ce
than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a
rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private
inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them,
just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own
procedure. You may say that at least you guard against ignorance of
the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how
then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject?
This happened in the instance by which I introduced this article, and
it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges? The truth is that the
Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American
custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason.
As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to
childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a
dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.

Next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic
snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system.

There are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they
pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them. Such
persons are born for professional success. Examinations have no
terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or
worldly interests. There are others, not so gifted who nevertheless
rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become
doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation
of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with
advantage. These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the
degree is legitimately instituted. To be sure, the degree is of no
consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him
the personal worth obviously outshines the title. To the second set of
persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy
and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and
were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would
result from the institution.

But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the
most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of
character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a
virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but
fond of truth an