of them have fallen. ... I appeal to any Oxonian whether—with the exception of the Latin and Greek languages and a fair proportion of the corresponding history—there is any one of these subjects for which Oxford is even a third-rate school." He goes on to relate that, when he himself was in Oxford, the candidate for the degree of Doctor of Divinity implied no theological learning whatever; "a candidate had simply to read aloud an old composition lent him by the clerk—it mattered not what, so that it lasted an hour—and this was his sufficient scientific qualification."[1] Parliament has made various imbecile attempts to improve the vast corruption which is in the universities the fountain-head of the English Church, and the Salisbury government have announced another. None of them has reached the seat of the disease, which is the arbitrary bestowal of rewards and positions without service rendered. Class interest has hitherto been too strong for reform, just as it long was in upholding the practice of purchasing commissions in the army; and Oxford, with ludicrous pageant and solemnity, continues to spend its income of above two million dollars in repressing the progress and intellect of England.
It might be expected that the great schools of England—Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Westminster, and others of that class—would display like characteristics; and, indeed, evidence on this point is sufficiently abundant. In 1861 public clamor induced Parliament to appoint a commission to investigate these institutions, and it unearthed a mass of corruption and absurd practices such as staggers belief. Here the facts can only be briefly summarized. It was found that the revenues of the institution were absorbed by those in control. Head-masters received from twenty to thirty-five thousand dollars annually, besides the right of presentation to numerous church livings, and the Fellows contrived to appropriate most of what the head-masters left. There was found to be an astonishing dearth of general culture among the students: few newspapers were read, Shakespeare and Milton were hardly known, and even Scott and Thackeray were too heavy for the "disciplined" brains of most of the students. Science was an unknown field. Music, geography, history, and drawing were likewise conspicuous by their absence. One of the schools introduced mathematics as late as 1845, and one graduate was found who did not know that there was such a thing as the multiplication-table! The same thing appears everywhere.
The quality of beer and mutton which supported the students in their arduous intellectual labors was found to have been uniformly bad through several generations; the practice of giving bad beer and bad mutton had ingrained itself into the noble British constitution, and could not be changed. One of the provosts testified before the committee that he objected to the teaching of science, "because it is scarcely seventy years old." English literature and composition were
- ↑ Introduction to Huber, pp. xxv-xxvii.
