An acute critic tells me that Americans hearing such deprecatory words as these from an Englishman about his country’s institutions would say that this is precisely an instance of what an American means by the Oxford manner. Americans whose attitude towards their own country seems to be that of a lover to his lady or a child to its mother, cannot――he says――understand how Englishmen can be critical of their own country, and yet love her. Well, the Englishman’s attitude to his country is that of a man to himself; and the way he runs her down is rather a part of that special English bone-deep self-consciousness of which I have been speaking. Englishmen (the speaker amongst them) love their Country as much as the French love France, and the Americans America; but she is so much a part of us that to speak well of her is like speaking well of ourselves, which we have been brought up to regard as impossible. When Americans hear Englishmen speaking critically of their own country I think they should note it for a sign of complete identification with their country rather than of detachment from it. But to return to English Universities: They have, on the whole, a broadening influence on the material which comes to them so set and narrow. They do a little to discover for their children that there are many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world. They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the War is over they will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven forefend that we should see vanish all that is old, all that has as it were the virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is a beauty in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. But what is hateful in age is its lack of understanding and of sympathy; in a word――its intolerance. Let us hope this wind of change may sweep out and sweeten the old places of my country, sweep away the cobwebs and the dust, our narrow ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those who hate intolerance dare not be intolerant with the foibles of age; they should rather see them as comic, and gently laugh them out. The educated Briton may be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at bottom grit is, I fancy, what Americans at any rate appreciate more than anything. If the motto of my old Oxford College: “Manners makyth man,” were true, I should often be sorry for the Briton. But his manners don’t make him, they mar him. His goods are all absent from the shop window; he is not a man of the world in the wider meaning of that expression. And there is, of course, a particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, who does his best, unconsciously, to take the bloom off his country wherever he goes. Selfish, coarse-fibred, loud-voiced――the sort which thanks God he is a Briton――I suppose because nobody else will do it for him!