The great hit of the Social Science Association this year
at Liverpool has been the Rev. Mark Pattison's trenchant and brilliant address on education, delivered yesterday week. On one part of that address we have made some remarks elsewhere, but may add here that not the least amusing portion of it was the account of the University Bills of last Session and their manipulation in Parliament. He described, in language remind- ing us of the best speeches of Mr. Disraeli, his astonishment at finding the purpose of the University Bills,—a subject on which the Bills themselves were silent,—explained by the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Lord Salisbury, as being "the promotion of science and learning," at the cost of the sinecures called Fellowships. Lord Salisbury had generally been the spokesman of the party which treats Science as synonymous with Atheism, and considers it its principal mission to eulogise "character, property, respectability, patriotism, obedience to superiors, contentedness with our station," and it was perplexing to find the organ of this party attacking idle Fellowships, and defending the endowment of research. The riddle was solved in the Lower House, where the "flimsy notion" of connect- ing the ideas of science and research with a University was eagerly repudiated by the Government. This had been "an unauthorised escapade of their impulsive col- league in the Lords." " The Member for the learned Uni- versity of Oxford received the congratulations of the Member for the learned University of London on having done with all that nonsense." The only object of the Bills, then, avowed by Lord Salisbury, but not contained in the Bills themselves, had been disowned with emphasis in the Lower House ; and that being so, the Bills would give only great powers left in blank ; but powers left in blank are "explosive materials" on which all pru- dent men will "throw cold water." And no one will deny that at Liverpool, the Rector of Lincoln College discharged over those same explosive materials the contents of an admirably-directed and exceedingly powerful fire-hose.
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