THE ARISTOCRACY AND THE UNIVERSITIES.
WE are told, on authority which we believe to be well- informed, that the number of Peers' sons who enter the Universities has of late years perceptibly decreased and is still decreasing, and are curious to know if the statement is confirmed by officials interested in the preparation of the University Calendars. They must have conclusive figures in their hands, if only they like to search for them. If it is true, as we believe it to be, it would indicate either some change as yet unnoticed in the manners of society, or—which would be more serious—a dis- tinct decline in the appreciation of the value of culture among the caste which stands at the head of society. The former explana- tion has, no doubt, some probabilities in its favour. It is, for example, past question that the sons of Peers are not entering the Church in anything lilre the old proportion. Although a clergyman with his name in the Peerage has still a preference among the candidates for episcopal thrones, the prizes offered by the Clerical profession have been cut down till they are no longer attractive to the ambitious, while a belief that the Church will be disestablished, as a sacrifice demanded by the Radical programme, has become with them almost an article of faith. Gladstone will do it some day, they think ; or ff not he, then some other popular favourite ; or at all events, the risk is too great to run. They do not desire to serve in a disestablished Church, the sceptical movement of the age affects them, as it affects all other classes, while they feel more perhaps than any class the desire for the material pleasures of life. The University is, therefore, no longer necessary for them, en route to the mitre. Then the tendency of all changes in our system of patronage is to withdraw men who intend to enter any of the Services from the University. The Government year by year places stricter limit upon the age of entrance. No graduate can enter the Navy. He can enter the Army, and indeed some inducement is held out to him to do so, twelve cadetships being offered every year to graduates from any of the Universities of the Three Kingdoms. The cadetships, however, are not, as they ought to be, full com- missions, but only entrances to Sandhurst, and the number of competitors is therefore very small, seldom or never double the vacancies to be filled. Graduates, as a rule, do not like to go to school again, even at a Military Academy; they have had nearly enough of competition, and they are not very willing to enter a profession in which they will be at least five years behind every- body else. Five years means a great deal in the race for a colonelcy, and the Peer whose sons wish to be officers sends them to Sandhurst, or—with, we believe, increasing frequency— to Woolwich, as soon as they can succeed in the competition. If they can enter at eighteen, they have five years' advantage over most graduates, and no disadvantage except a want of general culture, less felt in the Army than any other profession. With the Church closed, and politics, once so general a career for the cadets of great houses, open only to a few—that is, to those Peers who can command boroughs or counties—the tendency towards the Army becomes very strong, and is, we are told, year by year attracting more of the Peers' sons, who shrink, like everybody else, from the drudgery modern habits are inflicting on all clever lads, but do not feel the whip behind them which induces the Ma of the professionals to bear the drudgery placidly. A few Peers' sons still enter the Civil Service, particularly the Diplomatic Depart- ment, but they, like the officers, prefer, when it is possible, to begin early, and do not see that a University career will give them any serious help. So they begin work, as artisans do, early, and the number of aristocrats in the Universities decidedly de- clines, while " noble " and " soldier " threaten in England, as in Germany, to become synonymous.
Considerable evil is likely to arise from this change, which separates much- too completely rank and culture, and tends to render the young men who enjoy the best chances in politics the least qualified to use them well. A young officer who has entered the Service at eighteen may learn a great deal from his profession, from his foreign service, and from his own reading, but he is scarcely likely to become a highly cultured man. His time is too limited, his friendships too numerous, his attention too dissipated for severe study, even if the traditional tone of a regiment did not make him believe, as nine officers in ten in their hearts do believe, that a student will never make a successful officer. He may, of course, in rare cases, be- come a politician, and even a distinguished one, but he will have all his life to contend with his own ignorance, and with that narrowness of view which ignorance almost invariably begets. This would be a real evil, even if militarism were not in itself in- jurious to society ; but this is not all of which the country has now to complain. It seems probable that the Peers, in keeping their sons from the Universities, are not only influenced by the present methods of entering public employ, but by a growing doubt whether University culture is of any particular use ; and even by a dislike of education, such as the mania for educating the people, and for examining for the professions, and for culti- vating the minds of women, has produced in a good many minds. They do not see that the cultivated beat the uncultivated much in the race of life. Wealth, on the whole, does not flow to the former, station is won by men who never slept in a college, and even power does not fall exclusively to graduates. It is no help to a man seeking a borough that he was once a double-first. The householder does not believe in him one whit the more for that,—believes rather in the self-made man, who has cash, and readiness, and audacity. It is quite true that in both parties a good many leaders are men of high academic standing, but the Dictator of the hour never was either at Public School or Univer- sity, and the youngest of rising politicians—Lord George Hamilton—obtained what learning he has at Harrow, and was an ensign at nineteen. The Peer wants his son to be a man of the world, to know its ways and its men, to be able to speak readily and act decisively, and not to be a student, or even specially well informed. He is not attracted by the hope of his " making friends "—they are ready made—he sees no road for him which a degree will make any wider ; he knows he cannot send him from the University into Parliament ; and he does not care for a mental polish which he thinks circumstances have made nearly valueless. He can secure his son a " training " in other ways, and ways, perhaps, which involve both less trouble and less expense, and he adopts those ways, quite indifferent to the fact that in the next generation the "great folk" who ought to guide the little folk will be the less cultivated of the two, and will, therefore, be exposed to that scorn which, as a solvent of institutions and in- fluences, is so much more effective than either mere dislike or envy. A House of Peers with only the intelligence of a mess- room would very soon be sneered out of all effective power. That might not be a misfortune, but unfortunately, the Peers' example is the example sure to be followed by the rich, who are already only too indifferent to thorough culture for their sons, and we may yet see in England what has been frequently seen in other countries, a rich class distinctly deficient in education and knowledge, and drawing down on itself the contempt already beginning to be felt by the country for the local magnates, " men with a million and an idea apiece," who so swarm in the House of Commons, and are yearly diminishing its power over the opinion of the kingdom. That will not be a social change conducive to good order, or to the system of government through social deferences which old Conservatives so approve. It is a great pro- tection for a society to appear rationally organised, and a society in which all luxury belongs to the stupid will not appear so, while it will be exposed to this further danger. The intel- lectual are often vicious, but the luxurious, who have no intellectual interests, no objects of ambition, and nothing to do witich must be done, are almost invariably so. A society in
which the upper class is ill-educated, stupid, and vicious is not a society that is safe.
If this tendency were to increase, as it may increase, it would have one striking result on the position of the Universities. They would be delivered up to Parliament, tied hand-and-foot. Their protection against legislation, good or bad, is the immense number of powerful persons who are interested in them, who got their education from them, and who are indisposed to see them radically changed, either for better or worse. That number is now so great, that reformers of all kinds see themselves constantly paralysed by a sort of inert resistance, which is nevertheless in- vincible; but if the number declines seriously, the resistance will decline too, and the Universities will be legislated for by men who have no associations with them, and either care nothing about them, or care only to remodel them to fit some ideal in their own minds. The ignorant, in fact, will legislate for the learned, to the probable advantage rather of ignorance than of learning.
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