iculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and more
cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this side of
the Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping, or in
Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion, or on
the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever on Human
Behaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild Animals.
Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things. This cuts
him off from a great deal of the larger culture of our side of the
Atlantic. "What are you studying this year?" I once asked a fourth year
student at one of our great colleges. "I am electing Salesmanship and
Religion," he answered. Here was a young man whose training was destined
inevitably to turn him into a moral business man: either that or
nothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is not taught and Religion takes the
feeble form of the New Testament. The more one looks at these things the
more amazing it becomes that Oxford can produce any results at all.

The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position
occupied at Oxford by the professors' lectures. In the colleges of
Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really
necessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again I
have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got
as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of
athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life. At
Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may even
be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to have
anything much to do with the development of the student's mind. "The
lectures here," said a Canadian student to me, "are punk." I appealed to
another student to know if this was so. "I don't know whether I'd call
them exactly punk," he answered, "but they're certainly rotten." Other
judgments were that the lectures were of no importance: that nobody took
them: that they don't matter: that you can take them if you like: that
they do you no harm.

It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on their
lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if not, the
professor's feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests his brain
until in some later year the students call for his lectures. There are
men at Oxfor