The small university debating clubs are the Russell, the Palmerston, the Canning, and the Chatham, each of which stands for some special stripe of political thought, and each of which has a special color which--sure sign of the pride of exclusiveness--it wears in hatbands. The clubs meet periodically--often weekly--in the rooms of members. Sometimes a paper is read which is followed by an informal discussion; but the usual exercise is a formal debate. Time was when the best debates came off at the Union, and writers of leading articles in London papers even now look to it as a political weather-vane. The debates there are still earnest and sometimes brilliant, and to have presided over them is a distinction of value in after life; but as far as I could gather, their prestige is falling before the smaller debating clubs. The main interest at the Union appeared to centre in the interpellation of the president, which is carried on much as in the House of Commons, though with this difference, that, following the immemorial custom, it is turned into ragging. When this is over, the major part of the audience clears out to the smoking and reading rooms. In the smaller clubs the exercises are not only serious, but--in spite of the preliminary ragging, which no function at Oxford may flourish without--they are taken seriously. The clubs really include the best forensic ability of Oxford. At the end of each year they give dinners, at which new and old members gather, while some prominent politician from Westminster holds forth on the question of the hour. In a word, these clubs, collectively, are what the Union once was--the training school of British statesmen. The university social clubs are of a newness that shocks even an American; but it would not be quite just to account for the fact by regarding them as mere offshoots, like the debating clubs, of a parent Union. Until the nineteenth century, there really was no university at Oxford, at least in modern times. The colleges were quite independent of one another socially and in athletics, and each of them provided all the necessary instruction for its members. The social clubs which now admit members from the university at large began life as wine clubs of separate colleges, and even to-day the influence of the parent college is apt to predominate. The noteworthy fact is that in proportion as the social prestige of the Union has declined, these college wine clubs, like the small debating clubs, have gained character and prestige.