of communities for common interest and
protection in the great and holy cause of the pursuit of learning, and
above all things their story is the story of the growth of European
unity and citizenship.

The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were
both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up
in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the
severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the
distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or
brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and
social position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was
European and not local[3].

The spirit which is characteristic of a university in its best
aspects, linked with the spirit which is inherent in the ranks of
working people, has on more occasions than one set on foot movements
for the education of the people. One of the most notable instances of
this unity found expression at the Oxford Co-operative Congress of
1882, when Arnold Toynbee urged co-operators to undertake the
education of the citizen. By this he meant: "the education of each
member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to
other individual citizens and to the community as a whole." "We have
abandoned," he said further, "and rightly abandoned the attempt to
realise citizenship by separating ourselves from society. We will
never abandon the belief that it has yet to be won amid the stress and
confusion of the ordinary world in which we move." From that day to
this co-operators have always had before them an ideal of education in
citizenship and have organised definite teaching year by year.

Another instance of even greater power lies in the co-operation
between the pioneers of the University Extension Movement at Cambridge
and the working men, particularly of Rochdale and Nottingham, to be
followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst
working people which took place in Northumberland and Durham in the
days before the great coal strike. At a later date, in 1903, the same
kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the Workers'
Educational Association, which has always conceived its purpose to be
the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in
common by university man and working man a