Cambridge would stand condemned were poets its only product. Fortunately, as some proof of the practical value of an University education, it can point to men like Cromwell, Pitt, and Macaulay, whose strenuous lives have in their several ways left a mark on the nation's history. Though one be not a champion of Cromwell's career, yet his savagery, his duplicity, his canting hypocrisy fade into the background and lose their significance beside the firmness of purpose, the iron determination and the wise policy that made England respected and feared abroad under the rule of the Protector. The beheading of a King weighs little in the scale against the upholding of the dignity of the State; and though a sour Puritanism ruled the land under the great Oliver, at least the guns of a foreign foe were never heard in our estuaries under the Commonwealth, as they were heard after the Restoration. Cambridge gives no sign that she is proud of Oliver, neither does Sidney Sussex, his old college. But if Cambridge be not outwardly proud of Old Noll, she abundantly glories in William Pitt. And rightly, too. None may calculate how the equation stands: how greatly his natural parts or to what extent his seven years of University education contributed to his brilliant career; but for one of her sons to have attained the dignity of Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three years of age, to have been Prime Minister at twenty-five, the political dictator of Europe and the saviour of his country, is a triumph beyond anything they can show on the Isis. The Pitt Press, the Pitt Scholarship, the Pitt Club, all echo the fame of his astonishing genius. XXIV