Make no mistake! The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees of Philadelphia will never crucify you while you deal in theological pleasantries. Has it occurred to you that their kindness is a return for your services in helping them to divert attention from real, pressing worldly injustice to heavenly bliss? Turn your oratorical brilliancy for a moment against low wages, over-work, unemployment, monopoly and special privilege.
Before you leave Philadelphia will you speak these truths?
We pray “Thy Kingdom come on earth.” While men are underpaid, while women are overworked, while children grow up in squalor, while exploitation and social injustice remain, the Kingdom of God never can come on earth and never will.
It was after the publication of this blasphemy that our interlocking trustees decided that Scott Nearing must go. They knew that the young professor’s colleagues were solidly behind him, and they also knew that there had been no room in Logan Hall big enough to hold the crowds of students who thronged to his lectures. So they must be cunning, and wait until both instructors and students had scattered to the country, and there was no longer a chance of organized action. On June 14 they voted not to reappoint Nearing, and the provost wrote him a brief note advising him of this action; at the same time the trustees voted privately that they would make no statement on the subject—regular gum-shoe work, such as they were accustomed to use when they put a bill through their city council, stealing the socks off the feet of William Penn’s statue!
But some of the alumni got together and formed a committee, and wrote letters to all the trustees, and also wrote letters to the press, and before long the newspaper reporters were dogging the trustees, trying to “smoke them out.” “Why should we make an explanation of what we choose to do as trustees?” demanded Mr. J. Levering Jones, trust company and street railway company and insurance company director and Republican machine politician. “The University of Pennsylvania is not a public institution.” And then the reporters got after the pious Senator Pepper, who also denied that the university was a public institution. The people of the state were putting up a million dollars a year for it—they are now putting up a million and a half; but they have no say as to how this million dollars is spent! The professors of the university were in the same position as Senator Pepper’s secretary, so this pious man declared; he had the same right to discharge them, and they had no more right to demand an explanation. Nor were the trustees obliged to pay attention to the provisions of the Wharton trust deed—in spite of the indignant protests of Mr. Morris, one of the trustees of the Wharton estate.