178 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



Such a boon the Privy Council had been memorial- 

 ised to advise the Queen (to whom the prerogative 

 belonged) to bestow upon Manchester. Surely our 

 community with its multitude of densely populated 

 manufacturing towns was as fully entitled to the 

 advantages of a University as the cities over the 

 Border. Surely, too, the time for demanding such an 

 increase in our educational facilities had fully arrived. 

 What tenable ground then could there be for hesitation 

 on the part of the Government in granting the prayer 

 of the memorialists who, in such unprecedented force 

 and numbers, appeared before the Lord President? 

 In the Colonies, in India, in Ireland many Universities 

 had been founded. Had we been 2,000 miles distant 

 from London instead of 200, we should have had 

 a University long ago. The proposal to found a 

 new English University seemed, however, to some 

 otherwise apparently well-balanced minds to savour 

 almost of sacrilege. We were told by some that the 

 great institutions of Oxford and Cambridge with 

 their great wealth can do all that England could 

 legitimately require in the way of the highest academic 

 culture. Others, again, affirmed that a new University 

 would lack all that prestige which the old institutions 

 alone could enjoy. Some expressed a fear that what 

 they were pleased to term our new-fangled degrees 

 could never compete with the older and more refined 

 and less provincial seats of learning, and that to 

 multiply Universities was simply to lower the tone of 

 the higher education. We were kindly advised to 

 tack ourselves on to those great old institutions as 

 poor and rather vulgar country-cousins, or admonished 

 that we must altogether give up our hopes of doing 

 more than we did at present. But we in Lancashire 

 knew perfectly well that thousands among us had 



