the morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a whole
chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have known
another one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do an
entire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. Or take the case
of my own university. I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill
and saying in his address to the undergraduates at 2.30 P.M., "You
have here a great institution." But how could he have gathered this
information? As far as I know he spent the entire morning with Sir
Andrew Macphail in his house beside the campus, smoking cigarettes. When
I add that he distinctly refused to visit the Palaeontologic Museum,
that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic apparatus, or of our classes
in Domestic Science, his judgment that we had here a great institution
seems a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem it
in some measure, the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by Lord
Milner, "McGill is a noble university": and the rash and indiscreet
expression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL.D. degree,
"McGill has a glorious future."

To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm,
and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford
should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon
a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.

On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make
the following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble
university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest
university in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a great
future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other
place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its
lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who
never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum
is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to
tell it how to teach, and yet,--it gets there. Whether we like it
or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of
thought, which in America as yet we can emulate but not equal.

If anybody doubts this let him go and take a room at the Mitre Hotel
(ten and six for a wainscotted bedroom, period of Charles I) and study
the place for himself.

These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surpris