"THE AMERICANS ARE HERE!"

"The sale to America of a masterpiece means little more than the passing of personal property, but the indiscriminate and unrestricted admission of foreigners into the Universities and seminaries of this country seriously affects all the stimulating influences of English culture.

It is high time that the authorities were made aware of their duty in this matter. . . . Let them reduce the proportion of foreigners from the neighborhood of 40 per cent to 10 or even 5 per cent. Then, and only then, can we be assured that Oxford is being maintained as a University English in influence and English in character".

How humiliating! This anonymous correspondent of the "Saturday Review" would limit the admission of Americans to Oxford. Unfortunately, his is not a solitary opinion. "I would welcome", says a Senior Tutor at Exeter College, Oxford in the "Nineteenth Century", "as freshmen at my College rather two English secondary school boys than four Colonials or fourteen Americans. . . ." Review" asks of a defender of the Americans, "His it ever occurred to his that with the control over the Union, their influence over a section of the Press and their secondary in the social clubs, the Americans will soon assimilate Oxford?' while another remarks that "Instead of a culture peculiarly English, Oxford" (with the admission of Americans unlimited) "will develop into the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the transatlantic liner".

These assertions are not mere overflowings of excess chauvinism, but are amply backed by grave and portentous reasons. Since 1918 the percentage of Englishmen at Oxford has fallen from 31 to 66 per cent, a drop of nearly twenty degrees. With their increase in numbers, the Americans have begun to "assert themselves in every conceivable direction" so that now the whole University is "under the influence of an overwhelming minority of Americans". The president of the Oxford Union and the president of the Moot Club are both Americans and one of the undergraduate journals has been taken over by Americans and is now being run in the true American-Oxonian style.

If the fresh winds from the West are blowing much that is "sticky" and snobbish out of Oxford, they are, nevertheless, distasteful to sensitive English nostrils. And from this side of the water a certain amount of the yearly current of American students in England is being diverted from Oxford by the American atmosphere already there.

But too much importance is not to be laid upon a temporary phase much magnified by alarmists. In the seven hundred years of Oxford's splendid history the university has built up a tradition as deep-rooted and unshakable as the Common Law. Even in 'Erasmus' day English scholars bemoaned the influx of the foreign student. The present inundation of Americans is far more likely to be absorbed by the atmosphere than to absorb it. The momentum of seven hundred years is not to be checked and swept away in four or five.