Rumford, the humanitarian, gone, a curious change came over the spirit of the enterprise he had founded. The aristocrats who at first were merely ballast for the enterprise now made their influence felt. With true British reserve, they announced their belief that the education of the masses involved a dangerous political tendency. Hence the mechanics' school was suspended and the workshops and kitchens abolished; in a word, the chief ends for which the institution was founded were annulled. The library and the lectures remained, to be sure, but they were for the amusement of the rich, not for the betterment of the poor. It was the West End that made a fad of the institution and a society function of the lectures of Sydney Smith and of the charming youth Davy. Thus the institution came to justify its aristocratic title and its regal patronage; and the poor seemed quite forgotten.
But indeed the institution itself was poor enough in these days, after the first flush of enthusiasm died away, and it is but fair to remember that without the support of its popular lectures its very existence would have been threatened. Nor in any event are regrets much in order over the possible might-have-beens of an institution whose laboratories were the seat of the physical investigations of Thomas Young, through which the wave theory of light first gained a footing, and of the brilliant chemical researches of Davy, which practically founded the science of electro-chemistry and gave the chemical world first knowledge of a galaxy of hitherto unknown elements. Through the labors of these men, and through the popular lecture-courses delivered at the institution by such other notables of science as Wollaston, Dalton, and Rum-ford, the enterprise had become world-famous before the close of the first decade of its existence.
From that day till this the character of the Royal Institution has not greatly changed. The enterprise shifted around during its earliest years, while it was gaining its place in the scheme of things; but once that was found, like a true British institution it held its course with an inertia that a mere century of time could not be expected to alter. Rumford was the sole founder of the enterprise, but it was Davy who gave it the final and definitive cast. He it was who established the tradition that the Royal Institution was to be essentially a laboratory for brilliant original investigations, the investigator to deliver a yearly course of lectures, but to be otherwise untrammelled. It occupied, and has continued to occupy, the anomalous position of a school to which pupils are on no account admitted, and whose professors teach nothing except by a brief course of lectures to which whoever cares to pay the admission price may freely enter.