At the present juncture of political forces in America this consideration has a special importance. The success with which we exert our influence upon distant peoples will depend upon what manner of young men we train up to carry it among them. If the graduates of German institutions are prepared to establish their civilization in the imperial colonies, the fact has not yet been shown. The colleges of England have manned the British Empire.
I
THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE
I
One of the familiar sights at Oxford is the American traveler who stops over on his way from Liverpool to London, and, wandering up among the walls of the twenty colleges from the Great Western Station, asks the first undergraduate he meets which building is the university. When an Oxford man is first asked this, he is pretty sure to answer that there isn't any university; but as the answer is taken as a rudeness, he soon finds it more agreeable to direct inquirers to one of the three or four single buildings, scattered hither and yon among the ubiquitous colleges, in which the few functions of the university are performed. A traveler from our middle West, where "universities" often consist of a single building, might easily set forth for London with the firm idea that the Ashmolean Museum or the Bodleian Library is Oxford University.
To the undergraduate the university is an abstract institution that at most examines him two or three times, "ploughs" him, or graduates him. He becomes a member of it by being admitted into one of the colleges. To be sure, he matriculates also as a student of the university; but the ceremony is important mainly as a survival from the historic past, and is memorable to him perhaps because it takes place beneath the beautiful mediæval roof of the Divinity School; perhaps because he receives from the Vice-Chancellor a copy of the university statutes, written in mediæval Latin, which it is to be his chief delight to break. Except when he is in for "schools," as the examinations are called, the university fades beyond his horizon. If he says he is "reading" at Oxford, he has the city in mind. He is more likely to describe himself as "up at" Magdalen, Balliol, or elsewhere. This English idea that a university is a mere multiplication of colleges is so firmly fixed that the very word is defined as "a collection of institutions of learning at a common centre." In the daily life of the undergraduate, in his religious observances, and in regulating his studies, the college is supreme.
To an American the English college is not at first sight a wholly pleasing object. It has walls that one would take to be insurmountable if they were not crowned with shards of bottles mortared into the coping; and it has gates that seem capable of resisting a siege until one notices that they are reinforced by a cheval-de-frise, or a row of bent spikes like those that keep the bears in their dens at the Zoo. Professor Von Holst would certainly regard it as a hybrid between a mediæval cloister and a nursery; and one easily imagines him producing no end of evidence from its history and traditions to show that it is so. Like so many English institutions, its outward and visible signs belong to the manners of forgotten ages, even while it is charged with a vigorous and very modern life. A closer view of it, I hope, will show that in spite of the barnacles of the past that cling to it—and in some measure, too, because of them—it is the expression of a very high ideal of undergraduate convenience and freedom.
II