UNIVERSITY TRAINING 9 



insist on directing towards the extension and diffusion of 

 science. Those who address the public on this subject not 

 infrequently take what seems to me to be a disastrous 

 line at the start. They speak of the new universities as 

 the universities of the people, and hand over Oxford and 

 Cambridge, with their enormous endowments, their history 

 and tradition, to the wealthy class. Such usurpation 

 cannot be tolerated. It is monstrous that the endowments 

 of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which were 

 thoroughly popular and democratic in their foundation, 

 should be, even for a moment, regarded as the peculiar 

 property of the wealthy. It is also monstrous to suppose 

 that it is anything less than disastrous to consign the 

 well-to-do classes in any community to an empty sham 

 of ancient " culture " rather than to imbue them with the 

 real and inspiring culture of the modern renaissance. It 

 is because this notion is allowed to gain ground that the 

 enormous funds of the colleges and universities of Oxford 

 and Cambridge, amounting to more than three-quarters 

 of a million pounds annually, are to a large extent, though 

 not exclusively, employed in keeping up a couple of huge 

 boarding-schools, which are shut for six months in the 

 year. 



It is owing to this that it is the rarest thing to find in 

 Oxford or in Cambridge a great teacher who lectures 

 or demonstrates to an eager following of disciples. An 

 overwhelming majority of the young men who go as 

 students to these universities have no intention of study- 

 ing anything. They are sent there in order to be sub- 

 mitted to college discipline and to have, subject to that 

 safeguard, a good time. A large number are handsomely 

 paid by scholarships in order to induce them to go there 

 and would not go there at all unless they were so paid. 

 They do not find such teachers there and such an effective 

 occupation of their student years as would induce them, 



