EDUCATIONAL ENDOWMENTS. 539 



thirty thousand students were in attendance ; and Huber, the learned 

 historian of the universities, says that " the intellectual importance of 

 Oxford at that period is universally acknowledged." At this time the 

 university had none but rented buildings, and little or no land. En- 

 dowments did not exist, and every teacher was left to find his own 

 level. The Church and the government now attained a more efficient 

 organization, however, and laid hands upon the universities. The 

 means by which the university became a stepping-stone to the Church 

 and an appendage to the government are not very clear. Monasteries 

 and endowments encouraged the cultivation of such learning as the 

 ecclesiastics considered genuine. The Church and the government 

 gradually acquired intimate and stable relations ; and the end of the 

 process was that Oxford, and Cambridge as well, became aristocratic 

 institutions, whose aims and ideas were those of the ruling classes, and 

 whose characters became sociological or political rather than educa- 

 tional. Huber * has the following remarkable passage on this point : 



" After attaining its greatest external privileges a new process com- 

 menced in the university. The number of students diminished but 

 endowments kept increasing, and of course democracy waned rapidly. 

 . . . The university became gradually more dependent on fixed posses- 

 sions and assumed a new impress. It was of course more aristocratic ; 

 and did not wholly escape the deadening influence of worldly goods." 



Surprising as it may seem, Oxford seems never since to have at- 

 tained any considerable importance intellectually. From the writings 

 of a contemporary, we learn that the gownsmen became " swollen in 

 mind " and indifferent to learning. Gradually the university became 

 filled with the younger sons of the gentry, who went to the university 

 as the means of ecclesiastical preferment. It is unnecessary to rehearse 

 the facts here summed up ; I do not know that they are seriously dis- 

 puted. Politically, it is well known that the universities have been 

 millstones on the necks of the English people. No progress has been 

 made that they could prevent. Ever fawning on power, they have 

 made it their principal business to obtain pecuniary favors from the 

 government. In this they have been very successful. They early 

 acquired the sole right of presentation to ecclesiastical livings by 

 the bishops and others, and, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, 

 " there would not remain one fifth of the present number of students " 

 without this stimulus. Professor Newman, the translator of Huber, 

 states the effect of all this on Oxford in our own century. " An arti- 

 ficial monopoly," he says, "is given to a few accomplishments. . . . 

 And here I speak not of the (neglect of the) physical sciences and 

 mathematics the taste for all which in the University of Oxford has 

 in very recent years actually declined but, confining our view to the 

 circle of studies which constituted the original basis of the universities, 

 it is extraordinary to see the neglect and decay into which the majority 

 * " History of the English Universities," vol. i, p. 76, English translation. 



