The Universities, hating to be reformed, and allowing the misuse of their resources by undergraduates, sometimes described by Rhodes scholars as “British babes,” have been unable to do their part for the nation. They have stood aside from elementary education, only coldly tolerating the establishment of training colleges in their neighbourhood, and only timidly following a few of their members when they have led the way in the extension of University teaching. It may almost be said that they have lost influence over public opinion, and that their mission of raising the tone of democracy, of clarifying human sympathies and elevating human preferences have passed to other hands. A recent visitor to India remarked on his return that many of its difficulties seemed due to its government by “unreformed Oxford,” and reflecting on the strike, one is led to say that some of its most disturbing features are due to unreformed Universities. II. There is something more needed, if not demanded, than a rise of wages. A few more shillings a week would soon be absorbed by men whose first use of leisure is in the enjoyment of somewhat sordid forms of sport. The men are hardly to be blamed for what are condemned as low tastes and brutal pleasures. They are what their environment has made them, and a mining village is not likely to develop a love of home-making, a taste for beauty, or any joy in the use of the higher faculties of admiration, hope, and love. The long, grimy rows of houses, without any distinctive features by which a man might recognize and become proud of his home. The absence of gardens which would call him to enjoy nature and be its fellow-worker; the want of a bathroom other than a tub in the sitting-room, by which to feel clean from the dirt of the day; the meanness of such public buildings as are provided--the church, the library, or the meeting-hall--do not provoke his soul to admiration or stir up a thirst for knowledge; such surroundings are likely to make the miner content with his pigeons, his dogs, and his football matches. Why, it may be asked, have not more owners done what some owners have done, and make a Bournville or a Port Sunlight for the workpeople. If out of the average 10 per cent profits, it is impossible to provide an appreciable addition to the men’s weekly wages, it is not impossible to provide better and pleasanter housing. Why is it that owners and managers, who by many acts have shown themselves to be people of goodwill, have been content that workmen should live under conditions which unfit them to enjoy the best things: why is it that with all their charity they miss their opportunity? The fault lies, I believe, largely with the Church--Established and Free. The Church has too often gone on preaching a mediæval system, it has not moved with the times, and does not recognize that goodwill to-day must find other ways of charity than those trodden by our fathers, when they built almshouses and provided