DISAPPOINTED

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 25, 29 July 1924, Page 3

DISAPPOINTED

RHODES SCHOLAR'S OUTBURST

Considerable discussion has been caused at Oxford University, and throughput the British Empire, by a speech made by Mr. W. C. Greene, a Khodes scholar from "the United States, replying to a toast proposed by Mr. Rudyard Kipling at the annual dinner of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust. _ "Oxford ' and Europe," said Mr. Greene (reports the "Daily Mail") ''have brought death to us of our dieams, our romance, and our hopes that here we would find three years of life, of continuous strangeness and duty. Romance is dead in us, and the grey, unbeautiful buildings of Oxford havo become just old-fashioned buildings and oftentimes prisons both of the soul and body. Oxford has not been Alysmm, nor has our experience of the Continent. '. .

"But two things have come to a good many of us. - We" have learnt the plain, old-fashioned, prehistoric, antediluvian jo« of just sitting down. We have come to see that idlers and idleness of the body are not terms of contempt. The Prime Minister of England represents to many of us the- thing which Oxford has brought, to us rightly or wrongly Here wo have sat down frequently sometimes with intense reverence, at the foot of the. grizzled figure of History. We have come to-sec the need of the new attitude towards peoples, and peope towards the State, of the running of the State of which the little crowd of the Fabian Society is - for many of ..w clllef sP!"tual example. We go home, many of us with the secret.hopo that some day we may enter the politics .of our own country and perhaps breathe .in the • slow, amalgam ox our nation the recognition of the social truth which has been enunciattl S,° T^riWn*' 1"63 and so Yasnl .V during the last 2000 years,, which wo .with our younger, ears,- though older ones seem often unable so to do, can hear We do not go home' with regrets. Whatever may have been the unexpressed desires of Cecil .Rhodes in laying the foundation of those scholarships, if he meant us to lova. another nation if he meant us to become anostles of that great creed for which Mr Kipling has laboured so long and so finely, we must deny his hopes. Oxford and England and Europe have oniy made,us love America morei We become more American every day that we are here. We are ssck of hand-shak-ing across the seas. Long ago we resigned our position as unofficial ambassadors. We. go home gladly and eagerly to a nation which we know and love • and understand, if often we cannot admire it. We go home with some appreciation of duty and appreciation of human life, borne day, perhaps, some of us may .amount to something if the life of idleness has not become too strong"