very highest and purest intentions, would ruin any administrative body unless they were counterpoised by non-professional, common-sense members of recognised weight and authority in the conduct of affairs.” [Furthermore, against the adoption of a German university system, he continues], “In holding up the University of Berlin as our model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to the considerations that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in these realms; that a great many of us would rather have no university at all than one under the control of such a minister, and whose highest representatives might come to be, not the fittest men, but those who stood foremost in the good graces of the powers that be, whether Demos, Ministry, or Sovereign."); [it was to include such faculties as Law, Engineering, Medicine, while it was to bring into connection the various teaching bodies scattered over London.  The proposers themselves recognised that the scheme was not ideal, but a compromise which at least would not hamper further progress, and would supersede the Gresham scheme, which they regarded as a barrier to all future academic reform.

The Association as thus constituted Huxley now joined, and was immediately asked to accept the Presidency, not that he should do any more militant work than he was disposed to attempt, but simply that he should sit like Moltke in his tent and keep an eye on the campaign.

He felt it almost a point of honour not to refuse his best services to a cause he had always had at heart, though he wrote:—­]

There are some points in which I go further than your proposals, but they are so much, to my mind, in the right direction that I gladly support them.

[And again:—­]

The Association scheme is undoubtedly a compromise—­but it is a compromise which takes us the right way, while the former schemes led nowhere except to chaos.

[He writes to Sir W.H.  Flower:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 27, 1892.

My dear Flower,

I had quite given up the hope that anything but some wretched compromise would come of the University Commission, when I found, to my surprise, no less than gratification, that a strong party among the younger men were vigorously taking the matter up in the right (that is, my) sense.

In spite of all my good resolves to be a “hermit old in mossy cell,” I have enlisted—­for ambulance service if nothing better.

The move is too important to spare oneself if one can be of any good.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Of his work in this position Professor Karl Pearson says, in a letter to me:—­

Professor Huxley gallantly came to lead a somewhat forlorn hope,—­that of establishing a really great university in London.  He worked, as may naturally be supposed, with energy and persistence, and one, who like myself was not in full sympathy with the lines he took, can but admire the vigour he threw into the movement.  Nothing came of it practically;...but Professor Huxley’s leadership did, at any rate, a great deal to unite the London teachers, and raise their ideal of a true university, while at the same time helping to repress the self-interests of many persons and institutions which had been before very much to the front.