THE WORK OF THE UNIVERSITIES FOR THE NATION, PAST AND PRESENT[1].
This meeting, to which the University welcomes her visitors, not as strangers or aliens, but as members of a body united to her by common studies and sympathies, is a visible expression of that change which, during the last thirty years, has been passing over the relations between the ancient Universities of England and the country. They are no longer content to be only, in the strict sense of the phrase, seats of learning; they now desire to be also mother-cities of intellectual colonies, and to spread the influence of their teaching throughout the land. It is indeed instructive to contrast this impulse with that feeling with which we meet in earlier ages, that any addition to the number of centres at which a higher education could be obtained was a menace to academic monopoly. In mediaeval times, when a body of Cambridge students withdrew to Northampton, Henry III., who had at first regarded the movement as likely to benefit the town to which they went, was presently induced to condemn it, as an infringement of privilege else-
- ↑ Cambridge University Local Lectures; Fourth Summer Meeting: The Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Guildhall, Cambridge, July 29, 1893.
