With the provision of new buildings, spacious class-rooms and admirable laboratories, designed by an artist who has left the impress of his genius upon some of the most noteworthy architectural features of the city, Manchester now realized that it possessed a temple of learning of which it might well be proud. And there can be little doubt that this fact quickened the local feeling in favour of the realization of that hope which, however faint at times, had persisted, in spite of many disappointments, for more than two hundred years. A few months after the College had been installed in its new premises, Roscoe and his colleagues, Professor Ward—now Sir A. W. Ward, the Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge—who was then Professor of History in Manchester, Principal Greenwood, and Professor Morgan, took the first effective steps towards this consummation. The historian of Owens College thus testifies to their action: It is to the zeal and untiring devotion of these four gentlemen (wrote Mr. Joseph Thompson) that Manchester owes its university; others cordially supported the movement, but they, through five weary years, placed their case before the public, removed prejudices, advanced good arguments, and lived down opposition. Roscoe has himself told the story of how he attempted to move Lancashire through the local Press, and strove to create a public opinion in favour of the project, for, as he clearly recognized, without public support nothing could be accomplished. He sought to show how the establishment of a new university in the North would benefit the great middle classes of the community in which it was placed, and what its influence might be expected to be upon the great hives of industry in the most densely populated districts of the kingdom. It was, he said, to be “The University of the Busy,” as distinguished from the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge—“The Universities of the Wealthy.” He pointed to the existence of the Scottish universities, and explained what their influence had been for generations back on the middle and poorer classes of their country. Was not Lancashire, with its many populous manufacturing towns, as fully entitled to the advantages of a university as the cities over the Border? The time had passed for imagining that Oxford and Cambridge, rich and powerful though they were, could do all that England legitimately required in the way of the highest academic culture. Where was the evidence that the establishment of provincial universities would lower the tone of higher education, or that the creation of new avenues to degrees would injuriously affect the reputation of those symbols of culture? That “many ripe and hopeful wits” among the youth of Manchester were well qualified for and desirous of receiving university training, but who, for a variety of reasons, could not go to the older universities, was no less true now than in Cromwell’s time.