Page:University Reform - Two Papers.djvu/12

8 our hands the information necessary for us in inaugurating such a measure. That such a supposition should exist is to me most portentous. That a careful study of the information therein contained should induce anybody to believe that the time is ripe for framing a final scheme for disposing of the revenues therein described is to me incredible. Those who believe that that time is come must have been deluded by the erroneous and misleading inferences of the first volume of the three the Commission has issued; inferences which have been repudiated by nearly all those who have the best capacity for judging of them, and which, after all that has been written, anybody at all acquainted with college property can easily test for himself.

Even within the limits of that thin blue volume, however, there is quite sufficient to guide a careful reader to the conclusion, how little the information so copiously supplied in the later volumes affords which can be taken as a basis for a comprehensive measure of financial distribution.

The colleges that have availed themselves to the full of the powers given under the University Estates Acts of 1858 and 1860, have done a good deal to free their estates from the control of their tenants, and to develope their revenues; but this has been done by laying mortgages on the estates, from which they will not be free by the end of the century.

The colleges that have proceeded more leisurely in the process chalked out for them by these Acts, though not borrowers to this extent, have entered upon financial proceedings which cannot be arrested without great detriment to the property and which will last out the century.