Last Wednesday's debate on the Bill empowering the Scotch Universities
to admit women to degrees had no spark of life in it. It was supported faintly, and it was opposed on side-issues. Dr. Playfair, who had to speak for the University of Edinburgh, took the line of objecting to a " permissive " Bill, confined to a parti- cular group of Universities, instead of a measure which should lay down a specific principle for all British and Irish Univer- sities alike. Mr. Stansfeld gave the only appropriate answer to this plea. He said, with some justice, that the University of Edinburgh had freely entered into specific engagements with certain women asking for medical education and degrees, which engagements finally it refused to ratify, on the ground of defects in the law ; and it was not, therefore, for the representative of the University of Edinburgh to plead that there was no special reason why such a Bill should be applicable only to particular places in North Britain. The whole debate, like most of the recent debates, was limp and pallid,—drowsy talk manufactured as a sleepy imitation of argument, to pass muster with consti- tuencies, not to awaken or convince. We are passing through a vapid and stagnant political zone. The motion was lost by a majority of 43 (194 to 151).
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