§ THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNEasked the Secretary of State for India, Whether he will communicate to the House the names of the Commissioners to be appointed under Clause 4 of the University of Oxford Bill on a day earlier than that fixed for Committee on the Bill? He added, that he trusted the noble Marquess would not suspect him of having placed this Question upon the Paper, either with the view of gratifying an idle curiosity, or in the hope of embarrassing the progress of the measure. He had placed the Question on the Paper solely in the belief that it was one to which they were entitled to obtain an answer; and that, without the information for which he asked, they would approach the Bill in Committee under very considerable disadvantage. It was stated in the late debate by the most rev. Prelate that this was a case in which everything depended not upon the nature of the measure, but upon the character of the men who were to carry it into effect. He asked the noble Marquess to tell him who those men were to be? Some of their Lordships were no doubt preparing Amendments, and information upon this point might have an important bearing in reference to those Amendments. The more he looked at the Bill the more he was filled with apprehension at the prospect its various clauses offered. The Commissioners were to have vast and undefined powers, which would extend over a period of no less than seven years, and the only restriction on their action was an appeal to the Queen in Council. Therefore it was most desirable that their Lordships should know who they were to be. He was anxious to learn whether they would be few or many; 262 whether they would be persons not only holding high positions in the Church, or in the law, or in their professions, whatever those professions might be, but whether they would be persons well acquainted with the system of the University, and with the position occupied in it by the different Colleges. He wished also to know whether the interests of Science would be represented on the Commission? He wished to know also whether the Commissioners would not only be men of high attainments, but whether they would have the time necessary to be devoted to the purposes of the Commission? The members of the University were watching these proceedings with great anxiety—not because they had an aversion to change, but because they saw the prospect of a diversion of revenues from purposes to which they had been hitherto appropriated, without any security that the new appropriation would be a wise one, because they were threatened with the substitution of a new and untried reforming agency for that power of self-reform, which had already been used with advantage in many of the Colleges; because, in a word, they were threatened with a new order of things without any guarantee that it would be an improvement upon the old. These apprehensions could only be quieted by a knowledge that the Commissioners were to be wisely selected, and that their names would inspire confidence in the University itself. He hoped, therefore, that before the Bill went into Committee the noble Marquess would give their Lordships the information for which he had asked.
§ THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURYwould say at once that he thought the request of the noble Marquess an extremely reasonable one. Only that he was afraid that he might be unnecessarily occupying the attention of the House, he would have himself announced that it was his intention to state the names of the Commissioners on Monday next. He confessed he had been a little puzzled that, in making so simple a request, the noble Marquess should have found it necessary to preface it with an elaborate argument; but as the noble Marquess proceeded he thought he saw that the noble Marquess had intended the remarks just delivered for a speech on the second reading of the Bill, but 263 had shrunk from delivering it on the evening when he (the Marquess of Salisbury), as the person having charge of the Bill, could not avoid the painful task of addressing a speech in reply to the weary and forlorn half-dozen Peers who were at that time in the House. He admitted that the powers of the Commissioners under this Bill were large; but when the noble Marquess said they were unprecedented, he quite forgot the legislation that had gone before. They were not larger than the powers given to the Public School Commissioners and the Endowed School Commissioners. The noble Marquess had referred to the Act of 1854, and asked why not give the Colleges the powers that were conferred by that Act? It was true that under the University Bill of 1854 the Colleges had a restraining power over the Commissioners which was not given by the present Bill; but those who made that an objection to this measure forgot the difference between the objects of the two Bills. The object of the Bill of 1854 was to apply the revenues of the Colleges for the benefit of the Colleges themselves. The object of the Bill now before their Lordships' House was to apply them not for the Colleges, but for the University to which the Colleges belonged. The statutes under the Bill of 1854 proceeded on what was conducive not to the interests of the University, but to the interests of the Colleges; those to be drawn up under the present Bill would proceed on what was conducive not to the interests of the Colleges, but to the interests of the University. Again, the Quorum of three Commissioners would have to sit besides another Quorum of three appointed by the College itself; so that the Colleges, instead of being reduced to a dead veto over the whole scheme, would have an opportunity of following the scheme stage by stage, and suggesting changes and voting for each particular proposition in the scheme. He acknowledged that the Bill had been received in the most candid spirit; and though the Government had put forward arrangements for carrying out the measure, they would not adhere to those arrangements with undue pertinacity, but would agree to changes if changes were thought desirable after the provisions of the measure had been considered by their Lordship sand outside that House. 264 When laying the names of the Commissioners on the Table he would give Notice of the Amendments which he meant to propose in certain clauses of the Bill, and he hoped that such of their Lordships as had Amendments to propose would give Notice of them at the same time.