work, and his organising ability and his hope of promotion to a soap
factory. But with that his mind is exhausted. The student of genius
merely means to him a student who gives no trouble, who passes all
his "tests," and is present at all his "recitations." Such a student
also, if he can be trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, will
undoubtedly "make good." But beyond that the professor does not think
of him. The everlasting principle of equality has inserted itself in
a place where it has no right to be, and where inequality is the
breath of life.

American or Canadian college trustees would be horrified at the
notion of professors who apparently do no work, give few or no
lectures and draw their pay merely for existing. Yet these are
really the only kind of professors worth having,--I mean, men who
can be trusted with a vague general mission in life,
with a salary guaranteed at least till their death, and a sphere
of duties entrusted solely to their own consciences and the promptings
of their own desires. Such men are rare, but a single one of them,
when found, is worth ten "executives" and a dozen "organisers."

The excellence of Oxford, then, as I see it, lies in the peculiar
vagueness of the organisation of its work. It starts from the
assumption that the professor is a really learned man whose sole
interest lies in his own sphere: and that a student, or at least the
only student with whom the university cares to reckon seriously, is a
young man who desires to know. This is an ancient mediaeval attitude
long since buried in more up-to-date places under successive strata
of compulsory education, state teaching, the democratisation of
knowledge and the substitution of the shadow for the substance, and
the casket for the gem. No doubt, in newer places the thing has got