Jane Lathrop Stanford Papers

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 believed that the crash which would follow a sudden change was more dangerous than the evil itself. What Dr. Ross did was actuated 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 considered 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 recognized 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 President 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