34 UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 



of insecurity. It insists on reopening all questions and 

 asking all institutions, however venerable, by what right 

 they exist, and whether they are, or are not, in harmony 

 with the real or supposed wants of mankind. And it 

 is remarkable that these searching inquiries are not so 

 much forced on institutions from without, as developed 

 from within. Consummate scholars question the value 

 of learning ; priests contemn dogma ; and women turn 

 their backs upon man's ideal of perfect womanhood, 

 and seek satisfaction in apocalyptic visions of some, as 

 yet unrealised, epicene reality. 



If there be a type of stability in this world, one 

 would be inclined to look for it in the old Universities 

 of England. But it has been my business of late to hear 

 a good deal about what is going on in these famous 

 corporations ; and I have been filled with astonishment 

 by the evidences of internal fermentation which they 

 exhibit. If Gibbon could revisit the ancient seat of 

 learning of which he has written so cavalierly, assuredly 

 he would no longer speak of " the monks of Oxford 

 sunk in prejudice and port." There, as elsewhere, port 

 has gone out of fashion, and so has prejudice at least 

 that particular fine, old, crusted sort of prejudice to 

 which the great historian alludes. 



Indeed, things are moving so fast in Oxford and 

 Cambridge, that, for my part, I rejoiced when the Royal 

 Commission, of which I am a member, had finished and 

 presented the Report which related to these Universi- 

 ties; for we should have looked like mere plagiarists, 



