And, as the claim of poverty is to be extinguished within Oxford itself, so are those institutions which were to supply claimants to be robbed in their turn. Here is the sentence of disfranchisement for a multitude of provincial grammar-schools throughout England. No preference to any scholarship shall be accorded to any school except such school shall contain one hundred scholars. Is this wisdom and justice? Will the towns of Appleby, Abingdon, Ashburton, Bromsgrove, Coventry, Hereford, Marlborough, Reading, Tiverton, Worcester, call this a liberal scheme? Will you withdraw from these places the fruits of the munificence, often, of some grateful townsman, and deprive them of the only hope of a good classical education for their sons? For be it remembered, it is not merely the two or three boys here and there, who are the fortunate holders of these helps to study, who are benefited thereby—it is the many that, thus encouraged to exertion, and the still greater number who have the advantage of first-rate masters, whom these very scholarships have attracted to these schools. And is there no injustice to such men themselves?—who have given up perhaps fair prospects at Oxford, resigned fellowships, married wives, and carried their talents into remote districts of England to take charge of country schools, which two lines of this bill are to empty for ever? Then the absurd estimate of the efficiency of a school by its actual numbers—giving it a scholarship, we suppose, when it had the even hundred, and next year destroying it for lack of five. A school may be in a high state of efficiency, and yet never reach near a hundred boys. Bridgnorth, Oakham, Uppingham, when in the last generation they ranked almost as public schools, did not; Bromsgrove has not ninety, Repton just sixty, at the present time. Are these inefficient places of education? We are estranging the middle classes from us day by day. With all our large professions, we are a narrow-minded age. It has been well remarked, how, in olden times, many of our great divines were sons of tradesmen.[18] This enactment would close in great measure the avenues by which the Church was meant to draw into its ranks those who now, partly in ignorance, shrink from her teaching.