The Anatomy of Snobbery

Professor Rogers has now carefully explained his advice to young men of Technology that they train themselves to be snobs. He would have them become snobs divested of all snobbery. They are to cultivate self-respect, but equally are they to show respect for the rights and the human feelings of others. This is a dual feat which no snob of past history has ever accomplished, or tried to accomplish. But Professor Roger's snob of the future should be able to compass it, because he is to be a snob in an altogether new sense of the word. He is bound to remember the superior advantages of training given him in college, and he is to turn these to superior account in the development of "trained, organized, fastidious, discriminating leadership," yet he is to do this without arrogance, without self-conceit, in short, without snobbery. He is to court nobility, but never to forget, as snobs always used to forget, that noblesse oblige.

This is precisely what we took Professor Rogers to mean in our editorial defense of his speech published on Monday. It was impossible that a man of his ability as a teacher, and of his true magnanimity in conduct, toward others, could have any other ultimate meaning. Yet we confess that we greatly prefer the terms in which he has now expressed himself. Gone are the phrases which served to remind one, even though unintentionally, of the code of that "great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On" portrayed in "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Gone is the emphasis upon trifles--passable enough in the informal surroundings within which the original speech was delivered--but necessarily out of balance when reported in print in the newspapers. In their stead, is a larger and clearer statement of much value and true point for these times. Boston Evening Transcript.