It is true, we are told there is a new aristocracy rising in England, and that the English universities are gaining no hold upon the coming generation of "chiefs of industry." It would be far better for our social condition that these same chiefs of industry should be educated men, and should pass through a training which might tend to neutralise the power of the mercantile iron in entering into their soul. But at present the race to be rich is so strong and hardly contested, that this class is hardly likely, in general, to devote their scions to academical studies of any description; and the merchant or manufacturer who came from the banks of Isis or Cam, at the age of twenty-one, to the Exchange or the Cloth-hall, would find himself starting under a most heavy disadvantage as compared with his neighbour of the same age, who had spent the last three or four years in a counting-house. The reason that this class is not commonly trained in the national seminaries, is to be sought in the habit and requirements of the class, and not in the nature of the education afforded them. We have spoken chiefly of Cambridge, because Cambridge has put herself forward as the representative of a system of so-called university reform--of a certain movement in the direction of that principle which would accommodate the education of our higher classes to the caprice of a popular cry or cant phrase. We care not so much whether that movement in itself be advantageous or the reverse: it is against the principles supposed to be involved in it that we protest. The report goes, that changes of some kind or other are contemplated at Oxford also. If these changes be made, we trust that they will not be devised in deference to the noisier portion of the public, or to that fondness for short-cuts to knowledge, which fritters away the energies of the rising man in the collection of desultory facts, and the dependence upon shallow plausibilities. The Scottish universities, too, are likely to be put to the test in the same manner as their sisters of the Southern kingdom; and the questions raised cannot be uninteresting to them.