scholar from the other end,—not subject, happily, to an age-limit,—who will find here a delightful and instructive opportunity of enlarging his outlook on the world, and more particularly on the field of education.
As usage prescribes that the work of this Section, as of others, should be opened by an address from the Chair, I have ventured to take a subject suggested by one of the most striking phenomena of our time,—the growing importance of that part which Universities seem destined to play in the life of nations.
Among the developments of British intellectual life which marked the Victorian age, none was more remarkable, and none is more important to-day, than the rapid extension of a demand for University education, and the great increase in the number of institutions which supply it. In the year 1832 Oxford and Cambridge were the only Universities south of the Tweed, and their position was then far from satisfactory. Their range of studies was too narrow; their social operation was too limited. Then, by successive reforms, the quality of their teaching was improved, and its scope greatly enlarged; their doors were opened to classes of the community against which they had formerly been closed. But meanwhile the growing desire for higher education,—a result of the gradual improvement in elementary and secondary training,—was creating new institutions of various kinds. The earliest of these arose while access to Oxford and Cambridge
