Within itself the University is very democratic. The lines of social cleavage are rather vertical than horizontal. There is a thorough atmosphere of personal independence. While peculiarities and eccentricities are discouraged, yet originality—so long as it does not annoy—is at a premium, and individuality is sacred to an extent best known to Englishmen. The diversity of interests and the variety of pursuits in which Oxford men are daily engaged cover almost as wide a range as the catalogue of individual tastes. With all this diversity of taste and pursuit, the students within the University commonwealth are alike in this, that, whether from noble, aristocratic, or middle-class families, they generally represent achievement and ambition—and _most_ of them regard their University course as a training for active political, professional, literary, or social life. Oxford and Cambridge claim pre-eminently to fit the men, who by reason of birth or merit succeed to the leading places in British administration and thought, for the high places which they are to fill. As Wellington gave credit for the victory of Waterloo to the ‘playing-fields of Eton’, so England gives credit for innumerable triumphs, military, civil, and political, for achievements, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the playing-fields and the river, the lecture-rooms and the firesides of Oxford. The University boasts that it trains men to live lives both of achievement and of enjoyment, to meet exigencies and emergencies as they arise—to be not only men but gentlemen. Oxford and Cambridge degrees are accepted in England as educational hall-marks. [Sidenote: Social.] Clubs and cliques and social discriminations, of course, exist, but they are little paraded. One’s social relations and activities are little known outside the circle to which they appertain. There is a rare freedom from ‘’Varsity Politics’. Athletic professionalism is an absent quantity. Oxford neither knows nor understands the spirit of the German student _Verbindung_ or of the American ‘College Fraternity’. In fact many phases of the ‘fraternizing’ spirit seem lacking in Oxford life. The nearest approach to the ‘Class organization’ or organization by Departments which influences University life in America, is the predominance of the College in Oxford life. Clear lines between ‘Senior’, ‘Junior,’ ‘Sophomore,’ and ‘Freshmen’ are not drawn; there are no Class organizations and Class activities—such, for instance, as football matches, cane-rushes, editing the College Annual, and the ‘Junior Prom.’ There is some natural separation but no artificial cleavage between students of different years. The relations between a ‘Fresher’ and a ‘Second year’ or ‘Third year’ man, for instance, are subject to certain conventions and formalities of introduction which Oxford emphasizes only in their practice, but, beyond that, social relations are only limited by one’s own personality. [Sidenote: Conservatism.]