The Memoir will show that in Dilke's first year a Hall man was Senior Wrangler, and that the boat started head of the river. Such things do not happen without a cause; and the college at this moment numbered on its staff some of the most notable figures in the University. The Vice-Master, Ben Latham, for thirty-five years connected with the Hall, was of those men whose reputation scarcely reaches the outside world; but he had found the college weak, he had made it strong, and he was one of the institutions of Cambridge. Among the junior Fellows were Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. Both were profound believers in hard tonic discipline of mind and body, inculcating their belief by doctrine and example; and both, with great diversity of gifts, had the rough strong directness of intellectual attack which Cambridge, then perhaps more than at any other time, set in contrast to the subtleties of Oxford culture. Leslie Stephen in particular, who had been a tutor and who was still a clerical Fellow, made it his business to meet undergraduates on their own ground. Hard work and hard bodily exercise--but, above all, hard bodily exercise--made up the gospel which he preached by example. No one ever did more to develop the cult of athletics, and there is no doubt that he thought these ideals the best antidote to drunkenness and other vices, which were far more rife in the University of that day than of this. Both he and Fawcett were strenuous Radicals, and contact with them was well fitted to infuse fresh vitality into the political beliefs which Charles Dilke had assumed by inheritance from his grandfather. In these ways of thought he met them on ground already familiar and attractive to him. His introduction to Fawcett was at the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Association, which he attended at Cambridge in the first week of his first term. "I am one of the few people who really enjoy statistics," he said, long years after this, in a presidential address to the Statistical Society. But it was early at nineteen to develop this exceptional taste. In another domain of modern thought these elder men affected his mind considerably and with a new order of ideas. Old Mr. Dilke seems to have left theology out of his purview altogether; and it was at Cambridge that Charles Dilke first met the current of definitely sceptical thought on religious matters.