OXFORD'S BALANCE-SHEET
By E. L. WOODWARD
FOR comfortable reading in a train, I took with me, a day or two ago, the annual Abstract of Accounts of Oxford University. I am not a pillar of finance. I have never been invited to give my advice to the masters and scholars on Getting and Spending, and, on the few occasions in early middle age when I ventured to tender this advice I was promptly sat on as an inexperienced boy. Anyhow, I do not, as a rule, scrutinise abstracts of accounts for which I have no personal responsibility. Some people find figures romantic or, at all events, attractive. I just think of them as the people whom Wordsworth disliked thought of primroses on the river's brim. Figures, simple or complicated, and nothing more.
Only this time there was something more. There were some words which caught my eye. These words, " Preaching Fund: Henry VII's obit"—with a reference to another page. So I carried the Abstract down to the Great Western Station. I thought I would pursue Henry VII's obit. It was a blind alley. The reference led merely to a separate account for preachers of University sermons. They received as " part stipends " £84 16s. The train drew up at Paddington before I had dis- covered the other part of the stipends of these advocates of Holy Living, or, in certain cases, trumpeters of the Church Irritant. Indeed, I am not sorry that some mystery remains, and that 1 still do not know how much money passes between the pulpit and the church porch.
Anyhow, the Abstract of Accounts, though it did not easily yield up its secrets, lasted me for my journey. The Abstract is the record of the activities of a law-abiding community, a body of men prudent as well as learned, modest in their wants, well deserving of gifts, and (let rich men making their wills take notice) honest trustees of endowments which stretch back through centuries of English history and English domestic peace. So many are the years of fulfilment that the cycle of history begins to repeat itself. I see, from the accounts, that Nuffield College, in a search for sites, has extruded a dogs' home. Alas, in these hard days, even dogs, who had counted on men for shelter, are deprived of their hopes, and no one can explain to them why the social sciences must advance and advance and go on advancing, and why such progress always means more committee-rooms. It is little consolation to the race of dogs, now losing another home, to know that, centuries past, houses in Catte Street were pulled down to make room for the Bodleian, and that Kitten Court has been, for many feline generations, only the shadow of a name.
The august Bodleian still looms large among University insti- tutions which cost a lot of money. The wages of book-fetchers- a queer trade, like mole-catching, or collecting the small grubs used as bait for fresh-water fish. Nevertheless Bodley makes a little money, and in a suspicious way. Such and such a sum for waste paper. Bodley's librarian is a dictator in his own totalitarian sphere, and who is to disobey his ukase or rescript, his " So-oder-So," when he tells his book-fetchers that the works of his political enemies are to be weighed out as waste-paper?
From Bodley the pages of the Abstract led me to the Trust Funds, old and new. Here there is romance among the dry-as- dusts. Godstow Nunnery and Kelmscott Manor appear in the latest trust funds of Oxford University. (The repair of tapestries at Kelmscott last year cost £77 los. 3d. Time has begun to unravel the work of Burne-Jones and William Morris.) There are the benefactions of great Englishmen of our own time: the Beit fund, the Zaharoff fund. There is Lord Crewe's benefac- tion, of which I, though unworthy, once had the honour of partaking ; strawberries and champagne at I t.o a.m., on a mid. summer morning before you walk through the Oxford streets to hear the Latin speeches at Encaenia. Never before have I drunk champagne at t 1.0 a.m. ; never before have I listened with such dream-like intensity to Latin speeches. I would attend Lord Crewe's benefaction again, if I were invited.
So one moves on, from trust fund to trust fund—most of my colleagues, it would appear, living, like myself, on Mortmain. ("Qu'est-ce qu'un savant?" said Anatole France. " C'est un etre assommant qui itudie et publie par principe , tout ce qui manque radicaletnent d'interet.") The fund for the prize poem on a Sacred Subject filled me with remorse for lost opportunities. The prize is, as Henry Ws clerks described the income from the administration of justice, magnum emolumentum. The competition is open to all Masters of Arts, inter quos ego. Only the subjects (Balaam, Moses, the Temple, &c.) set for the prize have never inspired my Muse.
I turn from learning to life, from the poetry of religion to the poetry of action, from rhymed couplets to the Proctors and their men. Here also the accounts are discreet. But it looks to me as though the black-out has rather cut down trade, and I suspect that the Proctor's Marshal, that tiger among men, has returned to fiercer fields of war. Others " carry on." The Indian Institute carries on. It has faced the emergency, and re-organised its museum: item, £45 os. 8d., less sale of surplus exhibits, £12 OS. 5d. Most of the University money, however, goes in the physical sciences—science, to which we all owe so much for making the world what it is. I suppose the Defence of the Realm Act will not allow me to say what science has done, or, at all events. what it has cost, in the last year. Withal, there has been a certain amount of junketing. The amounts spent on fieldwork in botany, and in some other science (I forget the name) are exactly divisible, by an integer = the cost of one bottle of bottled beer. Hot work, botanising. The geographers, unlike stout Cortes, seem to choose cups of tea ; there is an odd four- pence or so tacked on to their " field work " charges. Experi- mental psychology seems very expensive, and to have passed the stage of asking you to pick out cheap coloured discs. Social anthropology costs very little in the way of apparatus. the cultivation of ancestral memories is enough, and this can be done in solitude. On the other hand, agricultural engineer- ing and agricultural economics practise hospitality, in nomine almae matris, though on a quiet scale ; last year to the tune. respectively, of £4 9s. 6d. and £6 16s. 9d. I notice that the agricultural engineers also speed the tractor with a special item of £510 14s. id. for " consumables and chemicals." A distinction which, with increased rationing, may disappear next year. I will not deal with other sciences, with Experimental Philosophy (prices in this line have gone up since Mr. Micawber's time), with the Bureau of Animal Population, the unexpended grant towards the cost of a Monolithic Collection: or the survey of Island Fauna (0 sacred dragon of the island of the Hesperides). I end on a sombre note. In spite of all this diffusion of wealth on the altar for which our democracy stands, the Department of Education—of all Departments— reports a bad debt: Li los. Someone has not paid his fee The work of linking virtue to knowledge has all to be done again.
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