In full: "I honor the man who is ready to sink / Half his present repute for the freedom to think, / And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, / Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, / Caring not for that vengeance the mob have in store, / Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower." With a Ph.D. from John Hopkins, Edward W. Bemis taught at Amherst and Vanderbilt before coming, in 1892, to the newly-established University of Chicago. Bemis lectured and wrote prolifically on progressive taxation, the evils of Trusts, labor unions and Socialism, and was a particularly vocal advocate of municipal ownership of utilities. In 1895, University abruptly canceled his teaching contract; the Professor contended that he was removed because his public statements had "aggravated certain business leaders whose support the University wanted", notably the institution's founding benefactor, John D. Rockefeller. From a less prestigious position at a Kansas state college, Bemis so noisily denounced an intrusion on “freedom of thought”, that his dismissal because a national cause célèbre of academic freedom. The eminent Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith had no doubt that Bemis was fired because of his attacks on corrupt local business monopolies: “The university authorities, like many godly and scholarly men in academic positions, took for granted that their devotion to truth accorded them a special license to lie. So they compounded their crime in dismissing Bemis by denying that their action was to appease the traditional monopoly or that it reflected any abridgment of academic freedom…” Bemis later administered effective reforms of politically-corrupt city departments in Cleveland and New York City. But his principal claim to fame remains his early dispute with John D. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago, his view of the momentous issues at stake being poetically described in this quotation.