Let us turn to another class, which is great numerically and should be great in influence, and which we shall consider more particularly in a later chapter. The average pay of teachers throughout the country districts of the Middle Atlantic States, including that manufactory of millionaires, Pennsylvania, is $870 a year; in the villages it is $1244. Let us bear in mind the bleak budget of $1900 of the street railway men and remember also that the conductor of a railway freight train gets about $3750 a year and the engineer about $4700. What are the opportunities and prospects for a man of scholarly tastes, attainments, and pursuits? The average pay of over eleven thousand members of college faculties is less than $3000 a year, and, although in rare[Pg 52] institutions a comparatively few men may attain to $8000 or $10,000, a man is fortunate indeed who gets from $5000 to $7000. How are these men to adjust themselves? Most of them do do extra work to earn money as, in forty per cent of the cases, do the wives also. In the days before the “high standard” a vacation was a vacation, a period in which the professor, fagged from nine months’ drilling of immature minds, could rest and catch up on his professional reading, get fresh points of view and prepare for the next nine months’ bout with inquiring or resisting youth. Now, we read, one-third of the faculty could take no vacation at all; 40 per cent took less than two weeks, and 60 per cent less than four weeks; yet yesterday the men in the building trades in New York laid down their demand for every Saturday off on full pay, equivalent to six and a half weeks’ vacation from purely physical work requiring practically no mental preparation or recuperation. Is it any wonder that a professor at Berkeley on $3000 a year goes into business at $20,000 a year, that a professor from an Eastern university on about $6000 a year becomes president of a business company with $75,000 a year drawing account, and that another turns from teaching history to writing advertisements, to mention the three who occur first to me?