be. The Old English University is a
playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a bad
thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if there
is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing class.
I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by men who
do not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by a rich
section of the community, it is certainly very important that that
section should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the sensitive man
on the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, "Playground of the rich," I
can suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford perhaps with
more precision. It is a place for humanising those who might otherwise
be tyrants, or even experts.

To pretend that the aristocrat meets all classes at Oxford is too
ludicrous to be worth discussion. But it may be true that he meets more
different kinds of men than he would meet under a strictly aristocratic
_regime_ of private tutors and small schools. It all comes back to the
fact that the English, if they were resolved to have an aristocracy,
were at least resolved to have a good-natured aristocracy. And it is due
to them to say that almost alone among the peoples of the world, they
have succeeded in getting one. One could almost tolerate the thing, if
it were not for the praise of it. One might endure Oxford, but not the
_Outlook_.

When the poor man at Oxford loses his angles (which means, I suppose,
his independence), he may perhaps, even if his poverty is of that highly
relative type possible at Oxford, gain a certain amount of worldly
advantage from the surrender of those angles. I must confess, however,
that I can imagine nothing nastier than to lose one's angles. It seems
to me that a desire to retain some angles about one's person is a desire
common to all those human beings who do not set their ultimate hopes
upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply our shapes. I
cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and exquisite vileness
which is poisoning and weakening our country than such a phrase as this,
about the desirability of rubbing down the angularities of poor men.
Reduced to permanent and practical human speech, it means nothing
whatever except the corrupting of that first human sense of justice
which is the critic of all human institutions.

It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we