McIlwain Depicts Wartime England

Charles H. McIlwain, Eaton Professor of Government, is back in the United States after a four-month George Eastman Visiting Professorship at Oxford University with high praise for the English people in wartime and for the way Oxford is carrying on its great educational tradition during the present crisis.

"The English people are tired," said McIlwain. "They thought the Germans had finished harassing the civilian population, and the recent robot bombing was a serious psychological blow. But they're taking it just as they took the blitz."

Servicemen Numerous

McIlwain said England looks like a great camping ground for servicemen of every conceivable nationality. "I couldn't and out much about England today by talking to the man in the street," he remarked, "because as often as not the man is the street is the American soldier.

"Getting a look at Britain today is not an easy thing," he continued. "Transportation is a genuine problem. There is no such thing as a reservation. The railroads are in constant use moving troops, and evacuating increasingly large numbers of women and children to rural regions where they will be safe from the buzz bombs.' It is a customary thing nowadays to stand on trains for even the longest distance trips, and in many cases on cannot get on at all."

Oxford Hard-Hit

Professor McIlwain lectured in Balliol College during Oxford's Trinity Term on the background of Angle-American constitutional institutions. "At Oxford it's much the same as here at Harvard," he asserted. "The students are either too young for military service or rejected for physical reasons. The faculty has also been hard-hit by the demand for men in the government services. Like Harvard, Oxford is trying to carry on with the cultural subjects in spite of the trend toward technical studies."

The Eastman Visiting Professorship had been abandoned from 1940 until last April when the American Association of Rhodes Scholars resumed it at the request of Oxford authorities.

Won Pulitzer Prize

McIlwain was the Pulitzer Prize winner in American History for 1924 and is a world-famous authority on political theory. A graduate of Princeton in 1894, he has held the Eaton chair at Harvard since 1927. His best-known books are "The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy," "The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation," "Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern," "Constitutionalism and the Changing World," and "The Growth of Political Thought in the West from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages."