In the House of Commons on Friday, June - 22nd, the
Universities Bill was read 11. second time -without a division. Mr. Wood, President of the Board of Educa- tion, who moved the second reading, said that it would be impossible to exaggerate the debt owed-to-Mr. Asquith and his colleagues on the -Royal Commission. Their Report,-which was the foundation- of the Bill, had been a " repository of wise sense and judicious- conclusion." Mr. Asquith declared that the Report had finally dis- pelled "the fiction -that Oxford and "Cambridge were places where the children of well-to-do parents were offered a fossilized curriculum in the intervals of boating and cricket." The general sense of the House was that the Bill was rightly framed- to save the essential collegiate system of Oxford and Cambridge, to throw these Universities more than ever open to those whose chance to get there is the possession of brains rather than of money, and to submit the Universities to only so much control as is strictly involved in the subsidies.
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