On the world outside their walls the ancient Universities exercised an exasperating ...

On the world outside their walls the ancient Universities exercised an exasperating fascination: they were clerical; they were idle; they were dissipated; they reflected those odious class distinctions by which merit is suppressed and insolence fostered; their studies were narrow, their teaching ineffective. And on every count of the indictment the reformers found themselves supported by eminent friends within the gates, by Thirlwall at Cambridge and by Tait and Jowett at Oxford.

The Commission of 1830- and the Acts of 1854 and 1861 only accelerated, and consolidated, a process of internal reform which had proceeded somewhat faster at Cambridge than at Oxford, partly because for ten years the activities of Oxford had been diverted to religious agitation, while Cambridge had had the good sense to

profit by her Chancellor's experience as an

undergraduate of Bonn.

The object of the Commission was to clear away the constitutional obstructions to internal development and to make the Universities more accessible to the middle classes, more useful to the pass-man, and more serviceable to pure learning. But in principle the Universities affirmed their essence, against Germany and Scotland, as places not of professional but of liberal education in a world which still acknowledged that public life, in the Church, in Parliament, or on the County Bench, was not only a more distinguished, but a better life than the pursuit of wealth by industrious competition.

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