life. But it is not fair to impose these sacrifices upon boys who are, as apprentices, learning the principles underlying their trade, and who are paid only small wages on the understanding that their masters teach these principles. In 1889 I introduced a bill into the Kensington Parliament compelling employers to provide such instruction during the working hours. Reforms of all kinds proceed with exasperating slowness, but already many employers are carrying out this idea.
In some things we reformers have made way. It is now recognized almost everywhere that examinations ought to be conducted mainly by the teachers of a student. I have often put the matter in this way: Huxley used to teach about forty students in biology; we can not imagine better teaching. But if those students had only wanted to pass the examination of London University, it is quite certain that they would have done very much better by attending the class of a cheap crammer. A university consisting of two, three, or more federated colleges is very little better than a mere outside examining body, and this is what London University has always been. I am glad that a change towards something better is now about to take place. A number of separate universities would be better, but in two years or less, probably, the colleges of London will conduct their own intermediate and degree examinations. One result will be that when a man gets his degree he will not shut up his books forever.
I would, however, point out that Old London University, which was a mere examining body, served an exceedingly important purpose. This statement may seem curious coming from a person who has always railed at London University as a mere examining board. I still say that it was never a university at all in the past. But a man reading hard by himself, perhaps far away from a college, could have a severe test applied to his acquirements which encouraged him in his studies when he had no other encouragement, and the test was very rightly a severe test. To do away with its outside examinations altogether, as I believe is the intention of the authorities, will be exceedingly harmful. It would be impertinent in me to make a suggestion as to the distinction which might be made between a degree conferred by his own professors upon a man who has attended regularly a college of repute, and a degree conferred by a mere examining body upon an outside student. For the first, the examination test may be easy. The Oxford and Cambridge pass degree examinations are quite easy, and rightly so, for the real qualification is that an undergraduate shall have lived for three years in the intellectual and cultured life of an Oxford or Cambridge college. In the other case the mere examination is the only test, and it is rightly very severe. The two kinds of degree differ altogether in quality. In a new country of great distances I can imagine many good secondary schools to be established having neither sufficient funds nor sufficient pupils to be qualified as universities. Yet it may be of enormous importance that
