And the strongest argument in favour of the bill now before Parliament is, that its authors have borrowed from this legitimate source their best enactments. To the Tutors’ Association indeed, especially, Oxford will hereafter in any event confess herself much indebted. Numbering some fifty or sixty of the most able and active college and private tutors—men of all shades of party—practically acquainted with the real wants and difficulties both of College authorities and undergraduates, and conscientiously desirous of remedying them—they took upon themselves, not without some obloquy, an anomalous and quite unrecognised position in the University,—that of a voluntary and independent legislative body, and supplied for a time, in this irregular manner, the defects of the academical constitution. By this gentle pressure from without, the Hebdomadal Board were made aware of the state of public feeling, and were brought to act somewhat more in harmony with it. To them we owe the changes of 1850—changes which, we say again, in many important features we cannot think improvements, and which we quote only in evidence of a progressive tendency. To them we shall owe almost all that is valuable in the Government measure of 1854. For let no one suppose that the bill now introduced by Government is the scheme of her Majesty’s Commissioners. The spirit which dictated their Report peeps out, indeed, here and there, in some of its most objectionable enactments; but, on the whole, their ponderous blue folio has contributed much less than the four modest pamphlets issued by the Tutors’ Association; and when those important modifications shall have been made in it, either in committee or in the Upper House—without which this measure can never become the law of England—it will be difficult for the late commissioners to recognise, in its altered features, the rickety and unpleasant-looking offspring of their own incubations. Their sole representative in the newly-proposed Commission, if he ever takes his seat in the altered company in which he must be rather surprised to find himself, will be called upon to administer an act of a character widely different from the recommendations which received his signature in April 1852. And before we briefly discuss the objections, both of principle and detail, against the bill as it stands, we would first of all draw our readers’ attention to these points of difference.