“The wives of the button-cutters are facing that to-night,” said Vida, her voice deepening. “Don’t you see why, Mrs. Guthrie? Through the present danger they seek the children’s greater safety.” “Sit down, Anna,” said Guthrie. “This talk is going to lead to something.” “It shouldn’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Guthrie. “It must not!” She turned to Vida. “The men who take the first steps—they will lose their positions. My husband’s salary is all we have. For a father of a family—it would be criminal. We can live very well as we are, John, as we always have. The Regents have even appointed a committee to see about raising salaries.” “Our despotism is benevolent,” said Clark, “—if we’re submissive enough.” “Our positions are insecure _now_,” said Guthrie. “To hold them some of us have to sacrifice the best that’s in us.” “If it’s that or the children——” said Mrs. Guthrie. “Don’t worry, Anna,” said Guthrie. “If we go into this it will be because we see it will make us more secure, not less.” Mrs. Guthrie went to the children’s table, leaned over Lucy’s chair, and drew the girl’s head against her breast. “What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida. “Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm around her and hugged her. Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only buy the bow and arrow.” III In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie, _à propos_ of a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom. It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist. Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’s _Getting Married_. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken. A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President. Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.