The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud of
what Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for the
universities that they forget the present. There is little or nothing
in England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals,
provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the United
States and Canada. There used to be. But by some strange confusion of
thought the English people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey and
Henry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not realise that the Carnegies
and Rockefellers and the William Macdonalds are the Cardinal Wolseys
of to-day. The University of Chicago was founded upon oil. McGill
University rests largely on a basis of tobacco. In America the world of
commerce and business levies on itself a noble tribute in favour of the
higher learning. In England, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as
that at Bristol, there is little of the sort. The feudal families are
content with what their remote ancestors have done: they do not try to
emulate it in any great degree.
In the long run this must count. Of all the various reforms that are
talked of at Oxford, and of all the imitations of American methods that
are suggested, the only one worth while, to my thinking, is to capture
a few millionaires, give them honorary degrees at a million pounds
sterling apiece, and tell them to imagine that they are Henry the
Eighth. I give Oxford warning that if this is not done the place will
not last another two centuries.
VI. The British and the American Press
THE only paper from which a man can really get the news of the world in
a shape that he can understand is the newspaper of his own "home town."
For me, unless I can have the Montreal Gazette at my breakfast, and the
Montreal Star at my dinner, I don't really know what is happening. In
the same way I have seen a man from the south of Scotland settle down to
read the Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satisfaction: and a man
from Burlington, Vermont, pick up the Burlington Eagle and study
the foreign news in it as the only way of getting at what was really
happening in France and Germany.
The reason is, I suppose, that there are different ways of serving up
the news and we each get used to our own. Some people like the news
fed to them gently: others like it thrown at them in a bombshell: some
prefer it to be made as little of as possible; they want it minimised:
others want the maximum.
This is where the greatest difference lies between the British
newspapers and those of the United States and Canada. With us in America
the great thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader; in
England they get the news and then break it to him as gently as
possible. Hence the big headings, the bold type, and the double columns
of the American paper, and the small headings and the general air of
quiet and respectability of the English Press.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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