Extracts from Addresses 367
fessor, because you must remember that those words mean very different
things in the two countries. In the Universities of Oxford—it is uni-
versally true of Oxford—and Cambridge, we have extremely few pro-
fessorial chairs. There are at Oxford something like 400 or 5∞ people
engaged in teaching, and of those 400 or 500 people only about 40 are
professors. And yet among those who are not professors, there are
men whose names are known throughout the world, men who are
acknowledged to be the greatest authority in their particular subject,
but they are not professors. Now, what would it gain? It would be
impossible for the university to send you younger teachers, simply be-
cause the university has no younger teachers. People do not with us
get into the professorial chair at thirty. They are lucky if they get
there at forty or fifty. Our young teachers would necessarily be college
teachers, tutors, lecturers, etc. Now it would be quite an easy matter,
I think, for one of our colleges to come to an arrangement to, say, send
once in five years, once in ten years, something of the kind, one of its
staff, a man between thirty and thirty-five, and to say that it would
pay him his salary, or a substantial part of his salary, during his
absence. Now could you—that is the question—could you over here
similarly give leave to one of your associate professors, one of your
young professors, to go for a year to one of our universities, and say
to him: “We will give you your salary during your absence”? If
that can be arranged, if that is a feasible scheme, then I think there is
no difficulty whatever in the way of that interchange of teachers, which
I myself believe to be one of the most valuable parts of the whole scheme.
Now, I hope I have made those two aspects of the question plain. I
have endeavored to be as practical and businesslike as I could, and I
hope I have explained it. Naturally I have said more about our
aspect of the question, about American students coming to our uni-
versities, because, of course, I understand our universities better than,
even after this visit, I understand yours. But do not think for a moment
that that means that I think that is the more important aspect of the
question. Quite the opposite! I am convinced that if this scheme is to
be a success at all, its success will depend very largely upon the extent
to which in the future time it may gain, slowly and gradually—we
are a very cautious people—upon the extent to which in the course of the
next ten or fifteen years students from our universities get into the
habit of coming for advanced work to America.