Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/272



tone of the Judicial administration during the past twenty years. We are still, however, far from perfection; and we must now rely to a great extent on the improved legal training of candidates for the Judicial service for a part of the improvement which is desired. Besides the changes in progress in connection with the administration of this University, there are other  changes also in prospect which concern us deeply.We are all deeply interested in the Matriculation Examination, which looms so largely in the view of every schoolboy, whether he intends to enter a college and to read for a degree, or whether he wishes only to qualify for employment in the Government service. Well there can be no question that this examination which every year assumes larger proportions, and every year presents increasing difficulties for those of us who have to carry it out is, in the judgment of many who are well able to form a sound opinion on the point, a gigantic failure. Schoolboys who have passed the Matriculation in order to enter a college not infrequently find themselves unable to understand the lectures which they attend. The Matriculation Examination, in short, furnishes a very insufficient test of a knowledge of English, and again the examination hall is crowded with many candidates who come up for examination long before they are properly prepared, and who thus add to the perplexities of examiners. These results are, of course, most unsatisfactory. The examination, as at present conducted, fulfils most imperfectly the one function for which it exists. I am not expressing my own opinion merely, but that of experienced professors and principals of colleges, who are much better able to advise the Senate in such a matter than I can ever hope to do. And it has been seriously proposed by men of the highest authority that we should abolish the Matriculation Examination as an institution of this University, and leave it to the Colleges themselves, as is done in Oxford and Cambridge, to hold their own Matriculations. I will not now attempt to enter upon a discussion of the merits of the controversy which has thus been raised. I refer to the question only as one which concerns us all, and I ought to inform you that, as weighty representations have been addressed to the Syndicate on the subject, the whole question was referred only last week to a Committee. I should now like to refer to a matter of still greater importance, if possible, and that is the Bill for the  reconstitution of the University, which occupied so much of our attention in the reigns of 1888. That