already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with
Colonel L. S. Amery, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford
are based upon observations extending over fourteen years.

At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the
British university is just as good a basis for reflection and
judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side
of the water. I have known a famous English author to arrive at
Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell,
and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education
in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with
President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious
Study in America. Or take the case of my own university. I remember
Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill and saying in his address to the
undergraduates at 2.30 P.M., "You have here a great institution." But
how could he have gathered this information? As far as I know he
spent the entire morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house beside
the campus, smoking cigarettes. When I add that he distinctly refused
to visit the Palaeontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new
hydraulic apparatus, or of our classes in Domestic Science, his
judgment that we had here a great institution seems a little bit
superficial. 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