OXFORD FROM WITHOUT

Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecuted outlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how much persecuted they were.  For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made some extremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect that Oxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too much merely plutocratic playgrounds.  One would have thought that an Anglican Bishop might be allowed to know something about the English University system, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour.  But (as I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be restrained.  The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the Outlook feels that it is his business to restrain it.  The passage has such simple sublimity that I must quote it—­

“Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of the older Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle.  In the first place, the rich men there are not idle.  Some of the rich men are, and so are some of the poor men.  On the whole, the sons of noble and wealthy families keep up the best traditions of academic life.”

So far this seems all very nice.  It is a part of the universal principle on which Englishmen have acted in recent years.  As you will not try to make the best people the most powerful people, persuade yourselves that the most powerful people are the best people.  Mad Frenchmen and Irishmen try to realise the ideal.  To you belongs the nobler (and much easier) task of idealising the real.  First give your Universities entirely into the power of the rich; then let the rich start traditions; and then congratulate yourselves on the fact that the sons of the rich keep up these traditions.  All that is quite simple and jolly.  But then this critic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne of the Outlook, goes on in a way that is really perplexing.  “It is distinctly advantageous,” he says, “that rich and poor—­i. e., young men with a smooth path in life before them, and those who have to hew out a road for themselves—­should be brought into association.  Each class learns a great deal from the other.  On the one side, social conceit and exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition amongst all classes; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are rubbed away.”  Even this I might have swallowed.  But the paragraph concludes with this extraordinary sentence:  “We get the net result in such careers as those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith.”