And the
foundation for university extension is a change, subtle but clear, that
may be seen to be coming over the attitude of the public mind to higher
education, varying in intensity in different localities, but capable of
being encouraged where it is least perceptible,--a change by which
education is ceasing to be regarded as a thing proper to particular
classes of society or particular periods of life, and is coming to be
recognized as one of the permanent interests of life, side by side with
such universal interests as religion and politics. For persons of
leisure and means such growing demand can be met by increased activity
of the universities. University Extension is to be the university of the
busy.

My definition puts the hope of extending university education in this
sense to the whole nation without exception. I am aware that to some
minds such indiscriminate extension will seem like an educational
communism, on a par with benevolent schemes for redistributing the
wealth of society so as to give everybody a comfortable income all
round. But it surely ought not to be necessary to explain that in
proposing a universal system of education we are not meaning that what
each individual draws from the system will be the same in all cases. In
this as in every other public benefit that which each person draws from
it must depend upon that which he brings to it. University Extension may
be conceived as a stream flowing from the high ground of universities
through the length and breadth of the country; from this stream each
individual helps himself according to his means and his needs; one takes
but a cupful, another uses a bucket, a third claims to have a cistern to
himself: every one suits his own capacity, while our duty is to see that
the stream is pure and that it is kept running.

The truth is that the wide-reaching purpose of University Extension will
seem visionary or practicable according to the conception formed of
education, as to what in education is essential and what accidental. If
I am asked whether I think of shop-assistants, porters, factory-hands,
miners, dock or agricultural laborers, women with families and constant
home duties, as classes of people who can be turned into economists,
physicists, literary critics, art connoisseurs,--I admit that I have no
such idea. But I do believe, or rather, from my experience in England I
know, that all such classes can be _interested_ in economic, scientific,
l