receive to-day, in all parts of our country, a living wage; and it is
equally true that society at large is the greatest sufferer because of
its penurious policy in this regard. I should applaud and support every
movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to
the level of those paid in other branches of professional service.
Society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not
as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public
servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at
the public crib. I should approve all honest efforts of school men and
school women toward this much-desired end. But whenever men and women
enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the
virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out
of the Church when, during the Middle Ages, the Church attracted men,
not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but
because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of
wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain
other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards
and tarnished their ideals.

This is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the
accumulation of property. The tremendous strides that our country has
made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type
of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our
respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or
pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope;
or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of
gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is
pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the
common clay must recognize its worth.