dismissing all the men from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar's wives—with persons 'above suspicion.' I always think of you professors as Cæsar's wives."
Cæsar's wives? Oliver's immediate implication, I suppose, was merely that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social vision. Cæsar's wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human infirmities of the democracy,
