There has been a smart discussion in the Times during
the week as to the justice of the Oxford Commission in withdrawing two of the All Souls' Fellowships from competition, and Mr. A. J. Butler, of Winchester, writes us a long letter, published in another column, to show that Mr. Robarts's defence of the- Commission, to which we referred last week, is inadequate Buthe only succeeds in showing, we think, that if the same persons had been responsible, first, for putting up these Fellowships to competition in July, and next, for asking the Com- mission to withdraw two of them from competition in October, they would have done very wrong. In all probability, however, this was not the case. Doubtless the authority who offered the Fellowships for competition in July was at issue with those members of the College who asked the Commission to with- draw two of them in October, and clearly the Commis- sioners had to consider fairly whether the offer so hastily made in July, which, if acted upon, would have had the effect of withdrawing, perhaps for forty or sixty years, two of the most available of the Oxford Fellowships from the scope of the reforming policy, was so far binding on them that they, with the interests of the University to con- sider, were bound to respect it. They decided—rightly, we think—in the negative, and. we are not quite sure that the closing lines of Mr. Butler's letter do not indicate a certain doubt in his own mind, whether he himself seriously disapproves the decision of the Commissioners.
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