on
dress-parade; he did not pose; he was no snob. We loved him because
he was so genuine. He had degrees, too, but they were so obscured by
the man that we forgot them in our contemplation of him. We knew
that they do not make degrees big enough for him. I often wonder
what degrees the colleges would want to confer upon William
Shakespeare if he could come back. Then, too, I often think what a
wonderful letter Abraham Lincoln could and might have written to Mrs.
Bixby, if he had only had a degree. Agassiz may have had degrees,
but he didn't really need them. Like Browning, he was big enough,
even lacking degrees, to be known without the identification of his
other names. If people need degrees they ought to have them,
especially if they can live up to them. Possibly the time may come
when degrees will be given for things done, rather than for things
hoped for; given for at least one stage of the journey accomplished
rather than for merely packing a travelling-bag. If this time ever
comes Thomas A. Edison will bankrupt the alphabet.

In this coil of degrees and the absence of them, I become more and
more confused as to majors and minors. There in college were those
two professors both wearing degrees of the same size. Judged by that
criterion they should have been of equal size and influence. But
they weren't. In the one case you couldn't see the man for the
degree; in the other you couldn't see the degree for the man. Small
wonder that I find myself in such a hopeless muddle. I once thought,
in my innocence, that there was a sort of metric scale in
degrees--that an A.M. was ten times the size of an A.B.; that a Ph.D.
was equal to ten A.M.'s; and that the LL.D. degree could be had only
on the top of Mt. Olympus. But here I am, stumbling about among
folks, and can't tell a Ph.D. from an A.B. I do wish all these
degree chaps would wear tags so that we wayfaring folks could tell
them apart. It would simplify matters if the railway people would
arrange compartments on their trains for these various degrees. The
Ph.D. crowd would certainly feel more comfortable if they could herd
together, so that they need not demean themselves by associating with
mere A.M.'s or the more lowly A.B.'s. We might hope, too, that by
way of diversion they would put their heads together and compound
some prescription by the use of which the world might avert war,
reduce the high cost of living, banish a woman's tears, or sav