620 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION L. 



from all students as a condition of entrance into the ancient universities. Such 

 a requirement may have been possible, and even reasonable, when educational 

 subjects were few. It cannot be maintained when those subjects have been 

 greatly multiplied. For the result is either that the study of two dead 

 languages, or at least of one among them, is little more than a farce, or that 

 it causes an unhappy disturbance at a critical period of a boy's intellectual 

 life. Nay, 1 should be tempted to say that to boys who have received their 

 education on .the modern sides of public schools the obligation of acquiring 

 some smattering of Greek knowledge is both a farce and a nuisance. 



Nobody feels more keenly than I the intellectual benefit of studying the 

 Greek language and literature. It is my sincere hope, as it is my firm belief, 

 that, when Greek rests upon its own intrinsic merits as a factor in human cul- 

 ture, the study of Greek, if it is less general, will not be less profound than it 

 has been. But times change, and compulsory Greek as a universal subject is 

 unsuitable to the present time, not because it is useless in itself, but because 

 it bars the way more or less against other studies which are still more important. 

 The universities enforce their law upon secondary schools. The schools must 

 teach what the universities require; they cannot teach, or they can only teach 

 within a fixed limit, what is not required at the universities. 



In my own mind, however, the abolition of compulsory Greek is only a step to 

 a change in the intellectual atmosphere of the universities. I hope that Oxford 

 and Cambridge will cease to insist upon Greek; but I hope that, when they 

 cease to insist upon Greek, they will require from all students the evidence of 

 some serious learning in some subject or subjects of higher education. Nobody 

 who is conversant both with the ancient and with the modern universities can 

 fail to be aware of the difference in their tone. The atmosphere of a modern 

 university is intellectual. Men and women come there as students; they come 

 to learn, and they do learn. At Oxford and Cambridge the atmosphere is much 

 more social ; and the number of undergraduates who can in any sense be called 

 serious students is but a fraction of the undergraduate body. The time is, I 

 hope, approaching when a degree conferred by the universities of Oxford and 

 Cambridge even upon a Passman will be a certificate of a certain definite pro- 

 ficiency in some recognised subject of academical study. For it seems to me that 

 the ancient universities in conferring degrees without an adequate guarantee of 

 knowledge are largely responsible for the indifference of English society as a 

 whole to the value and dignity of learning. 



No doubt there is force in the plea that the universities cannot afford the 

 pecuniary loss which would result from the policy of excluding Passmen, cr 

 of pressing hardly upon them. It may be answered that no pecuniary con- 

 sideration can justify a university in ceasing to be primarily a learned body. 

 But women students are more earnest than men; and if the universities grant 

 degrees, as I hope they will, to women equally with men, they will probably 

 find that they will receive as much money from the addition of the serious 

 students, who will then belong to them, as they now receive from those students 

 who are not serious at all. 



The universities of Oxford and Cambridge have made frequent appeals for 

 pecuniary support. Education — especially scientific education — is expensive, 

 and it tends to increase in expensiveness. But I have sometimes wished that, 

 before money is poured into the exchequers of the universities, a Commission, 

 composed of men who are fully sympathetic with academical culture and yet 

 have been trained in the habits of business, could issue a report upon the use 

 now made by the universities and by the colleges of the funds which they 

 severally command. I am of opinion that such a Commission would not prove 

 unable to suggest the possibility of large economies which might be carried 

 out without impairing the efficiency of the universities as seats of learning, or 

 even of the colleges as homes for the students whose proper object in their 

 academical life is to acquire learning. 



All that remains is to offer an opinion in some few brief words upon some 

 subordinate matters of academical education. 



There is something to be said in favour of, but more perhaps to be said 

 against, the proposal for two concurrent kinds of degrees, the degrees of Bachelor 

 and Master in Arts and of Bachelor and Master in Science. For the academical 

 degree possesses a recognised advantage as setting one and the same hall-mark 



