ack. Any one
could have told them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would
not brighten Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones
of the old inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought
the boarding houses up to date.

But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. Yet in spite of its
dilapidated buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation,
sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertion
that I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest university
in the world. I am aware that this is an extreme statement and needs
explanation. Oxford is much smaller in numbers, for example, than the
State University of Minnesota, and is much poorer. It has, or had till
yesterday, fewer students than the University of Toronto. To mention
Oxford beside the 26,000 students of Columbia University sounds
ridiculous. In point of money, the 39,000,000 dollar endowment of the
University of Chicago, and the $35,000,000 one of Columbia, and the
$43,000,000 of Harvard seem to leave Oxford nowhere. Yet the peculiar
thing is that it is not nowhere. By some queer process of its own it
seems to get there every time. It was therefore of the very greatest
interest to me, as a profound scholar, to try to investigate just how
this peculiar excellence of Oxford arises.

It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programme
of studies. Indeed, to any one accustomed to the best models of a
university curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and Canada,
the programme of studies is frankly quite laughable. There is
less Applied Science in the place than would be found with us in a
theological college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognise
a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student learns
nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing, electric wiring,
gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American college student
can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on a
kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on
what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed which
stamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the
minds of his parents.

But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur.

This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the
mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in the
Oxford curr