716 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
admission to the university; (2) the encouragement of an intellectual class of 
student and the maintenance of a body of scholars who can live together to their 
mutual benefit. To these may be added (3) means of endowing industrious lads 
who are unable to win the greater scholarship prizes in open competition, but 
require endowment if they are to live at an expensive university, and (4) the 
encouragement of special studies by special scholarships. 
With regard to (1) there is very little now to prevent any lad of really marked 
ability from winning his way to the university by means of scholarships, how- 
ever humble his origin. So far the present system is a success. But it is also 
quite certain that, at Oxford, scholarship money is spent on many young men who 
could afford to do without it, although the estimates of how many vary greatly. 
With regard to (2), it is most important that boys of ability should come together 
and form an intellectual class in the university, and that every college should 
have a considerable number of them, but that is no reason why they should all 
receive a uniform endowment of about 80/. a year. It has been suggested that all 
scholarships should be of a nominal value, say, of 40/. a year, and should only be 
supplemented by an additional endowment raising them to 80/. or more for those 
to whom it is really necessary. This would liberate funds which would render it 
possible to bring to the university, and to maintain there, many of a highly 
deserving class, mentioned above under (2), namely, the industrious boys who are 
not quite up to the open scholarship standard, but who have everything to gain 
from a university career, and are a great strength to the university and the 
colleges. Call them exhibitioners or what you will, the point is that they should 
not be elected merely on open competition, but to some extent on personal 
recommendation. 
The present scramble for scholars not only between the two older universities, 
but also between the various colleges at each, leads to no useful result. It some- 
times ends in very indifferent competitors being left for those colleges which come 
late. Add to this the worry and inconvenience caused by sending boys up from 
school for several successive competitions, and it is clear that there is room for more 
combination and organisation on the part of the colleges. The group system, by 
which several colleges combine and hold the examinations together, is a great 
improvement on the old independent system, and has been more developed at 
Cambridge than at Oxford. A college objection to large groups is that, owing to 
the number of candidates, there is no opportunity for the examiners to become 
personally acquainted with them ; but if the examination were held only twice a 
year it might be made more prolonged and more thorough than it is now, and 
give ample opportunity for the examiners to study their candidates on behalf of 
their respective colleges. From a large group system it is only one step to a still 
larger combination by which scholarship examinations would be really conducted 
by the university, say, twice a year, and the scholars drafted into the various 
colleges. This would of course leave each college free to reject an offered 
scholar, and would not preclude the possibility of a certain number of college 
scholarships in addition to those administered by the university. The endow- 
ments mentioned above for boys below the highest scholarship standard might 
well be exhibitions administered by the colleges themselves. That such an 
arrangement is not impracticable is shown by the working of the Rhodes 
scholarships. 
One of the great grievances at the present time concerning the scholarship 
system is the fact that the examinations are constantly becoming harder and are 
tending more and more to enforce specialisation at schools, Anything which will 
prevent this would be a gain, and it would be far easier for the university as a 
whole to keep the standard uniform and general than for the individual colleges 
which are in competition with each other. It is as easy to select scholarship boys 
of real promise from a crowd of competitors by means of a fairly simple and wide 
examination as by the more special and advanced examination which now pre- 
vails, and there is perhaps no reason why the same papers, including classics, 
mathematics, science, English, and modern languages, should not be set to all 
competitors alike, though it might be necessary to preserve a distinction between 
