Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, No. 463, May, 1854

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BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXIII. MAY, 1854. Vol. LXXV.
On Friday night, April 2, 1854—or rather at half-past one on the Saturday morning—there passed to its second reading in the House of Commons, represented at that time by twenty-four members, a Bill “to make further provision for the good government and extension of the University of Oxford.” A measure, declared by her Majesty’s Government so important as to demand their careful deliberation—heralded by its promoters as a new charter of intellectual liberty for England—denounced by its opponents as unconstitutional and illegal—appears to have commanded, at this crisis of its parliamentary existence, as little of the attention of the House as if it had been a Welsh highway act or an Irish grievance. True, the debate occupied its fair share of the time of the Commons, and filled its due number of columns in the morning papers. If the reporters as well as the speakers found themselves occasionally upon rather difficult ground—making some trifling confusion between “Students” and “Tutors,” and leaving out here and there a negative which must have rather confused their non-academical readers—such little inaccuracies are neither surprising nor important in a debate in which almost every speaker seems to have been anxious to assure his hearers, such as he had, that he meant nothing—at all events, that he did not mean what he said, still less what he might have said on some previous occasion; where the reputed parents of the bill, Lord John Russell and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were rather its apologists than its advocates, promising amendments even before they were proposed; while Mr Blackett, as the organ of the “root-and-branch” men, puzzling himself how to deal with the sop thrown to him and his party—sweet to the taste but far from satisfying—tendered his best thanks for a measure which he concluded by saying “the Liberal members of that House could never adopt.”