The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education

								

beneficial to mankind. This prime aim of the one, it is true, often
properly becomes a subordinate aim of the other. Professional men may
even be said to offer wares of their own--cures, conversions, court
victories, learning--much as traders do, and to receive in return a kind
of reward. But the business of the lawyer, doctor, preacher, and teacher
never squares itself by equivalent exchange. These men do not give so
much for so much. They give in lump and they get in lump, without
precise balance. The whole notion of bargain is inapplicable in a sphere
where the gains of him who serves and him who is served coincide; and
that is largely the case with the professions. Each of them furnishes
its special opportunity for the use of powers which the possessor takes
delight in exercising. Harvard College pays me for doing what I would
gladly pay it for allowing me to do. No professional man, then, thinks
of giving according to measure. Once engaged, he gives his best, gives
his personal interest, himself. His heart is in his work, and for this
no equivalent is possible; what is accepted is in the nature of a fee,
gratuity, or consideration, which enables him who receives it to
maintain a certain expected mode of life. The real payment is the work
itself, this and the chance to join with other members of the profession
in guiding and enlarging the sphere of its activities.
The idea, sometimes advanced, that the professions might be ennobled by
paying them powerfully, is fantastic. Their great attraction is their
removal from sordid aims. More money should certainly be spent on
several of them. Their members should be better protected against want,
anxiety, neglect, and bad conditions of labor. To do his best work one
needs not merely to live, but to live well. Yet in that increase of
salaries which is urgently needed, care should be used not to allow the
attention of the professional man to be diverted from what is
important,--the outgo of his work,--and become fixed on what is merely
incidental,--his income. When a professor in one of our large
universities, angered by the refusal of the president to raise his
salary on his being called elsewhere, impatiently exclaimed, "Mr.
President, you are banking on the devotion of us teachers, knowing that
we do not willingly leave this place," the president properly replied,
"Certainly, and no college can be managed on any other principle."
Professional men are not so silly as to despise money; but after all, it
is interest in their work, and not the thought of salary, which
predominantly holds them.
Accordingly in this paper I address those only who are drawn to teaching
by the love of it, who regard it as the most vital of the Fine Arts, who
intend to give their lives to mastering its subtleties, and who are
ready to meet some hardships and to put up with moderate fare if they
may win its rich opportunities.
But supposing such a temper, what special qualifications will the work