St Hugh's College, Oxford - Chronicle 1933-1934

hasten to add, in the High or the `Giler'—not under an academic gown, short or long, but—very suitably—wherever water was in the near neighbourhood. To keep boats and bathing-dresses in separate compartments of the undergraduate mind has been one of our preoccupations during a glorious May; and it says much for the discretion of junior members of the College that this aspiration should, so far as I know, have been achieved. Warned, however, by I know not what premonition, the Curators of the University Park have begun to discuss with us a Parson's Pleasure for Women. More of this, no doubt, hereafter.

This is as far, I hope, as we shall go in Oxford along the path of Revolution—a word which I am told (` I live out of the world and am often astonished at what I hear') is much canvassed in these days.

Continuity is so accepted a heritage in our island that we are in danger sometimes of forgetting what qualities, what attitudes and activities will alone secure that fortress against attacks, open and insidious, of contemporary Philistines. The 'sheer recalcitrance' of Oxford, like that of the public schools, may ward off successfully the enemy's most obvious weapons ; but an intelligence rigidly circumscribed by custom and locality is not enough, nor will it suffice to lean helplessly on our native institutions with little curiosity about anything which falls outside our usual experience. The tragedy of most quarrels, not only between lovers, not only between parents and children, or between undergraduates and professors, but between classes and even nations, is less that dues are consciously withheld or obligations evaded, than that each party has something to offer which the other doesn't want, or won't—in the nature of things cannot—see is really a needed gift. The bridging of these gulfs is surely the task of those whose sympathies, as well as whose minds, have had their training, not on a Procrustean bed where education so called is all the time subordinated to some other end, but where the diversity and variety of human character, human intelligence, are reflected freely, subtly, genially, and—as under those conditions, and under those alone, they can be—creatively, in every relationship of the common life. Such places of training are not on the increase in Europe. The humanist, he who wants men to be really free, saved above all from their saviours of the doctrinaire or of the bullying mind, and from the cruel vanity of domineering by mental systems or weapons of statecraft, to-day has something to defend more precious than national sovereignty; and is not as certain, as he used to be, where to look for the most loyal of his allies.

In Chinese households, as you know, the father is the supreme authority, living on one side of a courtyard round which all the sons with their descendants are accommodated, one family, one household —a strain on all concerned, we should suppose indeed. A certain family rose to eight assemblages, all in perfect harmony; they kept between them, for instance, too dogs, of which the 99 would never embark upon the dinner spread before them until the tooth had taken its place. The Emperor called in state to ask the secret. The II