the nation.  Again, there has been in the past a distinct governing class, to which the rest of society submitted; until a series of political revolutions lifted the whole adult population into self-government, using the services of political experts, but making public progress the interest of all.  Before the more quiet changes of the present age the conception of an isolated learned class is giving way before the ideal of a national culture, in which universities will still be centres for educational experts, while University Extension offers liberal education to all, until educationally the whole adult population will be just as much within the university as politically the adult population is within the constitution.  It would appear then that the university of such a future would be by no means a repetition of existing types, such as Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Johns Hopkins.  These institutions would exist and be more flourishing than ever, but they would all be merged in a wider ‘University of England,’ or ‘University of America’; and, just as the state means the whole nation acting in its political 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