How the case
stands now, we all know. I do not blame the Universities for the change. It
has come about, I think, simply by competition. The change began, I should
say, in the sixteenth century. Then, after the Wars of the Roses, and the
revival of letters, and the dissolution of the monasteries, the younger
sons of gentlemen betook themselves to the pursuit of letters, fighting
having become treasonable, and farming on a small scale difficult (perhaps
owing to the introduction of large sheep-farms, which happened in those
days), while no monastic orders were left to recruit the Universities, as
they did continually through the middle ages, from that labouring-class to
which they and their scholars principally belonged.
So the gentlemen's sons were free to compete against the sons of working
men; and by virtue of their superior advantages they beat them out of
the field. We may find through the latter half of the sixteenth and the
beginning of the seventeenth centuries, bequest after bequest for the
purpose of stopping this change, and of enabling poor men's sons to enter
the Universities; but the tendency was too strong to be effectually
resisted then.
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