There is yet one principle boldly laid down in this bill—for one principle it is under several forms—so cruel and so unwise, involving such a deep wrong to the memory of the dead, and such contempt for the claims of the living, that it forms alone one of the most solemn questions ever submitted to the decision of the legislature. Beneath this great injustice—if once it pass into law—all the minor evils of this measure may take shelter and be forgotten. If Parliament, more faithful to Oxford than her own sons and representatives, shall deliver her from this, we know of no surrender of her liberties which would be too great a price to pay. It is proposed by this bill to take away the heritage of the poor; Oxford is to be no more what she has been for above five hundred years—“the almshouse of noble poverty.” It is by the merest rule of consequence that the same hands sweep away the rights of families, of counties, and of schools. “No preference shall, after the passing of this Act, be accorded to any candidate by reason of birthplace, kinship, education at any school, or Indigence, over any other person of superior fitness in character and attainments,” (clause xxviii). These are the words. Then follow some grudging exceptions in favour of kinship, of districts, and of schools; none in behalf of poverty. For this wholesale confiscation the Commissioners had striven hard to prepare the public mind; voices within the walls of Oxford itself had shamefully avowed it as their object; the doctrine of “open competition” and “abolition of preferences” has been preached as an intellectual gospel; and still good and wise men have been slow to realise its growth: whilst those against whose rights it is aimed are lured into a blind belief in it.
Let the people of England look to it. If their old adage be true, that “learning is better than house and land,” a heritage is passing from them. “The nation has a claim to the national universities,” it is said. If it means anything, it means this—that rank, and wealth, and worldly position are not to hold them, to the exclusion of the poor seeker after knowledge. Will they believe us, if we tell them, that the great and good men who in other days built and endowed these colleges, said more than this; they said the poor alone should hold the seats of honour there, if they could prove that they were led by the love of learning to enter in and take possession. The sons of the rich and noble might resort there for education; but their fellowships and their scholarships, endowed by their bounty, were for the poor for ever. Is this truth disputed? Is there any moral doubt that the poor scholars of England are the true heirs of the “city of palaces,” any more than of the true purpose of the Hospital of St Cross, which has just engaged so much of the public attention? Is there one whit more iniquity in Lord Guildford’s acts, than there will be in this act, if it passes? We believe that in this case, as well as in that, the public is not awake to the fact, and needs to have the wrong set very plainly before them in order to appreciate it. Ancient statutes—even were the handwriting legible, and the Latin easy—are not popular reading. Yet there are some things in them which would open, to many a shrewd reader amongst our middle classes, a new chapter of the rights of man. It might form a novel, and not wholly unprofitable, theme for a popular lecturer to teach his hearers that the Scholars or Fellows of Oriel were, by the founder’s will, to be not only “casti et humiles” but “indigentes;” not necessarily first- or second-class men, who had spent large sums of money upon private tutors, but merely “ad studium habiles,” “proficere volentes;” that the same qualifications, nearly word for word, repeated as a sacred formula, are those for the Scholars or Fellows of the rich and noble foundations of St John’s, of Merton, of Balliol; that at Magdalen—perhaps now the most luxurious of all our colleges—they were, and are commanded by the same statutes, by which they claim to hold their rich endowments, to elect “pauperes et indigentes,” guarding the rights of the poor by a double title. And it might not be uninstructive to trace the different interpretations put, in different ages, upon those strange old Latin words—especially the last new interpretation of them; and, by the help of grammar and dictionary, impressing upon an audience, by this time somewhat interested, the rapid advance made, in this age of progress, and under a government of progress, both in the philosophy of language and the recognition of popular rights. There is many an honest Radical, hating a parson or a lord, who no doubt chuckles over reform in any shape, but especially reform of the universities—they being, as it were, hot-beds for raising parsons, and lords, and such-like. He regards this bill as a little step in the way in which we are to go,—not much, but something,—“the beginning of the end,” as our clever friend of the Examiner has it. He thinks it is to “throw open” the good things to his children which the higher classes have hitherto been giving away quietly among each other. Such men look upon Oxford as aristocrat, and the Commission as the popular champion. Never was a more complete delusion. Who will be the fortunate claimants for these “open” scholarships, which are to be wrested, as Mr Woodgate ably and eloquently shows, from country grammar-schools to which the middle classes resort, from districts which some benevolent founder, risen himself to wealth from a humble origin, wished in his grateful affection to connect with his name for ever—in some cases from orphans—who are to inherit them? They are to be rewards of “merit;” we have so much unrewarded merit going about in this generation; and merit is nothing now without reward. It will be, in nine cases out of ten, boys from the head forms of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster—
“Magnis centurionibus orti.”
The sons of parents who can afford to spend one or two hundred per annum upon their education,—who have had advantages of every kind, which the poor curate’s or the country tradesman’s son can never hope for,—who should need no such incentives to study, as they need no such help in its pursuit. Are these the classes for which founders bequeathed their wealth? Hear the good William of Wykeham, one of the most magnificent of Oxford benefactors—whose too princely foundations are, as it would appear, never to be allowed to do the noble and pious work for which he intended them—“I will have,” says he, “not those already learned, skilled in letters, wealthy, accomplished in arts.” His gifts were wisdom to those who sought after wisdom, and help to those who needed help to seek it.
It is curious to mark the poverty of argument amongst the champions—of all parties—who advocate this nefarious spoliation. “Fellowships and scholarships,” says the Edinburgh Reviewer, “have now become situations of influence and honour; it would be wrong to appoint men to these simply because they are poor.”[[16]] Let the words go down to posterity as the expression of the sentiments of our self-styled friends of the people: because the poor man’s heritage has increased, it may be his no longer—what has he to do in situations of “honour and influence?” “Because he is poor?” No; but because, being poor, with the many disadvantages which poverty entails, he has proved himself “ad studendum habilis et idoneus”—“proficere volens”—these must be his claims besides poverty; and they may involve at least as high an order of “merit” as any mere examination-test of acquirements. Hear again, in the same strain, Professor Garbett. University emoluments, according to him, are “the intellectual property of the nation.”[[17]] Now, if this be a mere flower of diction—a vox artis—if, being Professor of Poetry, he thought he was nothing if not poetical, we have nothing more to say—it may pass for what it is worth. But if it be put forth as a serious prosaic assertion—if he means to say that the wealth of Oxford is the property of mere intellect, then is Professor Garbett the strongest of all living arguments against professorial teaching. We are then to deify intellect; to this idol we are to sacrifice the rights of the poor, the claims of kindred and of neighbourhood. Does he know who is the impersonation of intellect unsanctified?
And, as the claim of poverty is to be extinguished within Oxford itself, so are those institutions which were to supply claimants to be robbed in their turn. Here is the sentence of disfranchisement for a multitude of provincial grammar-schools throughout England. No preference to any scholarship shall be accorded to any school except such school shall contain one hundred scholars. Is this wisdom and justice? Will the towns of Appleby, Abingdon, Ashburton, Bromsgrove, Coventry, Hereford, Marlborough, Reading, Tiverton, Worcester, call this a liberal scheme? Will you withdraw from these places the fruits of the munificence, often, of some grateful townsman, and deprive them of the only hope of a good classical education for their sons? For be it remembered, it is not merely the two or three boys here and there, who are the fortunate holders of these helps to study, who are benefited thereby—it is the many that, thus encouraged to exertion, and the still greater number who have the advantage of first-rate masters, whom these very scholarships have attracted to these schools. And is there no injustice to such men themselves?—who have given up perhaps fair prospects at Oxford, resigned fellowships, married wives, and carried their talents into remote districts of England to take charge of country schools, which two lines of this bill are to empty for ever? Then the absurd estimate of the efficiency of a school by its actual numbers—giving it a scholarship, we suppose, when it had the even hundred, and next year destroying it for lack of five. A school may be in a high state of efficiency, and yet never reach near a hundred boys. Bridgnorth, Oakham, Uppingham, when in the last generation they ranked almost as public schools, did not; Bromsgrove has not ninety, Repton just sixty, at the present time. Are these inefficient places of education?
We are estranging the middle classes from us day by day. With all our large professions, we are a narrow-minded age. It has been well remarked, how, in olden times, many of our great divines were sons of tradesmen.[[18]] This enactment would close in great measure the avenues by which the Church was meant to draw into its ranks those who now, partly in ignorance, shrink from her teaching.
Here then, or never, the Universities must take their stand. This is no struggle for privileges. It cannot be said that colleges have any interest in keeping up a preference for the poor. Rather, most unhappily, their tendency has been to pass over these claims, not being fonder of poor connections than the world in general is—preferring the scholar and the gentleman, and merging the preference into a poor “cæteris paribus.” Perhaps—not unnaturally—corporations, like individuals, require to be often recalled to homely duties. In this, as in other points, Oxford has not been immaculate. Let her make amends. Let us hear no more of “poor halls,” when almost every one of her proudest buildings should be an “Hospitium Pauperum Scholarium.” Much of what she holds to be her legal rights may be given up for the sake of peace—obedience to lawful, though arbitrary authority; some things indifferent may even be sacrificed as popular concessions; but in this there must be no compromise—in this she is a steward for God.
ANCIENT AND MODERN FORTRESSES.
Having been moved to put together some ideas on ancient fortresses, with a slight unprofessional glance at modern fortifications, we feel at a loss to say whether the subject was suggested by the prospect of a European war, or by finding, on turning up page 52 of the second volume of Edward King’s Munimenta Antiqua, the curious statement about famous Conisborough Castle, “that, if a person chances to stand in the least degree nearly opposite to any one of the buttresses, the whole building appears, notwithstanding its perfect rotundity, to be a square tower instead of a round one.”