ated
to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.

Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to
create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The
atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities;
but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her
universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her
endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in
an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely
to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America?
The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the
negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they
would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but
which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can
give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be
attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English
university life, they would rather forego them altogether.

What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any
book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners
and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a
university course,--manners and rules which are of an essentially
aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is
worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out
of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to
an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else
than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual
should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing
that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or
an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect
of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the
upper classes uppermost.

That there are too many "universities" in America no one--least of all
an educated American--denies; but with the vast distances and immense
population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew
Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those
establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly
classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than
justified