ing back the older condition of things,
though no doubt in an amended form. His ideas of University reform
were crude and barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what
the Germans call "bread studies" for mental cultivation, and to the
extension of the plan of competitive examinations for honours and
money prizes, a plan which more and more displeases the most
enlightened University teachers, and is felt to have done more harm
than good to Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the fullest play.
He had also, and could give good reasons for his opinion, a hearty
dislike to endowments of all kinds; and once, when asked by a Royal
Commission to suggest a mode of improving their application, answered
in his trenchant way, "Get rid of them. Throw them into the sea."

It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the results which followed his
vigorous action against the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no
one could then have predicted that in the following year the Tories,
beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would reverse their former attitude and
carry a suffrage bill far wider than that which they had rejected a
year before. But the sequel of the successful resistance of 1866 may
stand as a warning to those who think that the course of thoroughgoing
opposition to a measure they dislike is, because it seems courageous,
likely to be the right and wise course for patriotic men. Had the
moderate bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of further
extending the suffrage might possibly have slept for another thirty
years, for there was no very general or urgent cry for it among the
working people, and England would have continued to be ruled in the
main by voters belonging to the middle class and the upper section of
the working class. The consequence of the heated contest of 1866 was
not only to bring about a larger immediate change in 1867, but to
create an interest in the question which soon prompted the demand for
the extension of household suffrage to the counties, and completed in
1884-85 the process by which England has become virtually a democracy,
though a plutocratic democracy, still affected by the habits and
notions of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much as Disraeli and
Gladstone, may in a sense be called an author of the tremendous change
which has passed upon the British Constitution since 1866, and the
extent of which was not for a long while realised. Lowe himself never
recanted his views, but never re