1892 LONDON UNIVERSITY REFORM 233 



You -nill have to come to London and set up 

 physiology at the Royal College of Science. It is the 

 only place in Great Britain in which scientific teaching 

 is trammelled neither by parsons nor by litterateurs. I 

 have always implored Donnelly to keep us clear of any 

 connection with a University of any kind, sort, or descrip- 

 tion, and I tried to instil the same lesson into the doctors 

 the other day. But the " liberal education " cant is an 

 obsession of too many of them. 



A further step was taken in June, when he was 

 sent a new draft of proposals, afterwards adopted by 

 the above-mentioned general meeting of the Associa- 

 tion in March 1893, sketching a constitution for a 

 new university, and asking for the appointment of 

 a Statutory Commission to carry it out. The Uni- 

 versity thus constituted was to be governed by a 

 Court, half of which should consist of university pro- 

 fessors ^ ; it was to include such faculties as Law, 



^ " As for a government by professors only " (he ■writes in the 

 Times of Dec. 6, 1892), "the fact of their being specialists is 

 against them. Most of them are broad - minded, practical men ; 

 some are good administrators. But, unfortunately, there is among 

 them, as in other 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 everj-thing their own 

 way. It is these persons who, vi-ith the very highest and purest 

 intentions, would ruin any administrative body unless they were 

 counterpoised by non- professional, common -sense members of 

 recognised weight and authority in the conduct of affairs." 

 Furthermore, against the adoption of a German university system, 

 he continues, ' ' In holding up the University of Berlin as oux 

 model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to the considera- 

 tions that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in these 

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

 at aU than one under the control of such a minister, and whose 

 highest 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." 



