So when the Universities are at last confronted with that great Day of Reckoning which is continually held over their heads by external enemies, and which timorous friends are always trying to stave off by grudging concessions and half-hearted sympathy with Movements; when we are brought to the bar of that grand and final commission, which is once for all to purge Oxford and Cambridge of their last remnants of mediaevalism, and bring them into line with the marching columns of modern Democracy; when the judgment is set and the books are opened, we may hope that some extenuating circumstances may be found to set against the long enumeration of academic crimes. There will be no denying that Oxford has been the home of dead languages and undying prejudice. It will be admitted as only too true that Natural Science students were for many years compelled to learn a little Greek, and that colleges have not been prepared to sacrifice the greater part of their immoral revenues to the furtherance of University Extension; and we shall have to plead guilty to the damning charge of having returned two Tory members to several successive Parliaments. All this Oxford has done, and more; there is no getting out of it. Yet her counsel will be able to plead in her favour that once at least she has been found not retarding the rear, but actually leading the van of nineteenth-century progress; for it will hardly be denied that if the Universities did not invent the Examination System, at least they were among the first to welcome and to adapt it; and that if it had not been for the development of examinations, qualifying and competitive, at Oxford and Cambridge, the ranks of the Civil Service would have continued for many years longer to be recruited by the bad old method of nomination (commonly called jobbery and nepotism by the excluded), and society would, perhaps, never have realised that a knowledge of Chaucer is among the most desirable qualifications for an officer in Her Majesty’s Army. Here, at least, the Universities have been privileged to set an example.