UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE. 659 



molded, from generation to generation, by the aim of ensuring a supply 

 of men qualified to bear a worthy part, either in the government of the 

 nation, or in professional activities which are indispensable to the 

 national welfare. In our own time, and more especially within the 

 last thirty years, one particular aspect of that idea is illustrated by the 

 closer connections which have been formed between the universities 

 and the higher branches of the civil service. The conception of work 

 for the commonweal is in its turn inseparable from loyalty to those 

 ideals of character and conduct by which English life and public policy 

 have been built up. It is by the long and gradual training which such 

 ideals have given that our race has been fitted to grapple with responsi- 

 bilities which have inevitably grown, both in extent and in complexity, 

 far beyond anything of which our forefathers could have dreamed. 

 That training tends also to national self-knowledge; it makes for a 

 sober estimate of our national qualities and defects; it quickens a 

 national sense of duty to our neighbor. The munificence of a far- 

 sighted statesman has provided that selected youths, whose homes are 

 in this land, and whose life-work may be here, shall go for a while to 

 England, shall breathe the intellectual and social atmosphere of a great 

 English university, and shall learn to judge for themselves of the 

 sources from which the best English traditions have flowed. That is 

 excellent. But it is also most desirable that those traditions should 

 pass as living forces into the higher teaching of South Africa itself, 

 and that their spirit should animate educational institutions whose 

 special forms have been molded by local requirements. That, indeed, 

 has been, and is, the fervent wish of men whose labors for South African 

 education have already borne abundant fruit, and are destined to bear 

 yet larger fruit in the future. May those labors prosper, and may that 

 wish be fulfilled ! The sooner will come the day when the inhabitants 

 of this country, this country of vast and still indefinite possibilities, 

 will be able to feel, in a sense higher and deeper than citizens of the 

 Roman Empire could conceive, Cuncti gens una sumus (' We are all 

 one people'). If the work which lies before us, in this section of the 

 British Association, should result in contributing anything towards 

 the promotion of those great objects, by helping to elucidate the con- 

 ditions of further progress, our deliberations will not have been held 

 in vain. 



