ART. IX. THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.

1. Statutes and Regulations made for the University of London by the Commissioners appointed under the University of London Act, 1898; with an accompanying Report. February 1900.

HE task entrusted to the distinguished body of Commissioners appointed under the University of London Act, 1898, has now been accomplished. Lord Davey, the Bishop of London, Sir Owen Roberts, Professor Jebb, Sir Michael Foster, Mr. E. H. Busk, and Dr. Thomas Barlow (in succession to the late Sir William Roberts), with Mr. Bailey Saunders as Secretary, commenced their labours in November of that year; and the draft of their Statutes and Regulations, having been laid before Parliament, awaits the Royal Assent. When the draft becomes law, a long controversy will be ended. A scheme will come into operation which in favourable circumstances ought to exercise a beneficent effect upon higher education in this country. The seats of learning and science in London will be co-ordinated. They will be grouped round an existing centre. They will become parts of a University needing only adequate equipment and maintenance to be worthy of its position in the capital of the British Empire.

More than three centuries have elapsed since the first step was taken to provide students in London with an opportunity of receiving systematic instruction in all the higher branches of knowledge. The first step, like every subsequent advance in the same direction, encountered serious opposition. When Sir Thomas Gresham in 1575 bequeathed his house and garden in Bishopsgate to the purposes of education, and endowed seven professorships in subjects closely corresponding to those taught at the great universities of his day, he found-what other educational reformers have also found that the advancement of learning often receives the severest checks in the very quarters from which support might have been expected. He had to overcome the fears that were entertained at Oxford and Cambridge that his new foundation would irreparably injure the prestige of those ancient homes of learning. Such fears were not, indeed, at the time entirely groundless. In little more than half a century Gresham College was spoken of as academiæ epitome, and it took rank with the great Schools of Divinity and Law which then flourished in London. They had all attained so great a reputation that they were collectively described as an institution' lacking nothing but a common government and the protection of an honourable

Chancellor to be placed side by side with older foundations.' The appendix to Stow's 'Annals' (ed. 1615) included these places of study in a detailed account of the three most famous Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and London.' But for instruction in natural science there was, at least in London, no organised provision; and in 1661 Abraham Cowley, influenced in no small degree by Bacon's sketch of an ideal academy in the New Atlantis,' suggested that experimental philosophy, as he called it, might be advanced by the establishment, on the banks of the Thames, of a college with twenty resident professors, and such laboratories and appliances as might be needed for the investigation of nature. This project, however, was too ambitious to have any chance of being carried out, even in the age that saw the foundation of the Royal Society. It slumbered until the early years of the nineteenth century. Another poet then made the attempt to promote adequate instruction, not only in science, but also in the chief branches of humane learning. In 1825 Thomas Campbell wrote an open letter to Brougham,* to urge the foundation of a University for teaching and examining young men of the middle classes in London. His letter gained him the support of Zachary Macaulay, Grote, James Mill, Tooke, and other men prominent at that time. The sum of 160,000l. was soon collected, and the institution now known as University College, London, was founded in 1826, and opened in 1828, with provision for teaching in all the Faculties then recognised, except Theology. In the following year, in order to meet the objections raised by this deliberate exclusion of the religious element, King's College, London, was established, and in 1831 began its career as a place in which instruction in the doctrines and duties of Christianity, as the same are inculcated by the United Church of England and Ireland, should be for ever combined with other branches of useful education.'

Efforts were soon made to obtain for University College the status of a university and the right to confer degrees. They were strongly opposed, not only by Oxford and Cambridge, on the ground that a society which was unconnected with the Established Church, and taught no system of religion, had no right to confer academical distinction; but also by the medical colleges and schools of London, where the threatened extension of the right to grant a medical or surgical qualification was regarded with alarm. But the wave of liberal opinion which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832 was favourable to the demand. In

Published in the Times,' February 9th, 1825.

1835 the House of Commons carried by a large majority an Address to the Crown, praying for the grant of a Charter to University College with the right of conferring degrees. The Government of the day, considering the interests of King's College and of other institutions likely to be affected, decided to issue two Charters, the one incorporating University College and undertaking to incorporate other institutions of the same kind which might thereafter be established; the other constituting a Board of Examiners to be called the University of London, with power to admit to graduation students educated at University College or King's College or any other institution in London or elsewhere which might, with the consent of the Home Secretary, be afterwards named as an affiliated college. The first Chancellor of the University thus constituted was the Earl of Burlington, father of the present Duke of Devonshire; and the first Vice-Chancellor was Sir John William Lubbock, father of the present Lord Avebury. The Senate was wholly nominated by the Crown. Prominent among its earliest members was Arnold of Rugby, whose endeavours to provide that religious knowledge should be an essential factor in the curriculum for a degree in Arts met with no success. The affiliated colleges soon came to include the chief educational institutions, Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and secular, in the English provinces and in Ireland; and for twenty years the University continued to impose a course of study, to be pursued in one of these institutions, as an indispensable qualification for admission to the examinations for degrees. But in the absence of any power on the part of the Senate to visit these institutions or to regulate the courses of study pursued, and with the natural tendency of the institutions themselves to issue certificates of attendance on different conditions of stringency, or to make them a matter of form, the connexion between the University and its affiliated colleges ceased to have any practical value. In 1858 a new Charter was granted, by which, so far as the degrees in Arts and Laws were concerned, the exaction of a certificate of attendance was abandoned, and the examinations were thrown open freely to all students wherever educated. At the same

time the graduates were admitted as part of the corporate body and permitted to assemble in Convocation. In 1867 special examinations with special diplomas were instituted for women, and in 1878 all the degrees and certificates of proficiency which the University was empowered to bestow were made accessible to women upon precisely the same conditions as applied to men.

Such was the origin and such was the general character of the University of London, as known to the last and the present generations of Englishmen. Its growth in public repute has been great and rapid. The number of the students submitting themselves to the somewhat severe test of the matriculation examination, imposed upon all candidates for admission without regard to the nature of the degree to which they might ultimately aspire, has increased from about three hundred in the year 1858 to upwards of three thousand last year. Located at first in rooms at Somerset House, afterwards at Marlborough House, and now for thirty years in its own building at Burlington Gardens, the University soon came to possess a peculiar significance. It was distinguished as the centre of certain definite tendencies in educational discipline.

In particular, the University of London participated to the full in that renascence of natural science which will hereafter be regarded as the main feature of intellectual progress in the nineteenth century. It perceived, before any other similar body, the advantages which might accrue to science from a proper direction and stimulation of scientific study. It was the first to recognise that the various branches of that study might usefully form a separate department of academic activity, and did in themselves constitute a Faculty no less coherent in conception or definite in range than the old Faculties of Theology, Arts, Law, and Medicine. As the result of this recognition it was the first to confer degrees in Science ; and hitherto it has demanded an elementary knowledge of that subject from all candidates for admission.

Closely allied with what the University of London has done for the investigation of nature is the service which it has rendered to the advancement of medical knowledge. By the high standard which it set up and maintained from the first, the University has not only provided an ideal of study and achievement for the best students in the medical schools of London such as had never been offered to any medical student previously; it has also imparted a vigour and activity to the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, both in London and elsewhere, which has been of inestimable value in their respective spheres; nay more, the benefit of its good example has been felt both at Oxford and Cambridge, where it has directly affected the character of the examinations in medicine and made them much more thorough and comprehensive than was previously the case.

Nor has the University neglected the literary side of education. It was the first to make the English language and

literature a direct and important element in the examinations for a degree in Arts. Its services to philology have in this respect been remarkable, and here, too, it has set an example which has been followed, although tardily, by the older universities. Finally, by its reputation not only for severity but also for fairness, by the distinction of the men of letters and of science whose services it has secured, by the character of its matriculation, intermediate, and final examinations, it has exercised a great influence upon secondary schools and university colleges throughout the United Kingdom. In the last twenty years its operations have had a still larger scope. By the freedom which has enabled it to throw open its portals to all comers, and to provide facilities for the examination of students in all parts of Her Majesty's dominions, the University of London has assumed an Imperial character.

But, far-reaching and beneficent as has been the influence of the University of London, it has hitherto lacked some of the most obvious features of a University, as the word has hitherto been understood. Critics soon pointed out that the provision for higher instruction in London was either inadequate or wanting in co-ordination, and that the University was doing nothing to provide or organise such instruction. They complained that, whatever else the University might be, it was not a confraternity of learned men; that it left no room for any influence on the part of teachers; that it divorced examination from teaching, and tended to make examination an end in itself and the receipt of a certificate the goal of education. They contended, further, that the severity of the standard adopted for matriculation and for the preliminary examination in Science was bearing harshly on the students in the metropolitan medical schools; that such students were thereby debarred from taking their medical degrees in London, and were being compelled in increasing numbers to seek a degree on easier terms elsewhere. This tendency was alleged to be a disadvantage alike to the students themselves, to the University, and to the public, inasmuch as the opportunities of clinical instruction, offered in London to an extent which no other city in the world could approach, were not properly utilised. Finally, they urged that the University had never fostered, and by the very conditions of its existence could never foster, any esprit de corps among its students.

For nearly twenty years the critics both within and without the University continued to criticise. Nothing was done, possibly because most of the critics ignored the circumstances in which the University had its origin and the special purpose