British universities have passed through three stages, of which, however, the second is not yet wholly displaced by the third. At first, they were training colleges for the clergy, to whom, in the Middle Ages, learning was almost wholly confined. Then, with the renaissance, the idea gained ground that every well-to-do person ought to be educated, though women were supposed to need less education than men. “The education of a gentleman” was given at the universities throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still given at Oxford. For reasons which we considered in Chapter I, this ideal, which was formerly very useful, is now out-of-date; it depended upon aristocracy, and cannot flourish either in a democracy or in an industrial plutocracy. If there is to be an aristocracy, it had better be composed of educated gentlemen; but it is better still to have no aristocracy. I need not argue this question, since it was decided in England by the Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in America by the War of Independence. It is true that we still have in England the forms of aristocracy, but the spirit is that of plutocracy, which is quite a different thing. Snobbery makes successful business men send their sons to Oxford to be turned into “gentlemen”, but the result is to give them a distaste for business, which reduces their children again to comparative poverty and the need of earning a living. The “education of a gentleman” has therefore ceased to be an important part of the life of the nation, and may be ignored in considering the future.