Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎486v] (97/238)

310 The P 7 'ince of Wales Professorship of History
University has held honours examinations for the B.A.
degree in literature and science, the first place in each depart
ment has thirteen times fallen to a student of the College.
We have now attempted to determine the position which
the South African College occupies in the system of the
national education of South Africa. W^e shall next
endeavour to indicate the extent and nature of the work
which, as occupying this position, it is called upon to do
for the country. Of the extent of this work we can form
some estimate by a merely mechanical reference to the
numbers of its students. During the last session there
were 236 students at the College. As the white popu
lation of South Africa, including Boer and Colonial
belligerents and deported prisoners of war, is probably
less than 800,000, it follows that about 1 in 3,000 is a
student at the College. Reckoning thirty years for a
generation probably forty would be an under-estimate—
it follows that about r in every 100 of the inhabitants
of South Africa is a present or past student at the College.
It is difficult to compare this with the position of universities
at home. It is important to notice that there are in the
United Kingdom two grades of universities ; on the one
hand, those which, like the Scotch, Welsh, and provincial
universities, do the general work of university education for
all classes of the community, and are accordingly more or
less local in their operation ; and on the other hand, the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do the
university work for the social and intellectual aristocracy
ot the whole kingdom. It is important to notice this for
two reasons, the first and greater of which is only indirectly
connected with the immediate question. It is the need,
and the possibility arising from a general sense of the need
of the older universities rising to their position as educators
of the real aristocracy of the whole Empire, and acting, if
we may use the expression, as universities of appeal not
only for the three kingdoms, but also for the great colonies.
The other reason is that the South African College cannot