on a large scale, no common rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We
never saw the magazines,--personally I didn't even know the names
of them. The only interchange of ideas we ever got was by going
over to the Caer Howell Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging
them there.

I mention these melancholy details not for their own sake but merely
to emphasise the point that when I speak of students' dormitories,
and the larger life which they offer, I speak of what I know.

If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of
dormitories and dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don't
think I would ever have graduated. I'd have been there still. The
trouble is that the universities on our Continent are only just
waking up to the idea of what a university should mean. They were,
very largely, instituted and organised with the idea that a
university was a place where young men were sent to absorb the
contents of books and to listen to lectures in the class rooms. The
student was pictured as a pallid creature, burning what was called
the "midnight oil," his wan face bent over his desk. If you wanted to
do something for him you gave him a book: if you wanted to do
something really large on his behalf you gave him a whole basketful
of them. If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to the
college at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two
or more pallid students working themselves to death to get it.

The real thing for the student is the life and environment that
surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by
the active operation of his own intellect and not as the
passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what