be wholly remodelled. There is no fight about this. The struggle will be what model shall be adopted.

This is the history of the relation of the colleges to the central authority in the state. In the time of Elizabeth and James they depended directly on the crown. The monarch was in personal relations with their members. He chided or commended, patronised or punished them. The colleges were shielded from attack by the power of the crown, and, in return for its protection, they submitted to its usurpation of their most cherished privileges. James II. was the last prince who exerted his prerogative for the nomination of heads and fellows. From 1688 to 1854 the colleges governed themselves and administered their property without control or interference from without.

Had the central government no other object in dealing with the universities than the assertion of its own power, it could not have been successfully resisted. It had become necessary to remind these republics within the state that there were limits to their autonomy. But in 1854 there were other questions at issue besides that of the supremacy of the imperial authority. The government of the day was set in motion by an external pressure. In appointing a royal commission of enquiry the ministry did but yield to the demands of the public. As in the case of all the other endowed and charitable trusts throughout the kingdom, so in the case of the colleges within the universities, abuses were alleged.

The abuses' charged upon the colleges were not of the gross nature of those which had led to the visitation and reform of the charities and the municipal bodies. Peculation or embezzlement were neither suspected nor found. The colleges being eleemosynary foundations, and not trustees, could not be guilty of diverting public funds to private uses. The management of their property has been shown to be more economical than that of most private landowners. As usually happens when any institution has once become unpopular, inconsistent accusations were heaped upon the colleges. It was urged, e.g., that they habitually violated statutes they yet swore to observe; and, at the same time, they were taunted with obstinately adhering to codes of rules which had originated in the dark ages. But the colleges had been gradually becoming unpopular. All through the eighteenth century this alienation of feeling had been going on. It was brought to a climax about the middle of the present century, when parliamentary reform, and the extension of the suffrage, had given the popular element voice and weight in the direction of affairs.

Dismissing incidental and minor charges brought against the colleges, the public feeling of dissatisfaction at this period (1850) may be said to have run in two main channels, and to have been entertained by two separate sections of English society.

The educated class, containing the professions, and the irregular professions of letters and science, com

plained that university education was behind the age,' as the phrase then ran. Professing to be the highest school of teaching in the country, the greater part of knowledge was excluded from, or unknown in, the universities. What Oxford taught was confined to the Latin and Greek classics, and even in this department it was reduced to import its text-books from Germany. Useless studies, obsolete methods, an effete system, and generally incapable teachers-this was the description of Oxford which was received in literary and scientific circles. The belief in our general obscurantist tendencies was confirmed by the fact that we had usually chosen to be represented in parliament by the most reactionary and bigoted country gentlemen we could find.

Wholly different, but equally unfavourable to the colleges was the conception of Oxford prevalent among the lower middle class, which was now beginning to contribute an important contingent to public opinion. This class, the modern growth of manufacturing industry, did not and could not share the views which I have attributed to the professional classes. Wholly destitute of culture, even of manners, without the traditions of literature, its only reading the newspaper, its only interest the sordid squabbles of local politics, the lower middle class knew of Oxford only as a place of extravagance and dissipation for the sons of the gentry. To a class whose one virtue was industry, the fellow of a college appeared as an idle clergyman.' The col

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leges received large incomes, and 'did' nothing for them. Headships and fellowships were sinecures.

These two distinct streams of opinion met in 1850, and formed that pressure from without, which led to the abortive commission and Act of 1854.

Different as these current views of Oxford were, it will be seen that they concurred in one point, viz. in regarding the colleges as seminaries of education merely. Accordingly, the recommendations of the reporting commission of 1852 were directed wholly towards increasing the efficiency of teaching. The Report of that commission did indeed recognise the historical fact that the colleges were instituted (Report, p. 140) for study. But the recommendations of the Report gave no effect to this recognition, and by the Act of 1854, founded on these recommendations, the fellows of colleges were relieved from the statutable obligations to study under which they had hitherto held their places. It is true that they had in practice already dispensed themselves from this obligation. All that the Act of 1854 therefore did was to legalise the existing practice, and to annul an obligation which it was admitted could not be enforced. But while it was suppressing the duties, it did not suppress the revenues. The hypocrisy of party cries never exhibited greater effrontery than in the cry of founders' intentions which was raised in 1854. If the founder intended anything, he intended to provide a maintenance to priest-students. A life of prayer and praise, of penury and secluded

contemplation, as the condition of a life of learning— this was the idea of the fifteenth century collegiate establishment. A course of not less than twenty years of study and exercise conducted the academic to the apex of the doctorate. The founder proposed to provide the ardent but pauper student with a house, food, the bare necessaries of life, with opportunity of common worship. The fellow of 1854, who was not a Catholic priest, who had never heard of such a thing as mature study, a younger son of a well-to-do family, who drew his annual pension of 2501. free to go anywhere, filled the length and breadth of England with an indignant howl over the sacrilegious violation of founders' intentions.

It is true that this Tory cry was not listened to by the legislature. The founders' intentions were swept away by the Act, and not a vestige of them left. The Ordinances for the colleges, framed under the Act, abolished not only the statutable requirements of studies and exercises, but even the obligation to proceed to the superior degree. But the Conservative resistance had been so far effectual that it paralysed the action both of the legislature and of the commissioners. They took away the duties, but they could not dare to touch the revenues. They suppressed the founder's will, but they left his property untouched. They created a vast system of sinecure pensions to the tune of 130,000l. a year.

As soon as our cry of founders' had answered its