ppointment as Dean of Westminster. Such
anomalies will happen in a country fortunately so full of anomalies as
England; but, as a rule, a political reformer must not be angry if he
passes through life without the title of Right Honorable; nor should a
man, if he will always speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, be disappointed if he dies a martyr rather than a Bishop.

But even granting that in Mill's time there existed some traces of social
tyranny, where are they now? Look at the newspapers and the journals. Is
there any theory too wild, any reform too violent, to be openly defended?
Look at the drawing-rooms or the meetings of learned societies. Are not
the most eccentric talkers the spoiled children of the fashionable world?
When young lords begin to discuss the propriety of limiting the rights of
inheritance, and young tutors are not afraid to propose curtailing the
long vacation, surely we need not complain of the intolerance of English
society.

Whenever I state these facts to my German and French and Italian friends,
who from reading Mill's Essay "On Liberty" have derived the impression
that, however large an amount of political liberty England may enjoy, it
enjoys but little of intellectual freedom, they are generally willing to
be converted so far as London, or other great cities are concerned. But
look at your Universities, they say, the nurseries of English thought!
Compare their mediaeval spirit, their monastic institutions, their
scholastic philosophy, with the freshness and freedom of the Continental
Universities! Strong as these prejudices about Oxford and Cambridge have
long been, they have become still more intense since Professor Helmholtz,
in an inaugural address which he delivered at his installation as Rector
of the University of Berlin, lent to them the authority of his great name.
"The tutors," he says,(3) "in the English Universities cannot deviate by a
hair's-breadth from the dogmatic system of the English Church, without
exposing themselves to the censure of their Archbishops and losing their
pupils." In German Universities, on the contrary, we are told that the
extreme conclusions of materialistic metaphysics, the boldest speculations
within the sphere of Darwin's theory of evolution, may be propounded
without let or hindrance, quite as much as the highest apotheosis of Papal
infallibility.

Here the facts on which Professor Helmholtz relies are entirely wrong, and
th