Page:Founder's Day in War Time.djvu/24

 for the pious remembrance of later generations will be forgotten because our chronicles are dumb. Already the contemporaries of the Founder of our College, of whom a few were known to some of us, have gone to their rest with him; already those who may be called the Founders of our University have for the most part followed. But what it would hardly be a forced figure to call their handiwork still surrounds us; and it is as if in their presence that I remind you of part of what we owe to them and their fellows.

Paradoxically enough, as you well know, the idea of the University of Manchester was of earlier origin than that of Owens College. Henry Fairfax, who, in the year before that of the outbreak of the Great Civil War, petitioned the Long Parliament for the establishment of a northern University, was himself a Yorkshireman; 17