sidents, above all of
official residents, professors, tutors, and the like, the result of the
election would have been different. If then, it is argued, the
Universities are to keep the right of parliamentary representation, the
right of voting should be taken away from the mass of those who at
present exercise it, and confined to those who really represent the
University, to those who are actually engaged on the spot, in the
government, the studies, or the teaching of the place.

Now every word of this outcry is true. No one can doubt that the
electoral bodies of the Universities, as at present constituted, are
quite unfit to represent the Universities, to speak in their name or to
express their wishes or feelings. The franchise, at Oxford and
Cambridge, is in the hands of the two largest bodies known to the
University constitution, the Convocation of Oxford, the Senate of
Cambridge. If we look at the University as a commonwealth of the
ancient, the mediaeval, or the modern Swiss pattern, the election is in
the hands of the _Ekklesia_, the _Comitia_ of Tribes, the
_Portmannagemot_, the _Landesgemeinde_, the _Conseil General_. The
franchise is open to all academic citizens who have reached full
academic growth, to all who have put on the _toga virilis_ as the badge
of having taken a complete degree in any faculty. That is to say, it
belongs to all doctors and masters who have kept their names on the
books. Now, whatever such a body as this may seem in theory, we know
what it is in practice. It is not really an academic body. Those who
really know anything or care anything about University matters are a
small minority. The mass of the University electors are men who are at
once non-resident and who have taken nothing more than that common
degree which the _Spectator_, quite rightly, holds to be of such small
account. They often, we may believe, keep their name on the books simply
in order to vote at the University elections.

But what is the remedy? I cannot think that it is to be found in
confining the election to residents, at Oxford perhaps to members of
Congregation.[1] By such a restriction we should undoubtedly get a
constituency with a much higher average of literary eminence and
intellectual power. We should get a constituency which would far more
truly represent the University as a local body. But surely we cannot
look on the Universities as purely local bodies. It has always been one
of the great characterist