Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Objections to the Government Scheme for the Present Subjection and Future Management of the University of Oxford
But why, it will be said, such a quarrel about forms? If the change that is proposed is not bad in itself, it will only be the more secure for having the sanction of an act of parliament, and if it is done in this way, the University will be spared another year of con?icting opinion and interrupted study. Peace no doubt is a good thing, especially for Oxford, but freedom is a better and it is well worth another year of discomfort, to preserve, it may be, for ages yet to come, the privileges which many past ages have brought down to us for an inheritance. How much we should lose of that inheritance I will endeavour to shew in a few words.
We are now, and have been for many centuries, a corporation, what is called in law, a civil corporation', one created for some public purpose, and bound to the performance of some public duties, duties at least in which the public has an interest but there is another side, the private side, even to such a corporation. Though it has a public function, its members are not functionaries of the State. They are an aggregation of individuals undertaking to perform a certain public service, in their aggregate character, on condition of having certain rights and powers as a distinct self continuing, self-governing community conferred on them. These powers and rights, which in law are called, not functions, but franchises, as they are settled in the origin by mutual consent of the Corporation and the State, so neither can they be varied, without the like consent of both parties.
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