The Reorganization of the University of Oxford. By Goldwin Smith.
(James Parker and Co.)—This pamphlet bears a continual but unex- pressed reference to the elaborate work of Mr. Pattison on the same subject which was lately reviewed in these columns. Mr. Goldwin Smith is no less advanced as a Reformer than the Rector of Lincoln, but he brings to his task a different temper, and sometimes arrives at very different conclusions. His judgment, less calm, because more touched with the heat of social and political controversies, is yet more
practical. Mr. Pattison, in designing his Academical Eutopia, some- times forgets the existing facts ; Mr. Goldwin Smith is always mind- ful of the conditions under which every reformer must be content to work. The subject of the relations between tho University and the Colleges illustrates the difference between the two thinkers. Both are agreed that the present wasteful and ineffective system under which every college attempts to be a little university in itself, ought to give way to an organized plan of real university instruc- tion. But Mr. Pattison would practically destroy, while Mr. Goldwin Smith is anxious to preserve, the separate existence of the colleges. Without discussing the merits of the two plans, we may say with con- fidence that a reform which should be weighted with a scheme so generally distasteful as Mr. Pattison's would in effect be indefinitely postponed. Nor can it be denied that there is much truth in the remark " that to canton the colleges out at present among the different studies would be chimerical ; it would imply a knowledge of the future of learning and science to which nobody, especially at a moment of critical transition, can pretend." Into a pamphlet of about sixty pages Mr. Goldwin Smith contrives to compress a vast amount of useful sugges- tion, and makes us regret more than ever that the university is to lose so wise an adviser.
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