But this bit of favor was quickly lost, when the professor took up the troubles of his colleagues, who found it impossible to exist upon their salaries, with the cost of living going up day by day. My friend had spent ten years preparing himself for university teaching; he had spent eight years teaching at Clark, at Harvard and at Yale, and now he was getting fourteen hundred dollars! He insisted that he and his colleagues should get more; and the secretary was irritated by this agitation. Mr. Stokes comes from a wealthy family himself, but believes that other people should wait for their rewards in heaven. He wrote my friend that college professors should not interfere with matters which are not their own business; also that he had never advised Yale instructors to get married! What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University, a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. So you see, we are literally realizing the sarcastic observation of Professor Spingarn, that there are three sexes in America—men, women and professors. There is only one step more to be taken, and I expect some morning to pick up my paper and read that the president of some great university has announced that, inasmuch as college professors who cannot afford to marry sometimes set bad moral examples for the students, it is now ordained that none but eunuchs need apply for jobs. If this arrangement has proved useful to the ruling classes of Turkey, and for the choir boys of the Vatican, why should it not be given a trial in our plutocratic empire? CHAPTER XXVII THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLACK HAND