The universities hold the central position in this matter, and it is their influence and wealth which the State should insist on directing towards the extension and diffusion of science. Those who address the public on this subject not infrequently take what seems to me to be a disastrous line at the start. They speak of the new universities as the universities of the people, and hand over Oxford and Cambridge, with their enormous endowments, their history and tradition, to the wealthy class. Such usurpation cannot be tolerated. It is monstrous that the endowments of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which were thoroughly popular and democratic in their foundation, should be, even for a moment, regarded as the peculiar property of the wealthy. It is also monstrous to suppose that it is anything less than disastrous to consign the well-to-do classes in any community to an empty sham of ancient “culture” rather than to imbue them with the real and inspiring culture of the modern renaissance. It is because this notion is allowed to gain ground that the enormous funds of the colleges and universities of Oxford and Cambridge, amounting to more than three-quarters of a million pounds annually, are to a large extent, though not exclusively, employed in keeping up a couple of huge boarding-schools, which are shut for six months in the year. It is owing to this that it is the rarest thing to find in Oxford or in Cambridge a great teacher who lectures or demonstrates to an eager following of disciples. An overwhelming majority of the young men who go as students to these universities have no intention of studying anything. They are sent there in order to be submitted to college discipline and to have, subject to that safeguard, a good time. A large number are handsomely paid by scholarships in order to induce them to go there—and would not go there at all unless they were so paid. They do not find such teachers there and such an effective occupation of their student years as would induce them, if unpaid, to seek the university, or to pay fees out of their own pockets for the opportunities of seriously pursuing any branch of learning or science within its walls.