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 also done good work for the nation by forming characters in which at least some measure of liberal education has been combined with manliness.

That, however, is no longer the only ground upon which they can claim to be national. The successive reforms which have been accomplished since 1850 have been directed to remedying or mitigating the two principal defects, narrowness of study, and narrowness of social operation. The range of studies has been immensely enlarged; and though much remains to be done, it may be said of both Universities that at no previous time have they been the seats of intellectual work at once so highly organised and so varied. Within the last twenty-five years, too, their doors have been opened to whole classes of the community against which they were once closed.

But the historian of the future will see something still more distinctive of our time in the spirit which has moved the Universities to take up a new position in regard to national education beyond their own precincts. In the course of the thirty-five years since the Local Examinations were established, the Universities have done much towards elevating and organising secondary education in the schools concerned, and have thus contributed something, at least, towards supplying what is still the chief need in our educational system. Larger and more fruitful still has been the working of that later but essentially kindred movement which, twenty years ago, this