332 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xvm 



Law, Engineering, Medicine, while it was to bring into con- 

 nection the various teaching bodies scattered over London. 

 The proposers themselves recognised that the scheme was 

 not ideal, but a compromise which at least would not ham- 

 per further progress, and would supersede the Gresham 

 scheme, which they regarded as a barrier to all future aca- 

 demic reform. 



The Association as thus constituted Huxley now joined, 

 and was immediately asked to accept the Presidency, 

 not that he should do any more militant work than 

 he was disposed to attempt, but simply that he should 

 sit like Moltke in his tent and keep an eye on the cam- 

 paign. 



He felt it almost a point of honour not to refuse his 

 best services to a cause he had always had at heart, though 

 he wrote : 



There are some points in which I go further than your pro- 

 posals, but they are so much, to my mind, in the right direction 

 that I gladly support them. 



And again : 



The Association scheme is undoubtedly a compromise but 

 it is a compromise which takes us the right way, while the 

 former schemes led nowhere except to chaos. 



He writes to Sir W. H. Flower : 



professions, a fair sprinkling of one-idea'd fanatics, ignorant of the 

 commonest conventions of official relation, and content with nothing 

 if they cannot get everything their own way. It is these persons 

 who, with the very highest and purest intentions, would ruin any 

 administrative body unless they were counterpoised by non-profes- 

 sional, common-sense members of recognised weight and authority in 

 the conduct of affairs." Furthermore, against the adoption of a Ger- 

 man university system, he continues, " In holding up the University 

 of Berlin as our model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to 

 the considerations that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in 

 these realms ; that a great many of us would rather have no university 

 at all than one under the control of such a minister, and whose high- 

 est representatives might come to be, not the fittest men, but those 

 who stood foremost in the good graces of the powers that be, whether 

 Demos, Ministry, or Sovereign." 



