and the usual allowances' of each service is precisely what perpetuates the grievance of confounding old traditions and new contracts. Every rule the master or mistress makes beyond the work to be done should, above all, be distinctly laid down. and made a part of the contract; and common sense shows that such rules should be reduced to the very lowest point compatible with the moral and sanitary interests of the family. It is almost always these arbitrary rules, and not their proper work, against which servants recalcitrate, and have a right to do so, since, unless they contract to keep them, the master has no claim to exact obedience to them. He may think them very desirable for the servant's own benefit,-e.g. that he should invest his wages in the savings' bank, or that he should attend church. But the fact that the servant has contracted to clean his boots, is no reason why the master should have the ordering of either his purse or his soul.

Contracts reduced to the minimum of interference with the servant's liberty, accurately stated, and strictly respected, would, we believe, in process of time introduce a new spirit along with the new relation between masters and servants, and then might the second difficulty likewise be conquered. Servants might learn to feel that honesty and honour alike demand of them to perform, on their sides, punctually the contract faithfully kept by the master. To shirk work and do eye-service, to neglect a master's property committed to his charge, might be felt to be as base for the well paid servant as it would be for the master to give him bad money for good service. A religion of faithful contracts might arise, and the idea of dishonesty in defrauding the other contracting party in labour might be esteemed as disgraceful as it is now felt to be to defraud the servant in wages.

The equality our friends preach should surely exist here, if anywhere. Masters ought not to have the monopoly of fidelity to engagements.

It was Sanchez, the Jesuit casuist, we believe, who taught that a servant was justified in secretly robbing his master of money or goods to the amount of the wages which, in his (the servant's) estimation, his services were worth. English Protestants hold up hands of horror at such a doctrine; but to rob a master of the labour he has paid for, does not seem much better. Bourdaloue solemnly exhorts masters not to retain their poor servants' wages on false pretences, or dismiss them without payment. The county courts soon settle such affairs in these days, and all the world cries shame on the dishonest master. But the servant who, receiving his wages, does not give his work, escapes well nigh scot-free.

In conclusion, we would offer one or two practical suggestions as to the means by which the profession of domestic service might be improved.

Of course we shall be expected, as the foremost of such counsels, to recommend Education, the panacea of all evil. The subject is far too large to be treated here, and perhaps is not quite such plain sailing as we have been of late years accustomed to think.

Servants are

ten times more educated now (in the vulgar sense) than they were in the days to which the very persons who advocate such education refer as a sort of golden age of domestic virtue and felicity. That all real cultivation of the human mind aids the recipient in every task thereafter undertaken is not to be questioned. That a true moral education would be the highest possible preparative for every course of life is still more certain. But to how much of the schooling accessible to persons of the class of servants are

either of these propositions applicable at present?

An unmistakable desideratum is, that a method should be discovered by which the good characters of servants may be made of greater value than at present. In a degree, the end might be gained by the adoption of a practice long prevalent in Ireland, whereby the higher class of Irish servants is kept up at a very fair moral status. The employer, on discharging a servant, is bound to give him a written paper, with dates of admission and departure from service, and such testimonial of character as he may see fit. The series of these papers, running through the years of service, or the significant absence of any of them which should account for the time, affords a very valuable index of character. but just that a man who can prove long years of good conduct should be able to contract for better place and higher wage than another; and that a master should not be cheated into paying a worthless sot the price of reliable good service. By such a system, also, the great evil of constant migration of servants is checked, since nobody would engage a servant who for five years of service produced twenty discharges.

It is

Again, an important object would be gained if servants could be made to view their profession, not as a temporary one, but as a permanent employment, with proper prizes in view at fair intervals. For this end, we should urge the promise of a scale of wages rising through each of the earlier years of service; then promotion to what may be termed the

position of a non-commissioned officer in the little domestic regiment; finally, a treatment, in later life, of utmost consideration and friendship. No profession can flourish where there is nothing to look to of reward; and there are steps which (as regards wages and promotion) might justly form a part of the original contract in every case.

Again, the training of young servants is a task which every lady who can afford it would do well to undertake. The hope of future comfort lies in a supply of better taught and better feeling servants than now throng the bazaars and registry offices. Youth is of itself a great advantage for a servant, because it makes the relation to the mistress, and acceptance of directions from her, natural and easy. To expect women older than ourselves to yield readily to our instructions is vain. No covenant can make it otherwise than irksome. Thus, an older servant ought always to have advanced to the position where interference is almost superfluous, and each lady's ambition should be to train one or more girls in her house who may come in time to be her confidential ministers.

Were this done, were characters more regarded, and appearance and cleverness less valued, were contracts closely made and strictly adhered to (eschewing all intrusion on the servant's proper liberty), we cannot but believe that the groanings audible at present in half the houses in England might subside at last, and end in the pleasant purr of peace and satisfaction appropriate to the domestic hearth.

TH

THERE has lately been much discussion as to the possibility of extending the benefits of our old universities to persons who, from poverty or from religious scruples, are unable at present to enjoy them. All such discussions tend to reveal the fact that a change, to be really effective, must be more thoroughgoing than is at first sight obvious. It will not be enough to throw open the door; we must set the house in order before any numerous throngs will be attracted, and indeed before we can welcome them with a confidence that they will be benefited. Hitherto our universities have been reformed after the characteristic English system-by development instead of revolution-or, if the reader prefers to say so, by patching and tinkering instead of thoroughly repairing. They have indeed a strong vitality in spite of the restrictions which hamper their free growth. The lovers of the picturesque effects produced by a harmonious interweaving of old things with new, may find in them a better justification than usual. Still, the highest beauty, whether of material or political edifices, implies a perfect adaptation of means to ends; the picturesque is in some sense anta

VOL. LXXVII.—NO, CCCCLVIII.

gonistic to the beautiful; and in a matter of such vast importance as the highest education of the country we cannot afford to make any sacrifices to a sentimental regard for old traditionary forms. We may grant that abrupt changes are undesirable, if only on account of the waste of power always involved in summarily discarding old machinery and fitting up new in its place. But if we once plainly understand what are the evils to be eradicated we need not doubt that English superstitions about vested interests will sufficiently guard the universities from over hasty legislation.

Much light is thrown upon the evils which the most thoughtful observers detect in the present working of the university by the evidence given before Mr. Ewart's committee of last session. The most sweeping proposal for reform came from Oxford men, who therein showed their characteristic tendency to extreme party zeal. The evils, however, upon which they insisted are at least as evident in the sister university; and the present remarks will chiefly apply to Cambridge in virtue of the law which makes it impossible for a member of either university to write about

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the other without falling into palpable blunders. The main point upon which I desire to insist is the evil which results from the division of the chief revenues of each university among a number of separate and independent colleges, with no common organisation for teaching purposes, and rather competing than co-operating. Their internal arrangements are marked by inevitable defects, because adopted in obedience to exigencies which no longer exist, and the natural growth of an extinct order of society. Their statutes have outlived the constitutions of nations, and they have remained as insoluble masses amidst the general flux of social elements. Many colleges have been unaltered for centuries, and have then only given way to legislative omnipotence. They have indeed in no case sunk to the level of those great societies which can find no way of spending their revenues but by eating and drinking them. The mere presence of such large endowments in the educational capitals of England has done much, though indirectly, to strengthen the universities and encourage learning after a fashion. But it was certainly not the fashion which was contemplated by the founders, and still less that which would have been adopted had the same revenues been at the disposal of intelligent legislators at the present day. Yet it is always difficult to convince persons who have worked to good effect with an oldfashioned set of tools, that the same result might be obtained more easily in a different way, or that the arrangement to which they are accustomed is not part of the eternal order of nature. The best way of bringing such persons to an issue is to ask the simple question, What becomes of the money?—are the results obtained commensurate with their cost? And vulgar as the test may seem it will perhaps lead us to the real evils of the system.

The total revenues of Oxford and Cambridge have been calculated at over 500,000l. a year; a sum which, if it were at the free disposal of an intelligent body, would be sufficient to collect a body of the most eminent professors in England, or, indeed, in Europe. The contemplation of such a stream of wealth all flowing to educational purposes is enough to cause the mouth of a German professor or an English man of science to water. Under the present system, however, the funds are devoted to very different purposesit may be to much better purposesthan that of collecting learned men. The professors merely get the crumbs which fall from the richly spread table. With the exception of the divinity professorships, there is at Cambridge no professorial endowment, as one of Mr. Ewart's witnesses pathetically said, sufficient for the comfortable support of a married man. Moreover, as the professors are not only poor, but have no direct influence upon the studies of the place, it is the fashion to ridicule the professoriate, and to declare that it is almost waste of money to devote any more funds to its support. Liberal minded persons at Cambridge admit that there ought to be a chair devoted to the study of Latin and one or two other purposes. They make no small boast of having founded two or three professorships of 300l. a year, an effort which has gone near to exhausting the university chest. And, in short, they obviously regard the professoriate as an ornamental appendage; a luxury which is very well in its way, but with no satisfactory claim for a large share of the revenues. The presence some eminent mathematicians and men of science of course produces a good effect upon the society of the place; but, so far from the professoriate being a main wheel in the machinery, it might almost be omitted, without producing a sen

of

sible effect.

Such distinguished men as Professor Sedgwick have done what they have done in spite of their position rather than by force of it. The few whose lectures bear upon the practical work of the place are chiefly as a compliment, and by way of supererogation. The benches of their lecture rooms are filled, or rather sprinkled, by a few eccentric individuals who have the singular desire to improve their minds. An active-minded youth sometimes feels that he ought to pay the ablest mathematicians or scholars of the university the empty compliment of giving him a hearing, and perhaps attends a course of some twenty lectures during his undergraduate career, and feels that he has done the handsome thing. But the bare notion of making the professor his guide, or taking his lectures for his substantial food, instead of a passing whet to his appetite, never enters his head, and would in fact be, as matters stand, preposterous. The great stream of study flows by with the smallest possible influence from those who are theoretically at the head of the teaching staff. And

any change in this system is treated with contempt in accordance with what is called the 'practical' tendency of Cambridge study.

Cambridge, it is true, has done something to encourage its professors. By way of giving them an audience, the university has made it compulsory upon men who do not take honours to attend a course of professor's lectures; that is, the university will not waste the time of its promising youths by making them go through so absurd a farce; but as the professors exist, they may as well be made of some use; and therefore herds of those youths who are too ignorant or too idle to hope for distinction are, as it were, corralled in the lecture rooms. Hence the professor has the choice of lecturing above the

heads of nearly all his audiencea depressing and useless performance-or of lowering his pretensions, and trying to distil a little elementary knowledge into half attentive ears; and this is perhaps more depressing than the other system. Thus the ablest men obtainable-and there are many distinguished professors at Cambridge--are set to talk A B C to lads whose whole soul is in cricket and boating, and whose theory of learning is to pass the barriers of examination at the smallest possible expenditure of brains.

As the professors occupy this anomalous position, we naturally turn to the rich and powerful corporations which have usurped their functions. In the colleges we shall find the full development of that system of catechetical instruction which is the peculiar boast of an English university. The college tutors and lecturers are, according to the official theory at least, the main instructors of youth; and we must ask how they discharge this essential duty which has fallen to their lot. I do not dwell upon the fact that the endowments at most contribute to their support, and that their chief source of income is in the payments of the pupils-a plan which, within certain limits, has obvious recommendations. Great efforts have lately been made to improve the system of college lectures, and it is even said that in one or two of the largest colleges certain classes of the students might almost dispense with any other assistance. There is, however, one palpable difficulty in their way which seems to be inherent to the college system. It involves a lamentable waste of power. venues are divided amongst seventeen distinct corporations, each perfectly independent, and with a complete staff of its own. If there was a division of functions corresponding to the division of organs,

The re