"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.
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