648 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



courses at which his ignorance of Latin and Greek or of 

 elementary mathematics would make him a nuisance. But it 

 interposed no bar to any student who cared to come and see 

 whether in time he could pass its Intermediate. 



That, in brief, is the history and raison d'etre of Responsions. 

 It is one of the few survivals from an Oxford, not yet severely 

 afflicted with the examination habit, which accepted a student 

 without imposing any intellectual test at all, provided only 

 that some master or society of masters was prepared to take 

 the responsibility of supervising his work. It stipulated only 

 that the candidate did not seek admission to its " final " courses 

 before he had completed an "intermediate" course within the 

 university itself. 



It was an unfortunate accident— and I find no proof that it 

 was anything more — that in the same generation in which 

 unreformed Responsions became the standard of acceptance 

 by a college, the university was remodelling all the rest of 

 its curriculum and recognising subjects like Modern History 

 and Natural Science, with which Greek stood in no necessary 

 connexion at all. It was an accident too and a still more 

 unfortunate one, that within the same generation the grammar 

 schools reaped the retribution of their own incompetence, in 

 the shape of that Greek-hating crop of parents which carried 

 through the Industrial Revolution and invented the practice 

 of Technical Education and the doctrine of Payment by Results. 

 But the result was that, just when the colleges, hard hit by 

 agricultural depression, were unable to extend any further their 

 accommodation for students, a double stream of applicants 

 began to flow from the old and from the new schools. It was 

 fatally easy, therefore, for indolence, simulating prejudice and 

 perhaps not untainted by it, to select a means of discrimination 

 which has always penalised the Greekless school by mistake 

 for the brainless boy ; and is now perceived to be penalising 

 the penniless boy by mistake for the Greekless school. " There 

 is a large body of opinion outside the university which regards 

 the maintenance of Greek as a social bar." l Or as an under- 

 graduate put it : "I approve of compulsory Greek because 

 it brings the right sort of men to Oxford." 2 



How delicate is the adjustment of the standard of Responsions 

 to the residential capacity of the colleges is betrayed by 

 1 Times, November 23, 191 1. 2 Times, January 20, 191 1. 



