fashion from one melancholy habitation to
another. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes alone. We
dined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in some way after it
was dead, and there were always soda biscuits on the table. They used
to have a brand of soda biscuits in those days in the Toronto boarding
houses that I have not seen since. They were better than dog biscuits
but with not so much snap. My contemporaries will all remember them.
A great many of the leading barristers and professional men of Toronto
were fed on them.

In the life we led we had practically no opportunities for association
on a large scale, no common rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We never
saw the magazines,--personally I didn't even know the names of them.
The only interchange of ideas we ever got was by going over to the Caer
Howell Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging them there.

I mention these melancholy details not for their own sake but merely to
emphasise the point that when I speak of students' dormitories, and the
larger life which they offer, I speak of what I know.

If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of dormitories
and dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don't think I would
ever have graduated. I'd have been there still. The trouble is that the
universities on our Continent are only just waking up to the idea of
what a university should mean. They were, very largely, instituted and
organised with the idea that a university was a place where young men
were sent to absorb the contents of books and to listen to lectures in
the class rooms. The student was pictured as a pallid creature, burning
what was called the "midnight oil," his wan face bent over his desk. If
you wanted to do something for him you gave him a book: if you wanted to
do something really large on his behalf you gave him a whole basketful
of them. If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to the
college at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two or
more pallid students working themselves to death to get it.

The real thing for the student is the life and environment that
surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the
active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient
of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is
the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live
together and eat togeth