admit. Here, as elsewhere, there is need of public discussion, continued until public opinion becomes enlightened and sternly exacting.

I'

F YOU have a pain you are conscious of it. If you are not conscious of it, the pain does not exist. The sense of of it may be there still; but pain itself is an affair of consciousness and nothing else.

In trying to find out what pain means and how to treat it, it is necessary to keep this in mind. We tend to act all the time as if the pain we felt were the bottom fact; whereas, in reality, it is only a sort of indicator. The bottom fact lies deeper. If a man have ether given him, he no longer has any pain; yet the conditions that gave rise to the pain have not changed at all. Pain is like a danger signal on a railroad. It is put there for the purpose of attracting attention. There are two ways of treating the signal. One is to cover it up-to act as if it were not there. The other is to clear the track. You can treat pain in the same way. You can crowd it under with drugs so that you will not be aware of it, or you may try to set right whatever the indicator told you was wrong.

When a man is trying to get rid of a pain, he always ought to ask himself whether he is striking simply at the pain itself or whether he is getting at the underlying cause. There are times when it is perfectly right to aim at the pain. It may be intense—the kind that drives everything else out of your mind, makes thinking impossible; and the cause may be too deep to get at quickly. Perhaps some important work must be carried through; it may be essential for a man to stick to his job a little longer. In a case like that no one could blame him for giving the knock-out to his pain sense.

He does this, however, at his peril. He ought to realize the fact. From that moment on he has assumed absolute responsibility for the conditions, whatever they were, that gave rise to the pain. When the pain is not present any longer itself to remind him that something is wrong, he is in danger of forgetting it, for he has nothing but his memory and his will-power to depend upon. The danger signal was set

and he has deliberately run by it. He may be able to take his train a little farther, but the track has not been repaired, and if nobody keeps watch of things, there will be a smash-up.

A headache-powder does not hit the cause of the headache any more than a laxative hits the cause of constipation or a spoonful of pepsin the cause of indigestion. They cut out the symptoms, but the root of the trouble is still untouched. And it is a root, too, that will keep on sprouting.

It is a theory of biologists that pain-sense was the earliest development of conscious life. Sensation first came to some primitive invertebrate in sharp, stinging flashes-sense messages that had a positive effect upon its actions-"Stop, quick!" signs for contraction, or rigidity, or flight. An animal that responded to these flashes had a better chance of living and producing offspring than one that did not. It was for the good of the race that pain entered into its experience. Pain has never been meaningless. It always points somewhere, tells something; and if we dare put the extinguisher on it, we must not fool ourselves into thinking that it is the end of the matter.

As a general thing, the pain points pretty directly to its cause. You can usually put your finger on the root of the trouble. When you have a burnt hand, you don't need to ask where the pain comes from nor what it means. But this does not always hold. It occasionally happens that the relation between the pain and the cause is complex and hard to trace. "Reflex irritation," physiologists call it. A headache usually belongs to this class. It may be due to any one of a hundred causes, and the one it is finally followed back to may have seemed the most improbable of all.

I have met with cases in which chronic headache of the most aggravated type was caused by flat feet. Yet there was no sign of pain in the feet themselves, and the person had never suspected that there was any connection