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.
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