There are
no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can talk
about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what the
modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the Earl in
the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert, whose
angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by an old
English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added--
"A third adorer had the girl,
A man of lowly station;
A miserable grovelling Earl
Besought her approbation."
Perhaps, indeed, some allusion to our University system, and to the
universal clash in it of all the classes of the community, may be found
in the verse a little farther on, which says--
"He'd had, it happily befell,
A decent education;
His views would have befitted well
A far superior station."
Possibly there was as simple a chasm between Lord Curzon and Lord
Milner. But I am afraid that the chasm will become almost imperceptible,
a microscopic crack, if we compare it with the chasm that separates
either or both of them from the people of this country.
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