It need not by any means be competition which urges the university to undertake the ‘modern subjects’; it may be, and it is, the persuasion that its rôle does not end with creating a career, that a university possesses advantages extrinsic to the degree taken, or even the work done at it. The truth perhaps is that the present conditions of life afford an object to universities as far-reaching as has ever been allotted to them since their foundation. In these days of haste, and unchewed cuds of learning, they can suggest the value of leisure--and when a man is now sent to Cambridge or Oxford this fact alone is some security that he and his are content not to put haste and quick results above and before everything else. The lazy man we have always with us, the man in a hurry is a modern product, and suffers from a modern disease with which a university is better able, by latent influence and tradition, to deal than any other institution. And when it has taught the value of intellectual digestion, the number of those things which can only be well learnt by being gradually learnt, and in due season, has the university nothing more to teach? Our modern malady of haste, of quick methods, and quick results has a commercial basis, a certain standard of values and returns which is best so described. The academic spirit is the antagonist of this spirit, of the love of publicity, the self-advertisement, the liking for cheap and unearned rewards. Even as a business maxim it is being preached again that work done for its own sake is the only lasting work. The university may be a bulwark against false values in life, against the restlessness which is confounded with action, the constant change which is not the same thing as adaptation, against the prejudice that certain good things are not always and everywhere ends in themselves. And there is another conspicuous service which a university can perform. The commercial standard is the root of our social vulgarity, and the academic life has been in all ages that ‘simple life’ of which we hear so much. It is not necessary for generations of Englishmen to grow up to regard ‘poverty as a crime,’ or to subscribe to the worship of mere prosperity and success. A university may always be a protest against these and other mental vulgarities, against even that debasing of the good coin of the King’s English in which Milton saw the incipient undoing of a nation. What better place for combating the last ridiculous refuge of English _mauvaise honte_--the shamefacedness which prefers to speak one’s own language incorrectly? Something every man at least who reads for a tripos must learn about the uses of work, about its respect, something about breadth of view and accuracy of detail--and also about the legitimate support which such work is in life. It will be said that a man’s personal character and his home life inculcate all these things and give him the means to meet the shafts of outrageous fortune.