Sinclair is content to set forth the basic facts; his book, as it is, is very long; he neglects laboring all of the deductions and implications that flow from his thesis, some of them obvious enough. One of them is this: that the control of the universities by Mr. Babbitt is making it increasingly difficult to induce intelligent and self-respecting young men to embrace the birchman’s career, and that the personnel of the teaching staffs thus tends to decline in competence, steadily and sharply. This accounts, in large measure, for the collapse of the old public influence of the scholar in America; he begins to be derided simply because he is no longer the dignified man that he once was. In certain departments, of no immediate interest to trustees and contributors, a certain show of freedom, of course, still prevails. What is taught in astronomy, or paleontology, or Greek cannot menace the nail manufacturer on the board, and so he does not issue any orders about it, nor does his agent, the university president. But what is taught in economics, or modern history, or “education,” or sociology, or even literature, involves a dealing with ideas that are apt to hit him where he lives, and so he keeps a wary eye upon those departments, and at the slightest show of heresy he takes measures to protect himself. It is in these regions, consequently, that conformity is most comfortable, and that professional character is most lamentably in decay. Even here, to be sure, a few stout-hearted survivors of an earlier day hold out, but they are surely not many, and they will have no successors. The professor of to-morrow, in all departments that have to do with life as men are now living it in the world, will either be a scholastic goose-stepper or he will be out of a job. The screws are tightening every year. In the past the Babbitts have contented themselves with farming out the management of their intellectual brothels to extra-plaint professors, but now they begin to turn to yet more reliable men: army officers, lame-duck politicians, and engineers. The time will come, no doubt, when the president of Columbia will be just as frankly a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company as the head of the Red Cross or the chief vestryman of Trinity Church.