The first answer seems to be that the very stones of Oxford are charged with her traditions.  During the War the colleges have been full of officer-cadets; they were men of all ranks of life and of every kind of education; they came from all parts of the world; they were of all ages, from eighteen to forty, at least.  Their training was a strenuous one by strict rule, a complete contrast to the free and easy life of academic Oxford.  Yet in their few months of residence, most of them became imbued with the college spirit; they considered themselves members of the place they lived in; they tried to do most of the things undergraduates do.  If Oxford thus, to some extent, moulded to her pattern men who, welcome as they were, were only accidental, surely the college spirit may be trusted to assimilate whatever material the changed conditions of social or of political life furnish to it.  The hope of many at Oxford is that there will be a great development and a great change.  On one side it will be good if Oxford becomes to a much greater extent not only an all-British, but also a world university; on another side it is to be hoped that far more than ever before men of all classes in England will come to Oxford.  It would surprise many of the University’s critics to find how much had already been done in these directions.  It is certainly not true now that, as one of Oxford’s critics wrote,

    “Too long, too long men saw thee sit apart
     From all the living pulses of the hour.”

On the contrary, the Oxford of the last generation has already become markedly more cosmopolitan, and she has been drawing to her an ever-increasing number of able men of every class.

But these developments, thus begun, will certainly be carried much further in the near future.  Oxford will be altered.  Some of her customs will be changed.  This may well issue in great and lasting good, though there will be loss as well as gain.  But an Oxford man may be pardoned if he believes and hopes that his university will remain the university he has loved.  There is a saying current in Oxford about Oxford men, which may not be out of place here—­“If you meet a stranger, and if after a time you say to him, ’I think you were at Oxford,’ he accepts it, as a matter of course, and is pleased.  If you do the same to a Cambridge man, he indignantly replies, ‘How do you know that?’” No doubt the saying is turned the other way round at Cambridge, and no doubt it is equally true and equally false of both universities, i.e. it is positively true and negatively false, like so many other statements.  But it is positively true; the Oxford man is proud of having been at Oxford; the past and the present alike, his political and his religious beliefs, his traditions and his social surroundings, all endear Oxford to him.  May it ever be so.

RADCLIFFE SQUARE

“Like to a queen in pride of place, she wears
The splendour of a crown in Radcliffe’s dome.” 
L. Johnson.