same is true in France, England, and Italy. It is the public that protects the professor in Europe. The public alone can protect the professor in America. The proof of this is that any individual learned man in America who becomes known to the public through his books or his discoveries, or his activity in any field of learning or research, is comparatively safe from the guillotine. His position has at least some security, his word some authority. This man has educated the public that trusts him, and he can now protect his more defenseless brethren, if he will. I have often wondered, when listening to the sickening tale of some brutality done by a practical college president to a young instructor, how it had been possible for the eminent men upon the faculty to sit through the operation without a protest. A word from any one of them would have stopped the sacrifice, and protected learning from the oppressor. But no, these eminent men harbored ethical conceptions which kept them from interfering with the practical running of the college. Merciful heavens! who is to run a college if not learned men? Our colleges have been handled by men whose ideals were as remote from scholarship as the ideals of the New York theatrical managers are remote from poetry. In the meanwhile, the scholars have been dumb and reticent. At the back of all these phenomena we have, as I have said, the general atmospheric ignorance of the great public in America. We are so used to this public, so immersed in it, so much a part of it ourselves, that we are hardly able to gain any conception of what that atmospheric ignorance is like. I will give an illustration which would perhaps never have occurred to my mind except through the accident of actual experience. If you desire a clue to the American in the matter of the higher education, you may find one in becoming a school trustee in any country district where the children taught are the children of farmers. The contract with any country school-teacher provides that he shall teach for so many weeks, upon such and such conditions. Now let us suppose a teacher of genius to obtain the post. He not only teaches admirably, but he institutes school gardens for the children; he takes long walks with the boys, and gives them the rudiments of geology. He is in himself an uplifting moral influence, and introduces the children into a whole new world of idea and of feeling. The parents are pleased. I will not say that they are grateful; but they are not ungrateful. It is true that they secretly believe all this botany and moral influence to be rubbish; but they tolerate it. Now, let us suppose that before the year is out the teacher falls sick, and loses two weeks of school time through absence. You will find that the trustees insist upon his making up this lost time; the contract calls for it. This seems like a mean and petty exaction for these parents to impose upon a saint who