be obtained elsewhere than at college. For that matter, indeed, most men are self-educated. What they acquire from a teacher is as nothing to what they acquire from their own researches. What a university or a great public school gives, that cannot be obtained elsewhere, is society—the society of equal minds. A boy is taken from under the parental wing, is sent to school and thrown upon his own resources. He can no longer sing out when he is worsted—"I'll tell mamma;" he has to hold his own in a little world that is made up entirely of boys; he must learn independence; he must fight his way: he must study the arts of society before he has well laid aside his petticoats. So at college—it is in the clash of wit and the pulling of rival oars, it is in the public life and the social habit, it is in the free-and-easy measuring of man with man, that the chief value of a residence in the university lies. The system no doubt has its drawbacks. We must take the bad with the good; and no man who has had experience of it will deny that almost nothing in after life can make up for the want of that early discipline, which is to be obtained only in the rough usage of a school and the wild play of a university. Society, in these haunts, may exist chiefly in its barbaric elements, but they are elements that bring out the man; and the great glory of our universities is not so much that they make us scholars (though they have this also to boast of), as that they make us men.
To Englishmen these are truisms, but in Scotland they are scarcely recognized even as truths. A great deal of nonsense has been talked on both sides of the Tweed about the defects of the Scottish universities. It has been said that they do not turn out scholars. One might as well blame the University of Oxford for not turning out mathematicians. Prominence is given in every university to certain branches of learning; and in Scotland there has always been a greater admiration of thinkers than either of scholars or mathematicians. We all value most what we ourselves have learnt; but where no line of study is absolutely neglected, probably it does not much matter which one receives the most attention. We are apt to overrate the importance of the thing acquired, and to underrate the most important point of all—the mental discipline. The real defect of the Scottish universities is that they have no student life. They have an immense number of students, and nowhere is the higher sort of education more valued; but just in proportion as it has been valued and rendered accessible to all classes, no matter how poor, it has lost its finer qualities—it has lost—and especially in the greater universities—the student life. Suppose a young man at Islington, another at St. John's Wood, a third at Bayswater, a fourth in Pimlico, and a fifth at Brixton, studying at University College: what sort of feeling exists among them? what are the ties that bind them together? what society do they form? what student life can they enjoy? All the better for their studies, the genius of grinding and cramming will say; and it may be so; but the loosening of the social ties among students may also be an irreparable injury to qualities that are even more important than a thirst for knowledge. The college in Gower
