The Germans dominate the intellectual world by virtue of the same simple secret as that which made Napoleon the master of old Europe.  They have declared la carriere ouverte aux talents, and every Bursch marches with a professor’s gown in his knapsack.  Let him become a great scholar, or man of science, and ministers will compete for his services.  In Germany, they do not leave the chance of his holding the office he would render illustrious to the tender mercies of a hot canvass, and the final wisdom of a mob of country parsons.

In short, in Germany, the universities are exactly what the Rector of Lincoln and the Commissioners tell us the English universities are not; that is to say, corporations “of learned men devoting their lives to the cultivation of science, and the direction of academical education.”  They are not “boarding schools for youths,” nor clerical seminaries; but institutions for the higher culture of men, in which the theological faculty is of no more importance, or prominence, than the rest; and which are truly “universities,” since they strive to represent and embody the totality of human knowledge, and to find room for all forms of intellectual activity.

May zealous and clear-headed reformers like Mr. Pattison succeed in their noble endeavours to shape our universities towards some such ideal as this, without losing what is valuable and distinctive in their social tone!  But until they have succeeded, a liberal education will be no more obtainable in our Oxford and Cambridge Universities than in our public schools.

If I am justified in my conception of the ideal of a liberal education; and if what I have said about the existing educational institutions of the country is also true, it is clear that the two have no sort of relation to one another; that the best of our schools and the most complete of our university trainings give but a narrow, one-sided, and essentially illiberal education—­while the worst give what is really next to no education at all.  The South London Working-Men’s College could not copy any of these institutions if it would.  I am bold enough to express the conviction that it ought not if it could.

For what is wanted is the reality and not the mere name of a liberal education; and this College must steadily set before itself the ambition to be able to give that education sooner or later.  At present we are but beginning, sharpening our educational tools, as it were, and, except a modicum of physical science, we are not able to offer much more than is to be found in an ordinary school.

Moral and social science—­one of the greatest and most fruitful of our future classes, I hope—­at present lacks only one thing in our programme, and that is a teacher.  A considerable want, no doubt; but it must be recollected that it is much better to want a teacher than to want the desire to learn.