and has been only too often cherished as a badge of
exclusiveness, instead of the very consciousness of superior education
being felt as a responsibility which could only be satisfied by efforts
to educate others. To infuse a missionary spirit into culture is not the
least purpose of University Extension.

I cannot resist the temptation to carry forward this thought from the
present into the future. In University Extension so described may we
not see a germ for the University of the Future? I have made the
foundation of our movement the growing conception of education as a
permanent interest of adult life side by side with religion and
politics. The change is at best only beginning; it tasks the imagination
to conceive all it will imply when it is complete. To me it appears that
this expanding view of education is the third of the three great waves
of change the succession of which has made up our modern history. There
was a time when religion itself was identified with a particular class,
the clergy alone thinking out what the rest of the nation simply
accepted; then came the series of revolutions popularly summed up as the
Reformation, by which the whole adult nation claimed to think for itself
in matters of religion, and the special profession of the clergy became
no more than a single element in the religious life of the nation.
Again, there has been in the past a distinct governing class, to which
the rest of society submitted; until a series of political revolutions
lifted the whole adult population into self-government, using the
services of political experts, but making public progress the interest
of all. Before the more quiet changes of the present age the conception
of an isolated learned class is giving way before the ideal of a
national culture, in which universities will still be centres for
educational experts, while University Extension offers liberal education
to all, until educationally the whole adult population will be just as
much within the university as politically the adult population is within
the constitution. It would appear then that the university of such a
future would be by no means a repetition of existing types, such as
Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Johns Hopkins. These institutions would
exist and be more flourishing than ever, but they would all be merged in
a wider 'University of England,' or 'University of America'; and, just
as the state means the whole nation acting in its politic