Lord Nuffield is a great deal more than a brilliantly
success- ful business man or a munificent benefactor. He is an almost unique social phenomenon. This is no case of the deserving boy climbing the orthodox educational ladder from the bottom rung. Young Morris, I think I am right in saying, never climbed above that bottom rung, the elementary school, at all. After that life educated him. A cycle mechanic in days before motor-cars were heard of, he became in the course of something under fifty years (he was sixty last Sunday) what he is today. And what in fact is he today ? Unless his letters of last week to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford on his latest munificent donation were the work of some other hand than his—which need not be assumed— they were written by a man of remarkable discernment, culture and breadth of vision. The use to which his latest million is to be put was, as the letters state, and as was indeed to be taken for granted, discussed by Lord Nuffield with the Vice-Chancellor, and there are few more fertile minds in Oxford's than Dr. Lindsay's ; but Lord Nuffield is not the man to marry his money blindly to someone else's ideas, and the wisdom of his conception does him in many ways more credit even than the greatness of his generosity.
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