thirty thousand students were in attendance; and Huber, the learned historian of the universities, says that "the intellectual importance of Oxford at that period is universally acknowledged." At this time the university had none but rented buildings, and little or no land. Endowments did not exist, and every teacher was left to find his own level. The Church and the government now attained a more efficient organization, however, and laid hands upon the universities. The means by which the university became a stepping-stone to the Church and an appendage to the government are not very clear. Monasteries and endowments encouraged the cultivation of such learning as the ecclesiastics considered genuine. The Church and the government gradually acquired intimate and stable relations; and the end of the process was that Oxford, and Cambridge as well, became aristocratic institutions, whose aims and ideas were those of the ruling classes, and whose characters became sociological or political rather than educational. Huber[1] has the following remarkable passage on this point:
"After attaining its greatest external privileges a new process commenced in the university. The number of students diminished but endowments kept increasing, and of course democracy waned rapidly. ... The university became gradually more dependent on fixed possessions and assumed a new impress. It was of course more aristocratic; and did not wholly escape the deadening influence of worldly goods."
Surprising as it may seem, Oxford seems never since to have attained any considerable importance intellectually. From the writings of a contemporary, we learn that the gownsmen became "swollen in mind" and indifferent to learning. Gradually the university became filled with the younger sons of the gentry, who went to the university as the means of ecclesiastical preferment. It is unnecessary to rehearse the facts here summed up; I do not know that they are seriously disputed. Politically, it is well known that the universities have been millstones on the necks of the English people. No progress has been made that they could prevent. Ever fawning on power, they have made it their principal business to obtain pecuniary favors from the government. In this they have been very successful. They early acquired the sole right of presentation to ecclesiastical livings by the bishops and others, and, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, "there would not remain one fifth of the present number of students " without this stimulus. Professor Newman, the translator of Huber, states the effect of all this on Oxford in our own century." An artificial monopoly," he says, "is given to a few accomplishments. ... And here I speak not of the (neglect of the) physical sciences and mathematics—the taste for all which in the University of Oxford has in very recent years actually declined—but, confining our view to the circle of studies which constituted the original basis of the universities, it is extraordinary to see the neglect and decay into which the majority
- ↑ "History of the English Universities," vol. i, p. 76, English translation.
