Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/55

 of change which are at present imminent, as likely to settle the future of the University for any considerable number of years, we must look about us and see whether our staff of historical teachers and searchers is sufficient for present needs, if it is likely to be sufficient for future needs, how by careful speculation and economic arrangement we can best utilise the means which we have a right to expect under any re-apportionment of academic resources. Now I am not prepared to allow that our staff of historical teachers is either sufficient in itself or organised in the best way at the present moment. I am quite sure that, if our study advances during the next ten years in anything like the same ratio in which it has advanced during the last ten years, we shall need more professors and an organisation of teaching, which, like the present organisation of Natural Science professors, may be not so much dependent as we now are on the tutorial system in the colleges. It is most important to observe that, if impending changes alter the collegiate system or affect its available resources, the University will have to supply a large part of the teaching power, now provided by the colleges, in the shape of an increased professoriate or sub-professoriate. I should not like to have to make even an estimate now of the staff that we may require in ten or twenty years, and I should very much deprecate any measure which, taking the present as the standard of our needs, should prevent us from securing such development as the occasion for it may arise. At the present moment we want a Professor of Later Ecclesiastical History, to take up the subject at the point at which the department assigned to the Regius Professor comes to an end. We want a permanent chair of Indian History. The labours of our friend the present Indian Reader have shown us how thoroughly that study, the importance of which can scarcely be over-rated by Englishmen, falls in with the current of our University work. I say a permanent chair, because that is a subject of permanent necessity, not a subject like palæography or numismatology, in which the labours of one good professor may serve for two or three generations, and the endowment of the man is of equal importance with