But the days of hereditary tradition are over, and Trelawney belongs to an age long past; Oxford now is exposed to an influence compared to which the arbitrary proceedings of a king are feeble. A democratic Parliament with a growing Labour party has far more power to change Oxford than the Stuarts ever had, and even at this moment (1919) a third Royal Commission is beginning to sit. Will it modify, will it-- transform Oxford? The first answer seems to be that the very stones of Oxford are charged with her traditions. During the War the colleges have been full of officer-cadets; they were men of all ranks of life and of every kind of education; they came from all parts of the world; they were of all ages, from eighteen to forty, at least. Their training was a strenuous one by strict rule, a complete contrast to the free and easy life of academic Oxford. Yet in their few months of residence, most of them became imbued with the college spirit; they considered themselves members of the place they lived in; they tried to do most of the things undergraduates do. If Oxford thus, to some extent, moulded to her pattern men who, welcome as they were, were only accidental, surely the college spirit may be trusted to assimilate whatever material the changed conditions of social or of political life furnish to it. The hope of many at Oxford is that there will be a great development and a great change. On one side it will be good if Oxford becomes to a much greater extent not only an all-British, but also a world university; on another side it is to be hoped that far more than ever before men of all classes in England will come to Oxford. It would surprise many of the University's critics to find how much had already been done in these directions. It is certainly not true now that, as one of Oxford's critics wrote, "Too long, too long men saw thee sit apart From all the living pulses of the hour." On the contrary, the Oxford of the last generation has already become markedly more cosmopolitan, and she has been drawing to her an ever- increasing number of able men of every class.