Smithson Junior (as the homily ends and the real business is about to start): "Please, sir, is it sterilized?"
Commerce at the Universities
Punch viewed the multiplication of universities with acquiescence rather than enthusiasm. He had been, as we have seen, a severe critic of academic obstructives at Oxford and Cambridge, but he was entirely opposed to their reconstruction on purely utilitarian lines. In his view there was room for universities of different types; to standardize them would be a blunder, almost a crime. So when a school of brewing was established at Birmingham, he gave a forecast of Oxford in the year 2000 a.d., completely commercialized, with the Ashmolean transformed into the University Co-operative Stores. In 1901 a daily paper had said that, compared with the University of Birmingham, Oxford must seem hopelessly out of date. Punch rejoined in a masque in which the claims of the old and new universities are reviewed and contrasted, but the last word is left to the Oxford chorus:—
Out of date and useless we,
Commerce is beyond our ken—
Let us thank the gods we be
Twenty Oxford men.
Mr. Andrew Carnegie's gift of £2,000,000 to the Scottish universities in the same year is eulogized in the cartoon of "The Macmillion," but the prose comment, in which the extensions of the scheme are foreshadowed, is not lacking in an element of irony.
Mr. Rhodes's historic bequest to Oxford is discussed in an imaginary letter from a Cambridge to an Oxford don. The Cambridge don ridicules the notion that it would revolutionize Oxford, convert it into the University of the Empire, or transform the hoary old home of lost causes into a realization of the ideals of young barbarians from the bounding prairie or of the pipe-sucking beer-nurtured students of the Fatherland. The new-comers would find their level and, if really decent fellows, would do well enough. "Oxford will still remain Oxford, and that, at any rate, we may be thankful for." Nor did the Cambridge man anticipate any serious change in inter-'Varsity relations:—