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Board of the Faculties and contains the following clause:

'The General Board shall have power, after consultation with 'the Board of a Faculty specially concerned, to draft and send 'to the Hebdomadal Council any proposals on matters con'nected with the studies and examinations of the University ' which require to be dealt with by Statute: and it shall be 'the duty of the Council to submit all such proposals, without 'alteration, to Congregation.'

Under this Clause the Hebdomadal Council submitted the above statute to Congregation, with a note that this form of statute is proposed at the request of the General Board of Faculties'. But, as the whole of this history of Faculty Statutes proves, the General Board as well as the Hebdomadal Council was also bound by sections 53 and 55 of the Act of 1877; and therefore the Hebdomadal Council should have appended what was appended to the Statute of 1912 (University Gazette, 1911-12, p. 558)—namely, "This statute will require the assent of the King in Council', and to that again the consent of any College affected. It was careless neglect of the Universities Act of 1877, sections 53 and 55, and of the following statutes concerning Faculties, which wrecked the statute proposed on May 30.

The test of what is right is often what is reasonable. If the University had condescended to ask any College whether it would allow its Head to send the desired information to the Assistant Registrar of the University, all would have gone well; but to tell the Head of a College to do what he need not do is neither lawful nor reasonable. The limit of the power of the University over the Colleges is that each of them, which existed before the statute of 1871 on New Foundations, is a body corporate dependent on its founder and its Royal licence, and thereby independent of the body corporate of the University. Oxford, June 1.

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LIBERAL EDUCATION

From the first Case was aghast at the extravagance in public expenditure which the war exaggerated if it did not actually create. He set himself against the schemes for increasing expenditure on public education and wrote the following short letter. But when the comprehensive Fisher Bill was introduced in Parliament in 1917, he wrote no criticism of it.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, and later Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge, was one of Case's favourite philosophers. Besides works of Aristotle and Bacon, Case usually kept a volume of Clerk Maxwell in his bedroom.

The letter was written from Weymouth, where Case in his later years took an annual summer holiday.

FROM The Times, AUGUST 14, 1916.

Although, having been continually told that it is our duty to devote ourselves to the war, I hardly believe that the present moment is the right time for the reform of education, which is essentially a work of peace, yet, as the Government has thought fit to undertake it, I think it would conduce to a calm and comprehensive consideration of this hard problem if those in power were to adopt as a principle the opinion of Clerk Maxwell, who was, I suppose, one of the greatest men, thinkers, and physicists of the nineteenth century. This opinion formed part of his inaugural lecture delivered, after he had been appointed the first Professor of Experimental Physics in the University of Cambridge, in October 1871, and is as follows:

'Fortunately there is no question here whether the University 'should continue to be a place of liberal education or should devote itself to preparing young men for particular profes'sions. Hence, though some of us may, I hope, see reason ' to make the pursuit of science the main business of our lives, ' it must be one of our most constant aims to maintain a living connection between our work and the other liberal studies ' of Cambridge, whether literary, philological, historical, or 'philosophical. There is a narrow professional spirit which

'may grow up among men of science just as it does among men who practise any other special business. But surely a 'University is the very place where we should be able to overcome this tendency of men to become, as it were, granu'lated into small worlds, which are all the more worldly for their very smallness. We lose the advantage of having men of varied pursuits collected into one body if we do not

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' endeavour to imbibe some of the spirit even of those whose special branch of learning is different from our own.'

Weymouth, August 11, 1916.

IV

LETTERS ON THE LABOUR QUESTION

Sir Edward James Reed, K.C.B., was Member of Parliament for
Cardiff from 1880 to 1895. He had previously been Chief Naval
Constructor. He died in 1906.

The year 1890 had some serious strikes of gas-workers and dock-
labourers, following upon the famous Dockers Strike of 1889.
Mr. Benjamin Tillet was General Secretary of the Dockers' Union.
Along with Mr. John Burns he was one of the organizers of the
Dockers' Strike of 1889. Mr. Joseph Havelock Wilson is now
General President of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union.

FROM The Times, AUGUST 23, 1890.

Sir Edward Reed has addressed to you two letters on the labour question at Cardiff, which, though primarily intended to defend himself and the recent strikers, really open up the wider question between free labour' and what we may call the monopoly of employment'. There can be no doubt on two points the first, that the railway companies in South Wales could have obtained new servants in the places of the strikers; the second, that they were prevented by force, without which the strikers could not have been successful. The perusal of your reports of the strike (August 8-15) shows that the railway men on strike roughly handled those who refused to come out' and prevented others from being employed by means of pickets; while they were assisted by the co-operation of outsiders. The colliers refused to cut coal and the dockers to ship it if' black-legs' were used to carry it; the Amalgamated Society of Engineers requested its members to prevent workmen coming to Cardiff; Mr. Wilson, Secretary of the Seamen's and Firemen's Union, threatened to stop all Cardiff vessels from getting men; Mr. Ben Tillett was there; and Sir Edward Reed admits that he promised to hold up the grim

visage of democracy'. I mention these facts, not from any wish to rake up the past, but because they are examples of what is becoming the habitual conduct of a strike, and the question arises, What will be the result if workmen are to be allowed not only to strike, but also to establish perforce a monopoly of employment by preventing new hands from being employed?

The railway companies had an undoubted right to employ new servants, and, in fact, the very same right of free contract as that by which the old servants originally engaged themselves and afterwards terminated the contract by striking. Similarly the strikers had no right to prevent new servants from engaging themselves. They committed the illegal acts of preventing the companies from conducting their business and of intimidating those who were willing to work it. Yet Sir Edward Reed, in his letter last Saturday, said that the conduct of the railway men was throughout most exemplary and absolutely free from any tendency to violence'. To-day he asks, 'Amidst the conflicts of war, how many deeds are done of which neither of the high combating parties approve?' He has apparently forgotten that strikers are not belligerents, but citizens of a State, and that by roughly treating men who were actually working the engines the strikers in South Wales broke the laws of the State of which they are citizens. Similar illegal acts have become a feature of strikes. . . .

This violent and illegal monopoly of an employment, if allowed to continue, will not terminate in isolated acts of injustice. In his letter of this morning Sir Edward Reed says that a strike in one trade paralyses the whole district. But it would not have this effect if the employers in that trade were allowed to act upon their right of employing new servants. On the other hand, if they are compelled by force either to shut up shop' or to re-engage the strikers,

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