er, talk and smoke together. Experience shows
that that is how their minds really grow. And they must live together
in a rational and comfortable way. They must eat in a big dining room
or hall, with oak beams across the ceiling, and the stained glass in
the windows, and with a shield or tablet here or there upon the wall,
to remind them between times of the men who went before them and left
a name worthy of the memory of the college. If a student is to get from
his college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with the
life in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university that
fails to give it to him is cheating him.

If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousness
of which I am capable--I would found first a smoking room; then when I
had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after
that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library.
After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire
a professor and get some text books.

This chapter has sounded in the most part like a continuous eulogy
of Oxford with but little in favour of our American colleges. I turn
therefore with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing what is
wrong with Oxford and with the English university system generally, and
the aspect in which our American universities far excell the British.

The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud of
what Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for the
universities that they forget the present. There is little or nothing
in England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals,
provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the United
States and Canada. There used to be. But by some strange confusion of
thought the English people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey and
Henry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not realise that the Carnegies
and Rockefellers and the William Macdonalds are the Cardinal Wolseys
of to-day. The University of Chicago was founded upon oil. McGill
University rests largely on a basis of tobacco. In America the world of
commerce and business levies on itself a noble tribute in favour of the
higher learning. In England, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as
that at Bristol, there is little of the sort. The feudal families are
content with what their remote ancestors have done: they do not try to
emulate it in any grea