Untitled Page 29

best be done away with by the free coinage of silver. He did not
endorse Bryan, except as a means to this end, namely, the doing
away with the increasing price of gold. All that he said was
true, so far as I know, but I and all his other colleagues be-
lieved that the crash which would follow a sudden change was more
dangerous than the evil itself. What Dr. Ross did was actuat-
ed not by partisanship for he has never been a Democrat, but by
a sense of duty. He ceased when he saw that the public could not
separate him from the chair he held -- when he realized that
his words compromised his colleagues and the University. Since
that time he has not uttered a word in public that could be con-
sidered as partisan, and the silver question has been settled
for a long time to come by the unexpected growth of gold mining.

But even in this matter he never stepped outside of the recog-
nized rights of a professor. Many eastern professors spoke
in that campaign on the side of gold. Some, President Seth
Low, have been prominent as political leaders. President
Wheeler, as professor at Cornell, was a member of the Democratic
District Committee, without criticism, and he was afterwards one
of the leaders in the Gold Democrat movement which elected Pre-
sident McKinley.

The real work of a professor is to be judged not by a few
chance speeches but by the things on which he spends his time,
by his class work and his publications. Dr. Ross is the author