Page:University Reform - Two Papers.djvu/24

20 Such, if I may venture to predict, will be the case with this new reform. It will throw the University and the colleges into a ferment for the next three or four years, dissipate useful energy, and afford amusement to the enemies of the University. By the time we have each of us got some kind of constitution, we shall be so weary of reform that abuses, such as must grow up under any system left to work itself, will grow up unchecked and uncared for. Those who will then try to amend what needs amending will be denounced again as tinkerers, and by the year 1900 the University will be ready for a new body of Commissioners.

What the interests of education here and in England require is not a pulling down and building up again every quarter of a century, but such a permanent union with the central administration, as, while securing us freedom to develope in our own way, enables us, not once in twenty-five years, but as often as occasion requires, to change a detail, to add an improvement, to remove a disability or abuse.

The impotence of the present proposal even to remedy our present inconveniences appears from the notable omissions of Lord Salisbury's speech. From one point of view it is doubtless matter of thankfulness that the religious question does not crop up in his speech at all. In the "Times" report even the name of religion does not occur. In the "Standard," which reports the speech in the first person, it only occurs towards the close, in conjunction with learning and education, to turn a rhetorical phrase. Yet the Bill cannot pass through the Commons without a fight about clerical restrictions; or if, by misfortune, it should, each college must gird