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.

These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising
when one considers the distressing conditions under which the
students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to
go on working in the same old buildings which they have had for
centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed
since the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are
still housed in the old buildings erected in the sixteenth century.
At Christ Church I was shown a kitchen which had been built at the
expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible though it may seem,
they have no other place to cook in than this and are compelled to