THE New Laboratories tor Physiology and Pathology,* that despite some delaj'S have now 
reached structural completion, are worthy a dies fcstus in our University. They rise 
as one symbol of the recent progress of university life and education in this city. Their 
opening is a more than verbal promise for the future. They are acceptable as an instalment 
of the realization of that scope and aim which to its founders and benefactors the College 
represents. To increase the accessibility of university education to this modern centre of 
population, and to implant that education in the great communities our century has gathered in 
maritime Lancashire and Cheshire and their ' hinterland ' — this object was the birthright of 
University College, allotted to it even before its actual creation. Here where the mother country 
teams with a rich and active people, and faces the successes of her race in sister cities over sea, 
earnest minds have at our end of the century yearned for a loftier local education for the citizen. 
History has reared her recent growths of labour and capital remote from the old thrones where 
mediaevalism and the Renaissance crowned all the iiigher education for the realm. And more 
than that, the desire for fuller local opportunity for the complete training and thinking of citizen- 
ship, has been whetted on the hard self-knowledge of shortcomings in and apatliy towards the 
nation's effort for its children. Facts are eloquent ; the people are becoming aware that the 
renown and the prosperity of the country have, in spite of the boon of a long reign of peace, 
waned under comparative supineness of our governments — supineness in the matter of the In'gher 
education now requisite for enterprises botli of industry and commerce. The day is passed when 
we can speak of the 'learned' professions and mean three, in contradistinction to other vocations 
by antithetic inference 'unlearned.' The engineer, the manufacturer, the agriculturist, the 
shipowner, the raiser of stock, the importer of food, the exporter of goods, all these require as 
much, in many cases more, 'learning,' than do the members of the old professions. Eut 
we have in our conservatism been late to recognise this truth. A rival nation, despite the scourge 
of continental war and the up-keep of armaments far heavier than our own, has by her lavish and 
buoyant university system, supported on the large-handed s)'mpathy of the State, outstripped us of 
late years in progress and invention, especially in the vast industries based on Cliemistry. She 
leads the world in medical discovery. That astute other island race in the Eastern Hemisphere, 
* This ilescription was written for the opening of the Laboratories in October, 1898, and is reprinted by kind permission 
of the Editors of the University College Students' Journal, the Sphinx, Oct., 1898. 
