No, the self-constituted élite among Americans at Oxford-if there be one is not ordinarily made up of Rhodes Scholars. It is much more likely to comprise young men who go over from our great universities for a "cultural year," with their own money, their own special interests, and with responsibilities to themselves alone. If some of these feel the Rhodes Scholars to hold aloof, they should consider whether the explanation may not lie in the cares that attend those whose vistas are closed by the Honour Schools and the examinations for research. degrees. The first American Rhodes Scholars returned in the summer of 1907, which will soon be just twenty years ago. The average age of the returned Scholars is now about thirty-five. None can be as old as fifty; only a bare handful have reached forty-five. We shall not long be able to plead youth in extenuation when gentlemen from New Jersey ask why we have not done the great things they desiderate. I believe we shall not need to do so. If it does not appear necessary to reserve any great number of places in the Hall of Fame for living Rhodes Scholars, the pages of Who's Who are sufficiently studded with them. But there are grounds more relevant than this for objecting to Mr. Andrews' picture of the returned Rhodes Scholar as a nincompoop and wastrel. Certain broad characteristics of the group as a whole are quite conspicuous. One is the professions in which they are found. If you desire most easily to find the Rhodes Scholars in any town or city, you will get the best results by directing your inquiry toward the hard-working and less obviously remunerative occupations. You will find a surprising number of preachers and missionaries, and still more teachers; you will find doctors and lawyers in great abundance and a conspicuous number who are making their living by their pens; but you will find rather few pure "business men," brokers, manufacturers, bond-salesmen, or bankers. And when you find. one of these last, you will be strangely likely to find-as in the case of the late W. W. Thayer— that he is devoting an absurd proportion of his time and strength to public-spirited and unremunerative enterprises. Some of the men in all the callings I have mentioned have already achieved what may be termed eminence; some have achieved what may be called wealth. But the special point to which I would invite the attention of Mr. Andrews or other inquirers is that, wherever you find him, the ordinary Rhodes Scholar will be found rather particularly hard at work at something which rather particularly needs to be done. Furthermore, with a curious frequency, the ordinary Rhodes Scholar will be found still at work at the special job for which he fitted himself at Oxford. The man who read medicine is a doctor, the man who read law a lawyer, the man who read classics-in a huge proportion of the examples-a classicist still. And the fundamental capital they work with is what they laid up in their three years at Oxford. Surely this continuity implies some settled purpose, hard to reconcile with the current picture of the Oxford Rhodes Scholar leading a butterfly existence along the primrose path or giving his days and his nights to ostracizing and being ostracized. One other single thing craves to be said. The facile assumption prevails in many quarters that the Committees of Selection who give out Rhodes Scholarships thereby endow a more or less undeserving band of young Americans with a special privilege of great intrinsic value, giving them a short cut to glory, helping them to an unfair advantage over their doubtless more deserving associates. The idea is totally fallacious. The Rhodes Scholarship in itself is not necessarily an advantage at all; in more cases than not it is perhaps an actual detriment as far as a man's immediate future is concerned. Consider the circumstances. Most Rhodes Scholars are poor; most of them are without influence or the backing of important institutions. By going to Oxford they preclude themselves for three years from the possibility of such influence or backing. If they waste their time at Oxford, or fail through incapacity, the venture is a most serious loss. If they distinguish themselves, they still are in no very favorable initial position as compared with what similar intelligence and labor would do for them at home. The man who studies medicine at Johns Hopkins or law at Harvard or literature at Yale-and usually if he could gain a Rhodes Scholarship he could gain a scholarship at one of those places-will in most cases start his professional career ahead of where he could have been by holding a Rhodes Scholarship. This is less true now than twenty years ago, but it is still true. Only for the man capable of taking a long view and willing to build up a broad background at some cost in immediate results is the Rhodes Scholarship a boon at all. This all the Committees of Selection know and emphasize. The really gratifying success of the Scholarships is due, in very large degree, to the devotion and intelligence that these committees, composed mainly of old Rhodes Scholars, bestow on their gratuitous and invidious task of selecting the magnanimous, solidly-based rather than the merely flashy or selfish candidate. We do not, in Lowell's words, ask to be sprinkled with rose-water. Prodigy is the last word to apply to a typical Rhodes Scholar, either in scorn or earnest. Prodigies are specifically barred by the terms of Mr. Rhodes's will, which requires his committees to find men with balanced capacities such as no prodigy since Leonardo da Vinci ever had. We do not need or deserve rose-water. What we need perhaps is that one of our poets write an adaptation in our behalf of Kipling's appeal for the British regular. "We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But here, if our bard had his mind upon Mr. O. B. Andrews, Jr., he would in conscience have to pause, for the ordinary and unprodigious Rhodes Scholar as I have known him does not resemble the portrait Mr. Andrews has sketched of himself in the article under review. NOTE. The two sketches of Oxford life which follow seem to the Editor rather pertinent answers to the question, What do Rhodes Scholars get from Oxford? They are quite innocent of controversial purpose and were written, as it chances, by an Easterner and a Westerner who happen to have been at Oxford during the same period. By MORRISON C. BOYD, Pennsylvania and Oriel, '14. T HE respect that tourist and student feel for Oxford Univer sity cannot be entirely explained as due to her venerable age, or the beauty of some of her buildings, or even to the fame of her graduates. There is the feeling that at the very time she is engaged in the stern task of training her sons' minds she encourages and enables them to enjoy her sweetness and to grow in her light. When we speak of Oxford we mean its individual colleges. The University is little more than a name. Its duties are few. It conducts all examinations and grants all degrees. It furthermore maintains the Bodleian Library and tells students that they must wear academic gowns on the streets after eight at night and must not carry weapons sive offensiva sive defensiva, except bows and arrows for purposes of sport. Finally the University requires them to wear white ties at examinations and keep out of saloons; if they desire to buy liquor from their college and get drunk in their own rooms in the dormitories, that is their affair. In other respects the student is subject to his college, not to the University. The system much resembles one that would result from establishing Haverford, Gettysburg, Bucknell and other colleges on adjacent plots of land, each with its own president, staff of professors, dormitories, lecture rooms, dining hall, chapel, and athletic teams, and then allowing the University of Pennsylvania to set and mark the examination papers and grant the degrees. An Englishman will speak of himself not as an Oxford University man, but as a Balliol College man, or Magdalen College man. Each college governs itself, and gives whatever instruction it thinks will best enable its students to pass the University examinations. But before we consider the colleges let us see how the University itself, shadowy though it be, is governed. It is governed not by trustees, but by its graduates of three years' standing, i.e., its Masters of Arts. There are two such bodies: one, comprising the resident teaching staff, elects a smaller body of eighteen to initiate legislation, but itself passes *First printed in the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle of the University of Pennsylvania, January, 1926. upon it; and if the legislation is of importance (e.g., the addition of a new course, the dropping of compulsory Greek, the right to grant degrees to women), the second body, consisting of all the M.A.'s, whether resident at Oxford or not-in short, the alumni-must vote upon it. The Chancellor (Honorary President) of the University also is chosen by this second body; it numbers over seven thousand. The Vice-Chancellor (Acting President) is appointed by the Chancellor and serves four years. He is always an Oxford College President, never an outsider. Oxford University is made up of twenty-one independent colleges. As has been previously hinted, each has its own president, teaching staff, dormitories, library, dining hall, kitchen, chapel, lecture rooms, athletic fields and teams, literary and debating societies—my college of 125 students had five—, regulations, customs, and college spirit. Each college meets every other in football, soccer, rowing, cricket, lacrosse and tennis. The college spirit thus stimulated is keen without being bitter, and is one of the finest things about Oxford. The difference between the prestige of the various colleges is not sufficient to humiliate any, and every college has things of which it is justly proud. One College alone, Christ Church, furnished nine Prime Ministers (including Canning, Peel, and Gladstone) and eight Governors-General of India to Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Balliol has given of prominent contemporary figures, Asquith, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Lord Grey, and the recent Ambassador at Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. Another expelled Shelley for atheism and later erected him a splendid monument. My own, Oriel, was alma mater to old Sir Walter Raleigh and Cecil Rhodes, and was founded by Edward II in 1326 in fulfilment, so it is written, of a vow made to the Lord while being chased south by the Scotch after his total defeat at Bannockburn. Of course Oxford is fortunate. It "just grew," and its ideal college system is the result of chance. It should be added that every college teaches every ordinary subject. If a college taught only mathematics, e.g., the intellectual life of its students would be cramped. They would not meet men with different interests. If a student wishes to study Chinese, he does not enroll at the one college where there is an instructor in Chinese, but his own college makes arrangements for him to take work under that instructor and pays the latter's college. There is little unnecessary duplication of courses; a University roster committee usually restrains two or more colleges from giving a course |