Page:University of Calcutta Convocation Addresses Vol 3 (1899-1906).djvu/10

Rh with a University in England, I am speaking of something very different from the University which prevails here. A residential and teaching University such as Oxford or Cambridge, with its venerable buildings, its historic associations, the crowded and healthy competition of its life, its youthful friendships, its virile influence upon character, its esprit de corps, cannot either in Great Britain or in any country be fairly compared with an examining and degree-giving University such as yours. They are alike in bearing the same name, and in constituting parts of the machinery by which in civilised countries all peoples work for the same ideal, namely, the cultivation of the higher faculties of man. But they are profoundly unlike in the influence that they exert upon the pupil, and in the degree to which they effect, not so much his profession, as his character and his life. Nevertheless, inevitable and obvious as these differences are, there may yet be in an examining University, and there is in such institutions in some parts of my own country, and still more abroad, an inherent influence, inseparable from the curriculum through which the student has had to pass before he can take his degree, which is not without its effect upon character and morals, which inspires in him something more than the hungry appetite for a diploma, and which turns him out something better than a sort of