The wealthy Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are gradually constructing laboratories for science. The merchant princes of Manchester have equipped their new Victoria University with similar laboratories. Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have also done so, partly at the cost of Government and largely by private subscriptions. The poorer Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews are still inefficiently provided with the modern appliances for teaching science.
London has one small Government college and two chartered colleges, but is wholly destitute of a teaching university. It would excite great astonishment at the Treasury if we were to make the modest request that the great metropolis, with a population of four million, should be put into as efficient academical position as the town of Strasburg, with 104,000 inhabitants, by receiving, as that town does, £43,000 annually for academic instruction and £700,000 for university buildings. Still, the amazing anomaly that London has no teaching university must ere long cease.
It is a comforting fact that, in spite of the indifference of Parliament, the large towns of the kingdom are showing their sense of the need of higher education. Manchester has already its university. Nottingham, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bristol have colleges more or less complete. Liverpool converts a disused lunatic asylum into a college for sane people. Cardiff rents an infirmary for a collegiate building. Dundee, by private benefaction, rears a Baxter College with larger ambitions. All these are healthy signs that the public are determined to have advanced science-teaching, but the resources of the institutions are altogether inadequate to the end in view. Even in the few cases where the laboratories are efficient for teaching purposes, they are inefficient as laboratories for research. Under these circumstances the Royal Commission on Science advocates special Government laboratories for research. Such laboratories, supported by public money, are as legitimate subjects for expenditure as galleries for pictures or sculpture; but I think that they would not be successful, and would injure science if they failed. It would be safer in the mean time if the state assisted universities or well-established colleges to found laboratories of research under their own care. Even such a proposal shocks our Chancellor of the Exchequer, who tells us that this country is burdened with public debt, and has ironclads to build and arsenals to provide. Nevertheless our wealth is proportionally much greater than that of foreign states which are competing with so much vigor in the promotion of higher education. They deem such expenditure to be true economy, and do not allow their huge standing armies to be an apology for keeping their people backward in the march of knowledge. France, which in the last ten years has been spending a million annually on university education, had a war indemnity to pay, and competes successfully with this country in ironclads. Either all foreign states are strangely deceived in their belief that the competition of
