At Manchester last year, when they installed Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, as Chancellor of the University, the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour delivered a very interesting address, in which he declared himself a believer in the gospel of “Science the Master.” Mr. Balfour’s speech did not imply any disregard for the pursuit of historical knowledge and a training in literature and the use of language, but it was a clear recognition of the fact that when the great purpose for which universities exist is considered it must be asserted in no hesitating terms that the discovery of new knowledge is the most important activity which a university can foster. To train men (and women, too) to use their faculties not merely to acquire knowledge of what has been discovered by others in the past, but to discover new things and to gain further control over the conditions in which we live, and to secure further understanding not only of nature but of man—that is the great business of the university.

It was fortunate that Mr. Balfour was present and able to strike this note, for Lord Morley, the new Chancellor, had not expressed any such conception of the aims of a university. He declared that, so long as the Greeks have anything to teach us we should not cease to study the Greeks. But, whilst we may agree to this, it is well to remember that, though pleasure can still be obtained from Greek poetry and prose by those who have thoroughly mastered the Greek language, yet almost all, if not quite all, that the Greeks have to teach us has been by this time translated and dealt with by our own writers. Consequently, although we may cordially approve of the study of ancient civilisations and ancient literatures and languages, both Greek and barbarian, as part of the enterprise of a university, it is somewhat excessive, not to say belated, to set up the study of Greek or of any other historic language and civilisation as the chief and distinctive boon which universities can offer to their scholars. The matter has, indeed, been thrashed out, and Greek, together with what is called the “study of literature” (but is usually an ineffective dabbling in it), has been put into its proper subordinate place in all the universities of Europe and in most of those of Great Britain. The illusion that flowers of speech and mastery of phrase (though all very well if honestly used) are an indication of any knowledge or capacity which can be of service to the community, has been, in late years, to a very large extent, dispelled.

The concluding words of Mr. Balfour’s speech were: “The great advancement of mankind is to be looked for in our ever-increasing knowledge of the secrets of nature—secrets, however, which are not to be unlocked by the men who pursue them for purely material ends, but secrets which are open in their fulness only to men who pursue them in a disinterested spirit. The motive power which is really going to change the external surface of civilisation, which is going to add to the well-being of mankind, which is going to stimulate the imagination of all those who are interested in the universe in which our lot is cast—that lies after all with science. I would rather be known as having added to the sum of our knowledge of the truth of nature than anything else I can imagine. Unfortunately for me, my opportunities have lain in different directions.”

That is a splendid confession of faith. I do not remember that any German statesman of like authority and standing has ever given expression to so full and ample a belief in the value of science. Yet German statesmen have acted, though they have not spoken. They have arranged for, and continually are arranging for, a far larger expenditure of public money upon scientific training and investigation than is assigned to such purposes in this country. Every department of government in Germany has its thoroughly trained, well-taught, well-paid body of scientific experts and investigators, and, moreover, the whole official world, from the Emperor downwards, has a real understanding of what science is, of the folly of attempting to proceed without it, or allowing persons who are ignorant of it to act as administrators. The need for science is not merely recognised in words, but steps are taken, and have been taken now for many years, actually to secure in German public offices and public administration the predominance of that scientific knowledge which the German statesmen, as well as Mr. Balfour, consider so necessary. Is it too much to hope that in this country those who recognise the value and importance of scientific knowledge will also take steps to re-arrange our Government departments so as to give them the advantage of guidance by men trained in the knowledge of nature, rather than by men ignorant of the very existence of such knowledge?

The universities hold the central position in this matter, and it is their influence and wealth which the State should insist on directing towards the extension and diffusion of science. Those who address the public on this subject not infrequently take what seems to me to be a disastrous line at the start. They speak of the new universities as the universities of the people, and hand over Oxford and Cambridge, with their enormous endowments, their history and tradition, to the wealthy class. Such usurpation cannot be tolerated. It is monstrous that the endowments of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which were thoroughly popular and democratic in their foundation, should be, even for a moment, regarded as the peculiar property of the wealthy. It is also monstrous to suppose that it is anything less than disastrous to consign the well-to-do classes in any community to an empty sham of ancient “culture” rather than to imbue them with the real and inspiring culture of the modern renaissance. It is because this notion is allowed to gain ground that the enormous funds of the colleges and universities of Oxford and Cambridge, amounting to more than three-quarters of a million pounds annually, are to a large extent, though not exclusively, employed in keeping up a couple of huge boarding-schools, which are shut for six months in the year.

It is owing to this that it is the rarest thing to find in Oxford or in Cambridge a great teacher who lectures or demonstrates to an eager following of disciples. An overwhelming majority of the young men who go as students to these universities have no intention of studying anything. They are sent there in order to be submitted to college discipline and to have, subject to that safeguard, a good time. A large number are handsomely paid by scholarships in order to induce them to go there—and would not go there at all unless they were so paid. They do not find such teachers there and such an effective occupation of their student years as would induce them, if unpaid, to seek the university, or to pay fees out of their own pockets for the opportunities of seriously pursuing any branch of learning or science within its walls.

The inefficiency of the old universities is to a large extent the cause of the neglect and ignorance of science in the well-to-do class, who furnish the men who become Government officials of all kinds and members of professions which influence public opinion. But this inefficiency of the old universities is not due to their devotion to literary studies and to abstract science, nor to their objection to the pursuit of practical and commercial studies. That excuse is sometimes put forward for them, though at this moment they are, in fact, setting up laboratories and lecture-rooms for engineering, agriculture, forestry, mining, and such applications of science. Nor is it money which is really wanting at either Oxford or Cambridge, although they are both begging for it from the public. What Oxford and Cambridge want is not money but men; men as teachers—“professors” is the usual title given to them in a university—who must be the ablest, each in his own line, in the whole world. If such professors existed in either Oxford or Cambridge, and were allowed to teach, the town (if not the colleges!) would be full to overflowing of students—eager to pay their fees and to spend, not three short terms of seven weeks in each year, but the whole year, and many years, in the laboratories and lecture-rooms of those commanding men.

To obtain such men—to set the machinery at work—you must pay them handsomely, and give them authority and the means of work. Once they were at work, the mere fees of the students would furnish a splendid revenue. There is plenty of money at Oxford and at Cambridge—a superabundance, in fact—which could and should be applied to this purpose, namely, that of securing and establishing there the greatest teachers in the world. The money is at present administered by the colleges according to the directions given in recent Acts of Parliament, and by no means in any blind obedience to the original intentions of the founders of the colleges. It is to a large extent wasted. That portion of it paid out as “scholarships” is for the most part wasted in bringing students to a place where they cannot get the best opportunities of study, and the rest is unwisely applied (not so much by the tenants for life or administrators of college funds as by rigid Act of Parliament) to providing an excessive number of totally inadequate salaries by which a corresponding number of young men are induced to enter upon the career of teachers as underpaid college Fellows.