al capacity
through municipal or national institutions, so the university would mean
the whole adult nation acting in its educational capacity through
whatever institutions might be found desirable. Such a university would
never be chartered; no building could ever house it; no royal personage
or president of the United States would ever be asked to inaugurate it;
the very attempt to found it would imply misconception of its essential
character. It would be no more than a floating aggregation of voluntary
associations; like the companies of which a nation's commerce is made up
such associations would not be organized, but would simply tend to
cooeperate because of their common object. Each association would have
its local and its central side, formed for the purpose of mediating
between the wants of a locality and the educational supply offered by
universities or similar central institutions. No doubt such a scheme is
widely different from the ideal education of European countries, so
highly organized from above that the minister of education can look at
his watch and know at any moment all that is being done throughout the
country. On the contrary the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race leans
towards self-help; it has been the mission of the race in the past to
develop self-government in religion and politics, it remains to crown
this work with the application of the voluntary system to liberal
education.

In indulging this piece of speculation I have had a practical purpose
before me. If what I have described be a reasonable forecast for the
University of the Future, does it not follow that University Extension,
as the germ of it, presents a field for the very highest academic
ambition? To my mind it appears that existing types of university have
reached a point where further development in the same direction would
mean decline. In English universities the ideal is 'scholarship.'
Scholarship is a good thing, and we produce it. But the system which
turns out a few good scholars every year passes over the heads of the
great mass of university students without having awakened them to any
intellectual life; the universities are scholarship-factories producing
good articles but with a terrible waste of raw material. The other main
type of university enthrones 'research' as its summum bonum. Possibly
research is as good a purpose as a man can set before him, but it is not
the sole aim in life. And when one contemplates the band