The Modern U: niversity Movement’ 
T has been said that the future historians of England will 
record the foundation of its five new universities as the 
most noteworthy incident that has marked the opening of the 
twentieth century. The movement has been spoken of, in 
a picturesque way, as the Northern Renaissance. I think that 
we who have lived through this period may be inclined rather 
to date the genesis of the universities in the nineteenth century, 
and to reckon it among the great movements for emancipation 
of people and liberalization of institutions, which will make 
that century and the Victorian age for ever memorable. 
The university colleges, out of which these new universities 
have grown, seem to me to owe their origin not to anything 
that can be properly called a Renaissance. University College, 
London, and the Owens College, Manchester, were the first, 
and I think there is the clearest evidence that their success 
was determined, at the outset, by two factors; firstly, by their 
providing higher education for those who were unable to sub- 
scribe to the religious tests imposed by Oxford and Cambridge, 
and secondly, by the liberal recognition which they gave to 
natural science. At a later stage, they became distinguished 
as the academic resorts of the poor in purse, and as the 
nurseries of applied science. 
_ ° What has happened at the beginning of the twentieth 
“century, has been the conferment on single colleges of the 
power to grant those greatly overesteemed certificates of 
knowledge known as degrees, which previously had to be 
* An address to the Leeds Arts Club, delivered November 10, 1906, 
2461 B 
