COMMISSIONERS AND COLLEGES.

HEN in April, 1850, Mr. Heywood invited the members of the House of Commons to join him in an address to the Crown for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Universities, the friends of those institutions confidently anticipated that the invitation would be at once declined. An easy victory over the troublesome reformer was expected on all sides, and apparently with good reason; for the influence which those corporations had exercised for so many years upon the classes from which our legislators are for the most part taken was admitted to be great, and the esteem in which they were held by the country at large was high. Nor had they neglected the more obvious means of resisting the attacks of their assailants. Oxford had secured as her Chancellor the Great Duke, who was said to command majorities in the House of Lords; while Cambridge, wiser, as she fancied, in her generation than her sister, had wooed and won the protection of royalty itself, and felt safe under the shadow of the Throne. The exalted connexions, however, which the Universities had formed, availed them as little as their high character against the threatened insult. In the struggle, the simple member of the House of Commons proved stronger than either prince or peer. Mr. Heywood exhibited his bill of indictment against the Universities; and, to the surprise of the Ministerial benches, no less than of the Opposition, Lord John Russell endorsed it by announcing it to be the intention. of his cabinet to advise the Crown to issue the Commission of Inquiry for which the House was invited to ask. Whether this announcement of the noble lord should be attributed to sudden impulse, or to settled purpose, is even now a moot point. Various motives for the course which he took were alleged at the time. Contradictory causes were in turn assumed and discarded. Whatever may have been the moving

cause, however, the effect was produced; and the Ministry pledged itself to use the influence of the Crown to put Oxford and Cambridge to the question.

Upon the first mention of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, its legality was warmly disputed. The lawyers on the Opposition side of the House denied that the Crown had any power to command evidence, or to compel the production of documents; and justly, for the Crown in its administrative capacity is but the Parliamentary synonym for the Ministry of the day. Their assertions were not contradicted. The Crown lawyers contented themselves with alleging in palliation, that the persons deputed by the Commission were only to invite evidence, and to question such as chose to answer; all power of enforcing obedience to their mandates was disclaimed. It occasioned some surprise and remonstrance, therefore, when, on the issuing of the Commission, it was found that the precedents of ante-revolution times had been followed, and that the Commissioners were authorized and empowered to call before them such persons as they might deem necessary, and to call for and examine books, documents, papers, and records. Students of history of course well understood that this grandiloquent charge was but one of the many legal fictions in which Englishmen delight, and by which they contrive to make the same official forms serve for the past power and present impotence of the Sovereign; yet loyal subjects were justified in complaining of the Minister who degraded the Crown by making it play the part of a Glendower.

The Cambridge Commission received the sign-manual on the 31st of August, 1850 A kind of promise had been given that the Commission should be a friendly one; and the promise was kept. While the Commissioners numbered amongst them some well-pronounced University reformers, it could not be said that any one of them was ignorant of the internal working of the institution into which they were to inquire, or hostile to the purposes which it had chiefly served. To this happy selection, as much as to the consciousness that Cambridge and its colleges had nothing to lose by publicity, the success of the Commissioners in obtaining evidence may be fairly attributed. Little advantage was taken of their want of power. Twelve out of the seventeen colleges answered fully and freely all the questions propounded to them. And though it was strongly felt at Cambridge that the appointment of the Commission was in itself a reflection upon the administration of the University and its colleges, yet the members of the

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several foundations were, for the most part, content to forego the means of revenging the insult which the law had placed in their power.

In August, 1852, the Royal Commissioners presented their Report. In it they bore witness to the self sacrificing spirit which has of late years marked the conduct of affairs both in the University and in the colleges, and they acknowledged the promptness with which those bodies had adapted themselves, so far as their statutes permitted, to the requirements of the times. They gave credit to the colleges for the fairness which had been shewn in elections to fellowships and scholarships, and they expressed themselves content with the mode in which those elections had been conducted. With respect to the circle of University studies, they had little to remark beyond expressing their approval of the extension of it which was being carried out, and recommending the further development of a machinery which the University itself had created. In college matters they were equally complacent. Beyond the removal of county and kin restrictions from fellowships and scholarships, and a slight extension of the lay element in the college societies, they recommended no scheme of reform. So far their tendencies were conservative. They were travelling over trodden ground, and their footing was sure. But infallibility is not the prerogative of Commissioners. any more than of Popes. Humanum est errare. And it is not unfair to say that the Royal Commissioners proved most satisfactorily their participation in the common lot. They discovered, as they imagined, a panacea for all existing evils in the revivication of a teaching professoriate. This teaching professoriate formed the great feature of their Report; it was to be the nucleus about which the elements of the reformed University were to crystallize. The professorial system was to be rehabilitated, and a University millennium was to be the consequence. Teachers more eloquent than Abelard, and less erratic, were to draw eager crowds of students round their chairs, and by some charm, unfortunately not yet known, were to close the gaping mouths and open the dull ears of their auditors. The gifted utterances of the hour of inspiration were to be miraculously remembered, and still more miraculously digested by the occupants of the crowded benches. Ipse dixit was again to become the current formula; for each professor was to be a blessed Glendoveer,' whose commission to speak no hearer was to be permitted to question. Oral teaching was thus to resume its long-lost empire. Listen and learn was to be the symbol of initiation into the

professorial schools. Books, it was expected, would be at a discount; for books imply reading, and reading excites thought and arouses criticism, and so unfits the mind for receiving with due docility the professorial outpouring. To provide this teaching professoriate with material sufficiently ductile for its delicate manipulation, a large staff of public lecturers was to be appointed, who were to be endowed from college funds, not amply indeed, but with enough to create an appetite for more. The usefulness or necessity of private tuition. was to be no longer a vexed question; for such tuition was to be made impossible, as the Commissioners were sanguine enough to hope, by the conversion of each successful private tutor into a public lecturer. Eager and intelligent auditors were thus to be trained for the lecture-room of the professor, with whom the public lecturer was to be always en rapport, and whose docile subordinate he was expected invariably to be; while the professor, on his part, was to be spurred on to super-professorial efforts of explanation and description by 'the excitement of a large class.' There was thus to be no more idleness among either the teachers or the taught. The professors were to be incessantly engaged in composing and holding-forth; while their pupils were to be as incessantly employed in listening and remembering. So that, had

Diogenes pitched his tub in our renovated Cambridge, he must have had it re-hooped to stand the rolling which the sight of so much bustle would have driven him to undertake.

The Report of the Royal Commissioners, of course, excited much attention. This was but its due; for, whatever might be thought of the tendencies of the changes proposed, the weight of the names attached to the Report demanded for its proposals the most thoughtful consideration. Accordingly, a syndicate, composed of representatives from the several colleges, was appointed for the purpose of considering such of the recommendations as more directly affected the University. Although the functions of the syndicate were restricted, by the terms of its appointment, to the consideration of the expediency of adopting measures for augmenting the existing means of teaching the students of the University by public professors and public lecturers, and for regulating and encouraging the studies so taught; yet it was well understood that the syndics were at liberty to discuss the whole subject of educational reform, as treated of in the Report, and to provide means for carrying into effect such of the recommendations as they might deem advisable. Their representative constitution was supposed to give them a peculiar aptitude for such a work. And, so far indeed as the critical element

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was involved, the syndicate turned out to be admirably fitted for the duties imposed upon it. Every project of educational reform which was brought before it was thoroughly, it might even be said mercilessly, analysed. Consequently, though much time was occupied in discussing various schemes, little which could be made the subject of legislation resulted from their deliberations. Yet they did their work. The chief points of the Report were fully discussed. Many errors were exploded. The glaring defects of the professorial system of teaching were balanced against its apparent merits, and were found far to outweigh them. The grand scheme of public lecturers by which the system was to be propped was seen to be a costly and hazardous experiment, unlikely to answer even the end which the Commissioners hoped to attain, and calculated to secure little beyond the establishment of a batch of University sinecures endowed from college funds. The halo of glory with which the imagination of the Commissioners had invested their creation of a teaching professoriate, paled before. the common-sense gaze of those whom experience had made familiar with the material of which the great majority of University students are composed; and the result was, that the syndicate did not think it expedient to recommend the adoption of any measures for augmenting the existing means of teaching the students of the University by public professors and public lecturers.

It is difficult to understand how this system of a teaching. professoriate can have acquired even a temporary popularity; for the idea of education on which it is based seems altogether erroneous. That idea assumes, implicitly, that it is the sole province of the instructor to communicate knowledge, without caring to ascertain in the process if the recipient is capable of appropriating what is communicated to him, or even of understanding what he hears. It assumes that the pupil will be always attentive, and that his memory will never fail. It assumes, moreover, that the lecture will be of that even, commonplace character which excites no pregnant ideas in the mind, and suggests no lines of thought beyond those which the professor himself pursues. The lecturer may be amusing, rhetorical, superficial; but he must not be profound or suggestive; for depth excites thought, for which the hearer has not time, and suggestions call up associations, which distract and absorb. If the professor is to teach the large class, by the excitement of which he is to be stimulated to exertion, he must content himself with the delivery of a lecture either written or extempore, and must presume upon the attention of his hearers. If he proceeds with a continuous line of argument, he will