elementary schools themselves. When these opportunities so lavishly
provided for the development of student life in its self-governing
aspects are realised and when above it all there stand great teachers
in the lineage of those described by Cardinal Newman in his eulogy of
Athens--"the very presence of Plato" to the student, "a stay for his
mind to rest on, a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with
men like himself, ever afterwards"--little else can be desired. In
every university there must be such teachers, or universities will
tend to fall to the level of the life about them. "You can infuse,"
said Lord Rosebery at the Congress of the Universities of the Empire,
"character, and morals and energy and patriotism by the tone and
atmosphere of your university and your professors."

From one point of view, all the old universities of Europe--Bologna,
Paris, Prague, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.--must be regarded as definite
and conscious protests against the dividing and isolating--the
anti-civic--forces of the periods of their institution. They represent
historically the development of communities for common interest and
protection in the great and holy cause of the pursuit of learning, and
above all things their story is the story of the growth of European
unity and citizenship.

The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were
both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up
in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the
severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the
distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or
brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and
social position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was