Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

It was a secure and comfortable world, that close of Victoria's reign before the disillusion and change of the South African War. Peace brooded over the land and we should not have believed a prophet had he told us that most of our group would fall in battle. We were hardly aware of the problems of the State or its demands upon our services, and the University Volunteers had a hard time keeping up their strength. It was the day when Mr. Chamberlain was preaching a new gospel of empire, and Lord Milner beginning his difficult course in South Africa, but we were scarcely conscious of their efforts, except to laugh at Raymond Asquith's parodies of Kipling. There were political clubs -- like the Conservative Canning and Chatham, and the Liberal Palmerston and Russell; but they were chiefly pretexts for annual dinners, when statesmen came up to speak to audiences which were interested in their persons but apathetic about their policies. I called myself a Tory and belonged to the Canning, but that club at two successive meetings, after drinking Church and King, had by a large majority disestablished the Church and nationalised the land of England; and it had adventurous members who belonged also to the Fabian Society. Raymond Asquith and I at the Union usually spoke on the same side on foreign affairs and always carried our motion. When we troubled our heads about politics we debated questions by the cold light of reason, oblivious of party fervours. There were, of course, busy partisans who pulled wires and spoke at by-elections, but they were not highly regarded. The statesmen who visited us did not greatly impress me, with one exception. I met Sir Wilfrid Laurier at an All Souls luncheon, and began an acquaintance which in later years I highly valued.

After the War I came to live near Oxford and have had the chance ever since of studying the young entries. How shall I compare them with my own generation Upon them has fallen the shadow of economic disaster, so that Oxford cannot seem an end in itself as it seemed to us, but only a means of finding a niche in the world. Moreover, transport facilities have made the place less of a sanctuary which devised its own life, and more of a London suburb. The modern undergraduates are what we should have called "banausic," with a strict utilitarian outlook. For their virtues: they are more temperate and frugal than we were, less snobbish about athletics, more industrious, better sons to their parents, and, I am inclined to think, better mannered. For their defects: they lack our disinterested curiosity about the things of the mind, and in the broad sense they are less well-educated. Their average man lacks our average man's general culture. They tend to fall into grooves and exclusive cliques. The Union, for example, is a resort only of earnest politicians, chiefly of the left wing, and its debating quality seems to me to have declined, as has its catholicity of membership; in my time everybody belonged to it and more than one rowing Blue was president.