Page:University Reform - Two Papers.djvu/13

Rh Some colleges, Brasenose especially, have not thought the facilities granted by the Acts great enough, and the emancipation and development of their property has yet to be begun. Arrangements which are to last even for half a century, to say nothing of permanent arrangements, cannot be based upon calculations resting upon data so fleeting and uncertain as the statements of revenue and expenditure of corporations which are going through such financial processes as these.

The estimates of probable improvement in the value of the college property given by the Commissioners are thoroughly valueless, possess, perhaps, the least value of any part of their singularly unequal reports. The conditions upon which they are dependent have not even been ascertained by the Commissioners to be in operation in the colleges to which the estimates apply.

But all this is probably more interesting to a Bursar than to anybody else. I pass on to considerations of more general interest. Let me only claim to have shewn some grounds why the recent Blue Books should not be supposed to afford an argument in favour of an executive Commission at once.

The third point on which I should like to insist has an especial interest for those whom the Master of Balliol once described as waiting to have done with constitution-making and to set to work. The condition of the educational problem in England seems to me clearly to indicate that any present settlement of the University can only be temporary. The great fabric of national education will, we cannot doubt it, one day be reared from the foundations to the sky,