Life — July 26, 1923 — page 29: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Highwayman’s Wife: 11's LUCKY THAT GUY YE STUCK UP HAD SOME DOUGH, JAKE, THE DOCTOR JUST SENT US A BILL FOR FORTY DOLLAR: “HE DID? A N’T HE THE HIGHWAY ROBBE Pedagogy Up-to-Date g OUNG men,” began the Latest Thing in Professors to his new class in any old subject, “young men— and remember that you are not so young as you look—the course of study upon which we are about to embark will not cramp your style in the least. I have become a spe- cialist in this matter, having spent years in investigating the field we are about to enter, but you may bet your hip-flasks that I have no conviction regarding any phase, small or great, of the by-product of erudition before us. “If I had, if I could distinguish between tweedle-dec and tweedle-dum among the recognized authorities on this subject, I should be unworthy to guide you upon a path that leads nowhere. I should be false to the up-to-date school of instruction to which I belong if I stood before you as an exclamation point rather than as an in- terrogation mark. I wish you to realize that, as I increase the diameter of your knowledge, I shall automatically, thank heaven, enlarge the circumference of your ignor- ance. “By strength of will—and I'm sure that my face shows it—I have managed to keep my mind a blank so far as any opinion regarding the basic problems connected with our general topic is concerned. It is my ambition to render your minds during the next few months as blank as mine. If any one of you should feel a temptation to come to a conclusion regarding any old thing, I trust that you will stop, look, listen. You will see and hear me em- ploying my highest faculties—and nothing can be higher than faculties—to convince you that, in the last analysis, there is nothing in anything but a vacuum. “With these, I hope, inspiring words, gentlemen, let us proceed to glance, with not too much solemnity, at the initial steps of our unimportant journey through a bit of cultural territory that only an old fossil—trustee or not trustee—could take seriously. The fact that I’m drawing a salary to put you wise to this subject has nothing to do with the case. The perfect freedom of your individual minds must and shall be preserved. Now, young men, let's go to it as liberty-loving liberals, making a gesture that shall, if we be true to one another, mean nothing!” E. S. Van Zile. “DA, what's the ‘submerged tenth’?” “The husbands of famous women.” NORTHERN LIGHTS comicbooks.com