ABSTRACT
“On this then we are all agreed and in this let us hold fast that it is right education that turns out good men and that for this reason it is our bounden duty to cast no slight on education the first and fairest gift that our best men have to help them, And if ever it is dying out and can by any possibility be restored this ought to be the great business of everyman so long as he lives.” These words, quoted from Plato, 1 were taken as the motto of his Inaugural Address at the opening of University College, Liverpool, by the Principal, G. H. Rendall, Gladstone Professor at Cambridge in 1882. The words may be taken as expressing the idea that was the inspiration of the closing quarter of the nineteenth century. Think of the Victorian age as we may, it is difficult to over-estimate what post-Victorians owe to the wave of enthusiasm for education which swept the country in the last thirty years of the great Queen's reign, and issued in the foundation of Civic Universities in all the great industrial centres of England and in the present University of Wales.
