the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the mental process?
Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men whose angularities
have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom Oxford immediately
deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His Oxford reputation does
not seem to bear out either account of him. To regard Lord Milner as a
typical product of Oxford would surely be unfair. It would be to deprive
the educational tradition of Germany of one of its most typical
products. English aristocrats have their faults, but they are not at all
like Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was meant to prove, whether he was a
rich man who lost his exclusiveness, or a poor man who lost his angles,
I am utterly unable to conceive.

There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps be
mentioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent persons
is, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word is
understood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There are
no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can talk
about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what the
modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the Earl in
the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert, whose
angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by an old
English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added--


"A third adorer had the girl,
A man of lowly station;
A miserable grovelling Earl
Besought her approbation."