The Bishop of Oxford made a speech at Brighton last
week on distributing the honorary certificates and diplomas awarded in the University of Oxford Local Examinations to the Brighton students. He said that the older Universities were trying to retain their great national eminence by going out to seek the people, like the inhabitants of Salisbury, who are striving to preserve their pre-eminently beautiful spire by getting as much mortar as they can between its stones, fearing lest it should be soon blown down from the gradual weakening of its antique cement. So the University of Oxford, in these Local Examinations for the Middle Classes, is "pouring in the moral concrete which will make its structure last for ages yet to come." So far from encouraging "cram," the Bishop thought these examinations detected and defeated the crammer, and obliged him to disgorge the undigested knowledge as a fowl's crop is forced to disgorge the undigested food—by a squeeze. The Bishop is partly right and partly wrong. No doubt these examinations detect stupid cram, but to say that a clever lad does not often put on much more steam than is at all good for his intellect, and do it successfully for the time, in order to prepare for those hosts of examinations with which life is now crowded, is an error. There may be a healthy discipline to strong muscular sorts of intellects, not too fine in grain, in all this early competition, but many of a finer kind are utterly spoiled by it. It is the old Darwinian law over again—a selection of natural species by the conflicts of race ; but the natural species selected by this sort of conflict are decidedly of the harder, commoner grain. The Bishop of Oxford naturally sympathizes with successful intellect, and as naturally depre- ciates the higher and finer minds.
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