McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, Volume I, 1801-1895 9780773560758

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MCGILL UNIVERSITY VOLUME I

McGILL FOR THE

UNIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

VOLUME I 1801-1895 STANLEY BRICE FROST

McGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS KINGSTON AND MONTREAL

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1980 Reprinted 1985 ISBN 0-7735-0353-6

Legal deposit second quarter 1980 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Design by Naoto Kondo Printed in Canada by T.H. Best Printing Company

To the successive Governors, Principals, and Fellows of the University of McGill College this volume is respectfully dedicated

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CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

FOREWORD

xv

PREFACE

xvii

ABBREVIATIONS

xxi

CHAPTER 1 MONTREAL AND JAMES McGILL

1

Newcomers to Montreal. The Fur Trader. The Montreal Merchant. The Public Servant. The Colonel of Militia. The Private Person. Notes

CHAPTER 2

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION The Demand for Public Education. Chief Justice Smith's Report. Early Proposals in the Assembly. The Anglican Episcopate. Jacob Mountain's Intervention. The Act of 1801. The Proposed School System. The College Bequest. Alternative Proposals. The Royal Institution Established. The Royal Institution in Operation. The Royal Institution Circumvented. The Royal Institution Reviewed. Notes

21

CONTENTS

Vlll

CHAPTER3 THE YEARS OF LITIGATION 47 The Charter of 1821. The Lawsuits. The Burnside Estate. McGill College Inaugurated. The Montreal Medical Institution Engrafted. The Second Principal. Notes

CHAPTER4

THE YEARS OF JOHN BETHUNE

69

Royal Institution and Governors of McGill. Bethune's Qualifications and Support. Decision to Build. Building Commenced. Financial Problems. The College Opened. Religious Dissensions. The College Visited. A Committee of Inquiry. Bethune's Last Days. Bethune in Review. Notes

CHAPTER

5

A TIME OF I N T E R M I S S I O N : 1846-1852

101

The Third Principal. The New Men of the Royal Institution. The Second Visitation. College Life in the First Decade. Caput and Student Discipline. Matriculation and Curriculum. The Academic Staff. Academic Standards. Notes

CHAPTER 6

THE FACULTY OF M E D I C I N E

125

The Founding Fathers. Students and Courses. Students on Campus. Faculty and Caput. Faculty and the Boards. Faculty and Province. A Rival Faculty. Early Alumni. Notes

CHAPTER 7 A TIME OF 1852-1855

RECONSTRUCTION:

149

The Amended Charter. The New Board of Governors. The Education Committee. The Finance and Building Committee. The Land Sales. Graduates and Extension. The Fifth Principal. Anglophone, Protestant, Professional. Notes

CHAPTER 8 D A W S O N : THE EARLY YEARS Pictou and Edinburgh. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The Inaugural Address. The Program Initiated. A New Technology. The McGill Normal School. Schools and Colleges. Progress Report. Notes

177

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 9 MATTERS F I N A N C I A L

IX

209

Recurrent Crises. High School Relinquished. Academic Salaries. New Funds, New Ventures. The McGill Case. Imperial Petition. Another Viewpoint. Notes

CHAPTER 10 DAWSON: THE MIDDLE YEARS

223

Edinburgh and Princeton. Science and Religion. Teacher and Students. The Founder's Tomb. Notes

CHAPTER 11 DAWSON: THE YEARS OF ACHIEVEMENT The Tale of Benefactions. The McGill University Libraries. The Education of Women. A Subject of Controversy. A New Element on Campus. Notes

CHAPTER 12 THE END OF AN ERA

239

265

The Humanities. The Sciences. The Applied Sciences. The Faculty of Law. Faculties and Professional Councils. The Faculty of Medicine. Women in Medicine. The Faculty of Veterinary Science. Student Affairs. A New Chancellor, A New Generation. End and Beginning. Notes

McGILL COLLEGE SONGS

299

INDEX

303

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Montreal, 1803

2

By Richard Dillon, McCord Museum

James McGill

7

By Louis Dulongpre, McCord Museum

James McGill's Beaver Club Medal

8

McCord Museum

Isaac Todd

11

By Louis Dulongpre, McCord Museum

James McGill's Notre Dame Street house and warehouse

16

By Bunnett, 1885, McCord Museum

William Smith

24

From Les juges de la Province de Quebec

Bishop Jacob Mountain

29

Inventaire des Biens Culturels du Quebec

Mr. Speaker Louis-Joseph Papineau

38

Inventaire des Biens Culturels du Quebec

National School, Bonsecours Street

41

From Hochelaga Depicta, 1839

Burnside Place

56

By W.B. Lambe, 1852, McCord Museum

George Jehoshaphat Mountain McCord Museum

59

xii

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Montreal General Hospital, 1826

64

By John Poad Drake, Inventaire des Biens Culturels du Quebec

The Montreal Medical Institution, No. 20, St. James Street, 1823

64

By J. C. Simpson, Osier Library

John Bethune

70

Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre)

The City of Montreal, 1830

74

Lande Canadiana Collections

Joseph-Remi Vallieres de St.-Real

78

From Les juges de la Province de Quebec

McGill College, 1860

84

Notman Photographic Archives

John Cook

92

Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University

Burnside Place, 1859

96

By James Duncan

Edmund Allen Meredith, 1863

103

Notman Photographic Archives

James Ferrier, 1827

104

Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre)

Peter McGill

107

Notman Photographic Archives

John Ostell's plan of the McGill estate

111

McGill University Archives

William Turnbull Leach, 1864

119

Notman Photographic Archives

William Robertson, William Caldwell, John Stephenson, Andrew Fernando Holmes

126

The Dean's Office, Faculty of Medicine

The Faculty of Medicine, Cote Street

142

From Montreal Monthly Journal of Medicine, July 1858

Alexander Morris

145

Notman Photographic Archives

Wolf red Nelson

145

Inventaire des Biens Culturels du Quebec

Notre Dame Street, Montreal, 1850

151

By John Murray, Lande Canadiana Collections

Charles Dewey Day

154

Notman Photographic Archives

Abraham de Sola

159

McGill University Archives

John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, c. 1861

160

Notman Photographic Archives

Christopher Dunkin Notman Photographic Archives

164

ILLUSTRATIONS

Xlll

John William Dawson, 1859 Notman Photographic Archives McGill Normal School, 1875 By E. Haberer, from de Volpi-Winkworth's Montreal

180 189

William Hicks Notman Photographic Archives

190

Sampson Paul Robins McGill University Archives

194

McGill College, c. 1860 McLennan Library, Rare Book Department

199

William Molson, 1864 Notman Photographic Archives

203

Molson Hall and the Arts Building facade, c. 1875 Notman Photographic Archives

204

Burnside Hall By J. Walker, McGill University Archives

211

Professor and Mrs. Alexander Johnson, 1863 Notman Photographic Archives

215

John Clark Murray, 1894 Notman Photographic Archives

216

The Montreal Natural History Society's Museum Notman Photographic Archives

227

A page from Dawson's The Story of the Earth and Man

228

Graduating class, Arts 1866 McGill University Archives

231

Graduating class, Applied Science 1873 McGill University Archives

235

McGill College University, 1875 From Canadian Illustrated News, 29 May 1875

236

William Dawson

241

By Wyatt Eaton, Arts Council Room (Instructional Communications Centre)

John Henry Robinson Molson By Robert Harris, Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre) Grace Redpath By Robert Harris, Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre) Peter Redpath By Robert Harris, Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre) The Redpath Museum, c. 1884 Notman Photographic Archives Redpath Library, 1893 Notman Photographic Archives Donald Alexander Smith Notman Photographic Archives First women's graduating class, 1888 From McGill News, December 1934 (Instructional Communications Centre)

242 245 245 246 249 254 260

XIV

ILLUSTRATIONS

Carrie Derick, 1890

262

Notman Photographic Archives

Bernard James Harrington, 1885

267

Notman Photographic Archives

William Christopher Macdonald, 1870

271

Notman Photographic Archives

Thomas Workman, 1864

272

Notman Photographic Archives

The Macdonald-Workman Engineering Building, 1893

275

Notman Photographic Archives

Macdonald Physics Building

276

Notman Photographic Archives

Medical graduating class, c. 1890

280

McGill University Archives

The Medical Building, 1895

283

Notman Photographic Archives

William Osier, 1877

284

Osier Library

Maude Abbott, 1890

284

Notman Photographic Archives

Their Excellencies' visit to McGill College

289

By E. Jump, from Canadian Illustrated News, i February 1873

The international football match, Harvard vs. McGill

290

From Canadian Illustrated News, 31 October 1874

James Ferrier, c. 1885

293

By Robert Harris, Redpath Hall (Instructional Communications Centre)

The University of McGill College, 1882

294

From Canadian Illustrated News, 26 August 1882

Endpapers: Montreal, Canada East By E. Whitefield, 1852, Lande Canadiana Collections

Acknowledgements for generous assistance in the selection and preparation of the illustrations are due to the following: Susan Button and Sheila Rosenberg of the History of McGill Project; Robert Michel and Susan Rice of the McGill University Archives; Conrad Graham of the McCord Museum; Stanley Triggs of the Notman Photographic Archives; Gary Tynski of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library; Nellie Reiss of the Lande Canadiana Room, McLennan Library; Marilyn Fransiszyn of the Osier Library; Rolf Selbach and Jack Goldsmith of the Instructional Communications Centre; Sean Huxley of the Educational Media Centre, Faculty of Education; and Inventaire des Biens Culturels du Quebec. Newton Bosworth, Hochelaga Depicta (1839), and de Volpi-Winkworth, Montreal: A Pictorial Record (1963), have suggested much more excellent material than regrettably could be included.

FOREWORD

any people, graduates, faculty, students of history, will I am sure have shared my feeling for the need of a formal, authoritative, definitive history of McGill University. By good fortune I found myself in a position to take action towards satisfying this need. When in 1973 Dr. Stanley B. Frost was within a few months of the end of his term as vice-principal, it was borne in on me that he would be a most appropriate person to undertake the formal history of McGill. He had published several books, and although his own discipline was Old Testament studies, it had obvious historical elements. Not only had he been dean of the Faculty of Divinity (now Religious Studies), but he had also been dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and was thus familiar with the whole range of research in the university. Furthermore, Dr. Frost had been especially active in connection with McGilPs libraries and archives and, perhaps best of all, had a proven record of accomplishment, of tackling difficult jobs and of getting them done. In the course of a conversation with Dr. Frost about his plans, I asked him without any forewarning whether he would be interested in writing a history of McGill. Although momentarily taken aback by the suggestion, he quickly responded with his customary zeal and enthusiasm. In the spring of 1974 the university's board of governors appointed Dr.

XVI

FOREWORD

Frost director of the History of McGill Project and allocated to it some modest financial support. Dr. Frost tackled his task with characteristic care and thoroughness with the result that the first volume of his history now appears, and the second is well under way. As will become apparent to the reader, the writing of this volume represents an immense amount of research, consultation, organization, and plain hard work. Dr. Frost's enthusiasm has been infectious and has enjoyed the support of many people interested in the history of McGill, particularly members of the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts. With great imagination Dr. Frost conceived the idea of a society devoted to the public presentation of papers on various aspects of the history of this university, papers that were often from direct participants in that history. The success of the James McGill Society has provided ample evidence of the wide interest in the subject. McGill has always been fortunate in the degree of support so generously provided by staff, students, graduates, and friends. I have often expressed my thanks for this support and I do so again, particularly for this splendid new history. I hope it will serve not just as a source of knowledge about this university, but also as a resource for strength in the future of McGill. R.E. BELL Principal and Vice-Chancellor (1970-1979)

PREFACE

riting the history of an institution as large and complex as a university is a task that can only be undertaken with the assistance of a great variety of men and women, and it is unfortunately impossible to thank individually all those who deserve to be mentioned. But I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to a host of colleagues and friends, both within McGill and beyond, who have responded to my many requests with generosity of time and interest. From time to time I have been able to acknowledge particular contributions in the notes, but a great many more of the most helpful collaborators must still be left unnamed. It is, however, an inescapable obligation, and one which I am particularly glad to acknowledge, to speak of the immense help rendered by the staff of the University Archives: John Andreassen, Marcel Caya, Faith Wallis, and Robert Michel. Similarly the staffs of the Reference Department of the McLennan Library, of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department, of the Medical Library, and of the Osier Library of the History of Medicine have been constantly willing and resourceful; and from staff members in other libraries on campus and elsewhere, I have received unfailing kindness and cooperation. A number of colleagues have undertaken to read various parts of the manuscript and I am grateful for their many suggestions for its correc-

XV111

PREFACE

tion and improvement. In the Department of History, Professors Michael Maxwell and Carman Miller have been particularly generous of time and expertise, and I owe a special debt of gratitude in this respect to Emeritus Professor John Cooper. In the Faculty of Education, Professors Real Boulianne and Margaret Gillett and in the Department of Geology Professor Colin Stearn have given indispensable help with regard to the Royal Institution and to the Dawson years, and in the field of science Dr. R.V.V. Nicholls and in the field of medicine Dr. E.H. Bensley have served as project advisers with unstinted liberality. Barbara Tunis has similarly fulfilled the role of Research Assistant in the Public Archives in Ottawa. I am particularly appreciative of the fraternal interest and assistance of Professor Robin Harris of Toronto. My debt to these colleagues is of an individual quality. Over the years many have contributed by writing and research to the better understanding of the history of McGill, and I have inherited the results of their careful investigations. Foremost among them are, of course, Principal Sir William Dawson and Dean Cyrus Macmillan, but also not to be forgotten are those who worked on particular subjects, such as Mr. Justice E. Fabre Surveyer and Miss Maysie Steele MacSporran, and the contributors to the volume McGill, The Story of a University, edited in 1960 by Professor Hugh McLennan, who himself supplied two of the chapters. Among those contributors was Dr. Edgar Andrew Collard and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the valuable assistance he has given, both through his many writings and by frequent consultation. Another major aspect of the writing of a university history is that it cannot be undertaken and sustained without the commitment of institutional resources, and in this regard I very warmly thank Dr. R.E. Bell, Principal of McGill University 1970-79, for the confidence he displayed in assigning this responsibility and for his unwavering support. Vice-Principal Walter Hitschfeld has found ways to make research funds available, and Mr. Allan McColl and Mr. G. Sam Kingdon have greatly assisted the operation by ensuring that I have those administrative facilities on which all else depends. I have not reproduced any official documents, such as James McGilFs will or the original charter, since they are now readily available in the excellent manuals prepared by the University Solicitor. A copy of each has been deposited in the University Archives. The occasional use of Canada's other official language results at times in the same word being spelled differently in different contexts, and some current neologisms such as 'francophone' or 'Anglican' are so convenient that I have not hesitated to use them when referring to times when those words were

PREFACE

XIX

not available. Similarly, I have occasionally used the terms 'the Colonial Office' and 'the colonial secretary' in periods before those designations became established, and I have regularly referred to the chief representative of the crown as 'the governor general', even though at times another term would have been more accurate. These flexibilities of usage I judge to be justified by their great convenience for the general reader. Finally, I acknowledge that I owe more than I can readily express to my successive secretaries, Mrs. Susan Newton and Miss Susan Button. To their many skills they each added a degree of personal commitment to the project which made my task both very much easier and very much more enjoyable. Stanley Brice Frost

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ABBREVIATIONS

Addresses

Educational Lectures, Addresses, Etc, Reprints of J. W. Dawson's major writings on educational subjects bound in one volume and presented by Dawson to the University Library, MUL, IXM Ui855.

Audet

Louis-Philippe Audet, Le Systeme scolaire de la Province de Quebec, 6 vols. (Quebec, 1950-56).

Fifty Years

Fifty Years of Work in Canada, ed. Rankine Dawson, from J.W. Dawson's manuscript (London, 1901).

LAJ(C)

Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1841-1867.

LAJ(Q)

Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1792-1837.

McGilliana

Bulletin of the History of McGill Project; no. i, Sept. 1975 and published twice yearly thereafter. MUA 2172.

M-Caput

'Minutes of the Caput of the University of

XX11

ABBREVIATIONS

McGill College', July i843~August 1850, MUA 639/1M-Gov.

'Minutes of the Meetings of the Governors of the University of McGill College Situate at Montreal', June iSQg-November 1871, MUA 681 /3a, and continuing series.

M-Med, Fac.

'Minutes of Montreal Medical Institution and of Medical Faculty Meetings', October 1822(?)October 1824, MUA 38/3/1 a; February 1842June 1852, MUA 38/3/2a. The series resumes unbroken from 1873.

M-RIAL

'Minute Book Royal Institution', February i837-October 1842, MUA 681/1; November i842-June 1856; MUA 681/2. (The first volume 1820-1837 is missing; series discontinued 1856.)

MUA

McGill University Archives.

MUL

McGill University Libraries.

RIAL

Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning.

RIAL-LB

Royal Institution Letter Books, April 1820September 1858, MUA 100/1 to 5. Series discontinued 1858.

Shortt and Doughty

Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 7759-7797, vol. i, parts i and 2, second edition (Ottawa, 1918).

Statutes and Charters

'McGill University, Statutes, Charters, Et Cetera', Courtois, Clarkson, Parsons and Tetrault, University Solicitors, 1977, vol. i, McGill College; vol. 2, Royal Victoria College; vol. 3, The Visitor. MUA 2332/1-3.

CHAPTER

I

MONTREAL AND JAMES McGILL

he story of McGill is intertwined with that of Montreal. The city began as a French trading post. It is true that there was also originally a sincere religious motive and a vigorous mission settlement, but it was trade that determined that Ville Marie should be established where it was, and trading interests early became the dominant ones. Before the British arrived, Montreal had already become a commercial centre of considerable significance. This was particularly but not wholly due to the immensely valuable fur trade, which was organized and supplied by this port of furthest penetration of sailing ships. The coming of the English-speaking merchants only emphasized further Montreal's mercantile character. The city surrendered to General Murray on 18 September 1760 and five days later the British commander was writing to the governors of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, asking them to encourage merchants in their communities to come north to help victual the army of occupation. NEWCOMERS TO MONTREAL

It was a new and risky venture, and those who responded were necessarily of an adventurous temperament. Murray no sooner had them in

Montreal, 1803

MONTREAL AND JAMES MCGILL

3

his city than he fell out with them, regarding them as a disturbing and rapacious element in the population. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 promised the Canadians representative government, such as had long been established in the English colonies to the south of them. But the military governors of the new possessions quickly counselled against too hasty implementation of this promise and were soon supported in their views for reasons of their own by the Roman Catholic clergy and by the rural seigneurs. The merchants, however, found natural allies among the Canadian traders. These were now eager for more liberty than they had enjoyed under the French monarchy. The privileges they sought were in part political, after the fashion of the thirteen colonies, but even more they were commercial. They were quite ready to enter into trading partnerships with their new colleagues and take advantage of their new access to Britain's trading empire. Thus in the appeals for political and commercial liberty which came from Quebec City and Montreal during the next two decades, French-Canadian names were always to be found along with those of the Scots and the Americans. Men like the Chaboillez brothers, Amable Desrivieres, and Jean-Baptiste Godin made common cause as early as 1766 with traders like Benjamin Frobisher, Isaac Todd, and Alexander Henry in protesting the restrictions the government sought to place on trade with the Indians. These were the men who were ready to exploit the vast wilderness that stretched before them, not only westward to the prairies, but also south into the Ohio lands behind the thirteen colonies and northwest into the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company. At first, and of necessity, the British traders went themselves far into the west, and wintered with the Indians. They shared the freedom, the dangers, and the toil of the long canoe journeys to Georgian Bay, to Michilimackinack, and to Grand Portage on Lake Superior. But the rugged life did not suit them all. A few did settle permanently in the frontier lands. Others, however, preferred to live less arduous lives of increasing respectability and to remain based in Montreal and to leave the journeying to younger men. These men began to regard themselves as permanent members of the community; they took Canadian wives (there were few other European women available) and they learned to speak French. They founded the Beaver Club to remind them nostalgically of the times when they had wintered in the wilderness, this being the qualification for membership. Above all, they began increasingly to take part in the mercantile, political, and social life of the city in which they had settled. For one or two, Montreal became more than a place of residence; it became their home and the object of their concern. Such a man was James McGill.

4

C H A P T E R ONE

THE FUR TRADER

James McGill came from a family well established in Glasgow. He was born on 6 October 1744. His father, his grandfather, and his greatgrandfather are all described as 'hammermen' or ironsmiths, and each in his day was Guild Brother in one of the oldest incorporated crafts in Glasgow. James' father also served his turn as 'deacon' of the craft and went on to acquire land and to erect a property in Glasgow. True, he later got into business difficulties, and his sons in Canada had to come to their father's rescue, but most of his life he was in a position of respectable independence and modest affluence. When his boys entered Glasgow University he was described, perhaps a little generously, as mercator. The father appears to have sought to give his sons opportunities beyond his own, for James and his youngest brother Andrew were both entered at Glasgow University. The middle brother John does not seem to have gone so far in his schooling, but since he later operated successfully in Montreal as a merchant like his brothers, he too must have received at least a basic education. James matriculated at the then not unusually early age of twelve, and Andrew, ten years his junior, at the even earlier age of eleven. There is no evidence how long either stayed at the university but neither graduated. It was not uncommon for young men to take courses for a year or two and then depart without having completed the requirements for a degree. Certainly James received a sufficiently sound education to enable him in later life to conduct his business very efficiently, to draw up long and detailed memoranda for various government bodies, to argue a case in law with more than a layman's knowledge, and to act effectively in public office in both the English and French languages. The reasons behind his decision to emigrate are unknown, but the desire to lead a life less confining than that of his forebears and to seek adventure and a fortune in the American colonies was probably influential. It has been said that James was accompanied by John and that the brothers spent some time in Virginia and New York, but there is no evidence to support this tradition. The first known North American reference to James McGill is in a letter, dated 23 September 1766, to Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for New York. McGill is there described as 'the Deputy of Mr. Grant',1 and is reported as having proceeded with six canoes to Green Bay, Wisconsin. John and Andrew later followed James to Montreal and shared some business enterprises with him. It is difficult in these days of easy travel and instant communication

MONTREAL AND JAMES MCGILL

5

to realize what a venturesome business the Canadian fur trade was. First, the would-be trader had to find a merchant prepared to let him have on credit a cargo of trade goods worth several hundred pounds. Then he needed a government licence to trade with the Indians. The cargo had to be made up into ninety-pound packages, and sixty of these were allocated to each of the great, thirty-three-foot canoes. Each canoe required an eight-man crew and these had to be engaged with special concern (and special rates) for the 'end-men'. Finally a place had to be secured in one of the 'brigades', a group of three or four canoes in the charge of an experienced guide. Only then could the journey begin. Because of the rapids the goods had to go by road to Lachine, where the canoes were loaded. Then, after an easy paddle along Lac St. Louis to Ste. Anne de Bellevue for a last confession, the trader bade farewell to civilization. For the next three or four weeks each day lasted twelve to fourteen hours, with but two breaks for meals. The long hours of paddling, the constant unpacking and repacking of the six-thousand-pound cargo, the back-breaking portages at rapids and carrying places, the onslaught of flies and mosquitoes, the condition of privation bordering on starvation, the vastness of the country and frequent hostility of its inhabitants, all came together to create an experience of unremitting hardship and constant danger. Almost every rapid was marked by a little group of crosses commemorating the men who had lost their lives at that spot. Moreover, the business risks were such that none could engage in the trade with any peace of mind. The Montreal merchant would have himself borrowed large sums in London to pay for the trade goods— blankets, cottons, needles, knives, hatchets, guns, and ammunition— which he had advanced to the trader. Once they had been transported to Mackinack the goods doubled in value, so woe betide the trader who lost part of his cargo on the way and had to replenish at the trading store. Having got himself and his goods, more or less intact, to the junction of Lakes Huron and Michigan, the trader then made his preparations to go off into the wilderness, set up camp, and winter among the Indians. By doling out his trade goods to the local Indian families, who had by then become dependent on them, he strove to induce them to go hunting in all the rigours of the Canadian winter; by holding out to them the promise of more goods on their return, and especially by the sometimes judicious, sometimes not so judicious, distribution of 'fire-water', the trader hoped to hold his Indians loyal to their promise to return with their catch. Meanwhile, he eked out his own scanty rations with ice-fishing and the occasional hunt. If the Indians were genuinely unlucky, or if they had met with one of his competitors

O

C H A P T E R ONE

and disposed of their furs to him, the trader had no redress. The rule was that whoever staked a family last had first claim on their furs. When at the end of the long winter the season's catch had been assembled, the ninety-pound packs had again to be made up in anticipation of the canoe brigades from Montreal. They would arrive about the middle of June and after a ten-day rest would start back on the equally hazardous return journey. In 1787 McGill established his credentials before a commission investigating the Quebec Court of Common Pleas by referring to his long residence in Montreal, which he said had continued 'by intervals in this place from 1766 until the year 1775 and a constant residence since the last period till this day, being twenty-one years in all'. This statement indicates that McGilFs own career as an Indian trader covered a span of nine or ten years. In 1772 James McGill was wintering on the Crow Wing River, a tributary of the Mississippi, and Peter Pond records that in 1773 he secured a place in a brigade bound for Mackinack, led by McGill and Todd. The Montreal traders used the bases at Detroit, Mackinack, and Grand Portage on the south shore of Lake Superior; it was in the areas to which these centres gave access that McGill operated as an Indian trader. The revolt of the thirteen colonies and the subsequent drawing of frontiers between the territories of the United States and those of British North America resulted in the eventual exclusion of the Montrealers from lands south of the Great Lakes, but when in 1797 James was consulted on the arrangements to be made for the United States and British Boundary Commissioners, his reply revealed detailed knowledge of the routes and distances, the geography, and the climatic conditions beyond Lake Superior as far as the prairies. THE MONTREAL MERCHANT

The life of a fur trader who settled in Montreal was by no means without anxieties. Prices were very unpredictable. A single season could produce great wealth, but too many furs arriving at one time, a closure of continental markets on the outbreak of a European war, or even a change of fashion could depress the market and leave the Montreal merchant in debt to his suppliers. He in turn would hold his clienttraders responsible for their advances, and the man on the frontier who had endured so much and risked so many dangers might well find that the only reward he had for his exertions was that he had been cheated by his Indians or ruined by his competitors. At one time, Todd, McGill and Co. were owed some £27,000 by just one of their traders, while the

James McGill

James McGilPs Beaver Club Medal

MONTREAL

AND J A M E S M C G I L L

Q

house itself was in debt on the London market to the extent of £45,000. A few astute and fortunate fur traders became very rich, but many others lost their lives in the wilderness or ruined their health and their fortunes, failed in business, and died in poverty. Those who gained great wealth like Simon McTavish, Alexander Mackenzie, Joseph Frobisher—and we should add, James McGill—were the fortunate few. It was certainly not a business for weaklings. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War made little difference to the Great Lakes trading patterns for another fifteen to twenty years. The final surrender of the posts which McGill and his friends believed had been foolishly and negligently allowed by the British to slip into American hands did not take place until 1796, and even then, because of the agreement for mutual access, Canadians still traded for a number of years into the lands between the Ohio and Mississippi. But long before these changes became effective, James had changed the manner of his own livelihood. In the year 1776 he settled down in Montreal, married the widow of former colleague Amable Desrivieres, and began his new career as a Montreal merchant. He went into partnership with Isaac Todd and founded with him the house of Todd, McGill and Co., trading into the Great Lakes area. Their business was from the beginning very varied and as the years passed it became more so. From the papers and business correspondence of John Askin,2 and from the James and Andrew McGill Company's financial journal,3 it is clear that James McGill in his partnerships, first with Isaac Todd and later with his brother Andrew, became much more than a fur exporter. He was a businessman who was ready to undertake pretty well 'any commission for a commission'. Wine, tobacco, guns and ammunition, ropes and ships' riggings, linen breeches and men's shirts, ladies' dresses and shoes, were fairly regular additions to the usual run of trade goods. The transport of supplies for the British army outposts was a frequent responsibility. Receiving the young Scottish schoolmaster John Strachan, provisioning him, and sending him on to Kingston to be tutor to the children of McGill's friend Richard Cartwright, or fitting out a blacksmith named Vallieres to go and work for a year at the French royalist emigre settlement at Windham in Upper Canada, were less usual commissions, but by no means out of the ordinary. In the absence of banks, a great deal of McGill business was of a financial character: supplying or paying credit notes or cashing (at of course a discount) army pay certificates. The James and Andrew McGill Company performed that service for Sir John Johnson and Chief Joseph Brant and for a great many other less well known military and government figures. James McGill also acquired a great deal of land in and around Mont-

IO

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real, at Sorel, at Stanbridge in the Eastern Townships, in Upper Canada, and, rather unwillingly, in settlement of debts, on the Detroit side of the new frontier. The increasingly varied character of the McGill business reflected the increase of settlements in Upper Canada and the growth of Montreal. A town of some 3000 inhabitants before the Accession, it had grown swiftly to 7000 before McGill first saw it, and at the time of his death it had reached 15,000. As the city grew, so did the McGill merchandising operation. His friendship for Todd never faltered, but after 1792 the latter withdrew progressively from the active conduct of business and the new house of James and Andrew McGill and Company became the main agency through which in later years James conducted most of his business. From 1783 McGill, either through Todd, McGill and Co. or through the successor house, had an amicable business relationship with the 'Old Company', the 'New Company', and the 'XY Company', which in the end all welded into the North West Company, but as he stayed fairly consistently within the Montreal-Great Lakes trading patterns, he was not himself (after one short initial period) a member of that famous if turbulent brotherhood. But all the great names —Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, the Frobishers, even the American John Jacob Astor—figure in turn in his financial journal, and in later life he still prized his membership in the Beaver Club and frequently dined in the Frobisher mansion.4 THE PUBLIC SERVANT

Because his commercial interests were varied and his trading activities well documented, James McGill is an important eighteenth-century figure, and his affairs have the added quality of being more successful than those of most of his contemporaries. But what marked him out as of a decidedly different character from the general run of the fur traders and merchants of his day was his increasing involvement in public affairs. He was early associated with various petitions for free trade in the Indian lands and on the Great Lakes, and he also became more and more interested in legal matters. He joined in the petitions for a Legislative Assembly because, he pointed out, until a duly constituted lawmaking body made some clear decisions, the current ad hoc mixture of French and English legal custom created so many unresolved ambiguities as to make the rational conduct of business well-nigh impossible. He argued the case at length, with illustrations from his own experience of arbitrary and inconsistent rulings, and he referred to opinions he had secured from attorneys in London as well as from those in Quebec whom

Isaac Todd

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he had consulted on the points at issue. He was himself appointed in 1776 to the Commission for the Peace, and thus began to act as a magistrate early in his career. Before Montreal was incorporated as a city, something which did not happen until 1833, the magistrates were responsible for the peace and good order of the city, and everything from the upkeep of roads to the provision of markets and the licensing of taverns came before them. Both James and John served as magistrates. John died in 1796 but James was regular in his attention to his magisterial duties until 1813. In 1796 he was elevated to the rank of a Justice of the Peace. That there were qualities of leadership already evident in the young James McGill was revealed by the events of the year 1775 when the Americans invading Canada attacked Montreal. The British army retreated on Quebec, and the inhabitants of the city had no alternative but to capitulate to the American forces. Six English-speaking and six French-speaking merchants were chosen to negotiate the surrender. James McGill had been in the country only nine years and in Montreal only intermittently, and he was still only thirty years old, but nevertheless he was one of those deputed for this unpleasant task. McGill was both by nature and from business considerations not predisposed to sympathize with the revolutionaries. He noted disapprovingly in a letter to John Askin in 1793 that Tom Paine's Rights of Man was circulating in the province and putting all kinds of ideas into Canadian heads, and all through his career he was always strongly on the side of government. In the one public speech which has been recorded, a charge he delivered to the Grand Jury at the General Quarter Sessions at Montreal, 8 July 1794, McGill referred somewhat extravagantly, 'to the protection of a Parent State, whose Government is allowed to be the best calculated for the happiness of its subjects of any that has ever been devised by human wisdom'. He was at one time a commissioner for the taking of oaths of loyalty and he himself received lands at Sorel as one 'well-affected to the Crown'. Yet it would not be fair to dismiss James McGill as simply an establishment man seeking to further his own ends by being subservient to the entrenched powers in society. McGill undertook a great deal of public service out of a desire, which we need not doubt was sincere, to better society in general and to improve the conditions of life in the city he had adopted as his own. He was for example a commissioner for the Lachine Turnpike Road, and he was a member of the Montreal Prison Commission. He served from 1801 to 1804 as commissioner for the care of the insane and of foundlings; he accepted reappointment to this responsibility in 1808 and again in 1813, and his annual report relative

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to these matters was almost ready when he died in December of that year. He was also one of the commissioners charged with overseeing the reduction of the city walls.5 Another major activity, given closer attention in the next chapter, was his service as a member of the Legislative Assembly, to which he was elected three times: 1792—96, 1800—1804, 1804-8. He declined to be nominated for the session 1796-1800, and we know that it was more a sense of duty than of pleasure which took him off to Quebec each year to attend the sittings. Nevertheless, he was an active member of the assembly for twelve years. Interested as he was in so many aspects of public life, it is not surprising that we find him also active in ecclesiastical matters, for membership of a religious community was a notable feature of eighteenth-century attitudes and practices. There is no evidence that he was personally of a markedly religious disposition, but there is a great deal of evidence that he exhibited a generous tolerance which later generations of Montrealers would have done well to follow. When there was only the one 'Protestant' congregation, he was prominent in its affairs and continued in this course after it had become recognizably Anglican. He was a member of the committee which in 1805 planned the erection of the new Christ Church on Notre Dame Street. Nevertheless, as a Scot, he was also active in the development of the St. Gabriel Street Presbyterian Church. He retained a pew in both congregations and subscribed to the funds of both churches. In addition he served in 1796 as the only Protestant on a commission to oversee the building and rehabilitation of Catholic churches in the Montreal district; Mrs. McGill was a Catholic (her brother was a Sulpician and her sister a nun), but she and her husband stood sponsor to several children in baptism in the Christ Church congregation. The indications are clear that James McGill in his home and in his friendships, as well as in his public service, related positively to all the religious communities of the city; and this is borne out by the specific bequests in his will for 'the poor Protestants' and 'the poor Catholics' and the bequest of £200 'to the nuns commonly called the Grey Sisters at Montreal for their humane institution' and a like sum to the HotelDieu. THE C O L O N E L OF MILITIA

In matters military his role was even more prominent. In 1777 the Legislative Council passed the first Militia Act, whereby all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty were declared liable for service in the militia of the parish in which they lived. McGill was thus obligated to

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serve but he evidently went beyond the obligation and played an active role in the organization of these territorial forces. In 1787 he had gained the rank of major, and when he was invited in 1794 to address the Montreal Grand Jury, the subject he chose was an explanation and defence of the role of the militia. By the time war with the United States again threatened in 1812, he had risen to the rank of colonel and was appointed officer commanding a brigade consisting of the First, Second, and Third Battalions of the Montreal Militia. The companies were called to arms on 22 May 1811, and served garrison duty for several periods before being demobilized by McGill on the governor general's orders, 20 November 1813. McGill's correspondence testifies to the close attention he gave to his military responsibilities, and he and his fellow officers must clearly have exercised their commands with more than ordinary competence. They were directed in their duties by a bilingual manual, printed in Quebec and entitled Rules and Regulations for the Formation, Exercise and Movements of the Militia of Lower Canada. In peacetime the officers were required 'to draw out their companies upon the last two Sundays in June and the first two Sundays in July in order to inspect their arms, fire at marks, and instruct them in their duties'. The Canadian Grenadier Guards look to the Montreal Militia as their founding unit, and the official history comments on the role played by the militia in the 1812 campaign: 'The obvious ease with which these companies moved and acted in this campaign calls for explanation. There can be no doubt this resulted from fifteen months of consistent training.'6 Since this was just the period when James McGill was the officer commanding the units, the record is a testimony to his careful attention to the responsibilities he had undertaken. He was not required to demonstrate military prowess— that was for Lieutenant-Colonel Charles-Michel de Salaberry and his Canadian Voltigeurs and for the British professionals to supply—but he was called upon to exercise local leadership and administrative skills, and these he supplied in no small measure. When there were signs of disaffection and the possibility of revolt at Lachine, he dealt with the problem quickly and firmly.7 He was also at this time chairman of the Montreal Committee of the Executive Council and thus at this critical period his role in public affairs was particularly significant. During the year 1812 and ten long months of 1813 anxiety as to American intentions continued to mount, until in October it became known that an attack on Montreal was being prepared. The Battle of Chateauguay took place on 26 October and by close of day the attacking forces had been decisively beaten. 'The second wartime mobilisation of

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the Canada Militia for the defence of Canada had made manifest the soundness of its leadership and training. Like the population from which it was drawn, the Militia comprised men of both French and British origin, with the former in great majority. Attacked by a superior force, it had fought and won an outstandingly successful action, unaided by British regular troops.'8 The threat to the city and to Lower Canada had been thwarted, and in November McGill received orders to demobilize his men. This he did, and a month later after a very brief illness he died. The Montreal Gazette of 21 December 1813 carried the following obituary notice: 'On Sunday last, aged 69 years, after a short illness the Honorable James McGill, one of the members of his Majesty's Executive Council for this province, and Colonel Commandant of the ist Battalion Montreal Militia. This venerable and respectable citizen had long and deservedly filled the most elevated stations in his community, both as Magistrate and Representative in the Provincial Parliament, for which his long residence, his fortune, and his talents have eminently qualified him, and in the discharge of which he acquitted himself, in a manner highly honorable to himself, and useful to the country. His remains were interred this day with Military honors, and accompanied to the grave by an immense concourse of citizens, of all classes, as their last tribute of merited esteem and sincere regret.' THE PRIVATE PERSON

Those were the words of the public obituary. It is more difficult to come by an assessment of James McGill as a private person. We hear of him singing nostalgic boating songs 'in a sonorous voice' at the Beaver Club, and it is said to have been he who proposed that the doors should be unlocked for five minutes at midnight to allow those who must go home to their wives to depart and leave the rest free to continue their revels. A man who roughed it for ten years as an Indian trader was not likely to be a retiring introvert. In a similar vein we have already noticed that he figured frequently among Joseph Frobisher's dinner guests. But his almanac-diaries indicate that he was also very fond of his garden, and there are indications that he did not in later life enjoy being long away from his home and in summer from his farm, his beloved Burnside. He is said to have been fond of reading, and his name appears on the Canadian list of pre-publication subscribers to William Cobbett's Porcupine's Papers on the United States of America published in i8oi. 9 But the letters and papers he has left behind him are for the most part

James McGill's Notre Dame Street house and warehouse served in its later years as a tavern

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concerned with commercial or administrative affairs. There is little indication as to his thoughts on literature or music or religion, or on the matters of the mind. But in one aspect of his private life we are much better informed. As a family man, James McGill showed himself to be kindly and affectionate. When he married Charlotte Guillimin Desrivieres she was a widow of twenty-nine and had two boys—Francois (often in later life called Francis) aged twelve, and Thomas Hippolyte, aged seven. There had been two girls, but both had died in infancy. McGill had almost certainly known Amable Desrivieres in his early days, and whether out of respect for him or more probably because of his genuine love for Mrs. McGill (in his will, she is always referred to as 'my dear wife'), he accepted his new family responsibilities with generosity. Francis eventually became his stepfather's partner in business and his principal heir. Hippolyte was killed in a duel at an early age, but his son James McGill Desrivieres received especial attention in the will, and a separate educational trust was set up for him in the amount of £5,000. But this was not the only bereft family for which McGill made himself responsible. One of his friends was John Porteous, who married Josephte Drouet de Carqueville. He died in 1782 leaving his widow with eight children and a ninth born after his death, a girl named Charlotte. McGill became trustee for the children and conducted with some success a lawsuit on their behalf, and when the mother died also, he and his wife adopted Charlotte and brought her up as their own. Three years earlier, John Askin had sent his daughter Madeleine to live with the McGills, so that she might have a more cultivated upbringing than his frontier home could afford. She stayed seven years and when she finally returned home McGill wrote of her in kindly fashion: 'Your daughter Madeleine is in perfect health and when a proper opportunity offers It is my intention to fulfill Mrs. Askins & your wishes by sending her up & I am pretty certain you will find her bien entendue dans le menage insomuch that I fancy you will not keep her many years Mademoiselle.' Thus James McGill's home on Notre Dame Street was never without some young people, and we can be sure that he had a considerable regard for them and for their welfare. In January 1805 he wrote to Isaac Todd, who seems to have been in London at the time, a long letter which is full of business detail and gives a rough summation of the somewhat precarious state at that time of the Todd-McGill enterprises. But in the middle of his business preoccupations he breaks off to give Todd some of the family news: 'The little Girls Jane & Agnes are very well, and whenever I May be called upon for anything they may want, as well as their board etc., they shall not be neglected. . . . the little Boy, who is now visibly mending has occupied

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CHAPTER ONE

us all so much as at times to give much pain & Chagrin & I think made Miss Porteous forget to make an answer.' Who these children were is not known; they appear to have been left in McGilFs care by his partner; Miss Porteous is, of course, Charlotte; but McGill's obvious interest in children is a pleasant interruption of business detail. That this concern was characteristic is borne out by the fact that ten years earlier, when he was lamenting his long absence from Montreal occasioned by his parliamentary duties in Quebec, he expressed his regret in terms of his responsibilities to the girls in his household: 'If such Employments conferr honor they are dearly paid for by those who have families, I have indeed none of my own; but three Girls, of whom two are marriageable, whom I have brought up, put me in mind that if I am not called upon by ties of consanguinity to befriend them, the obligation to it is not less binding since it was voluntary.' Presumably these girls are the Porteous daughters, but it was for Charlotte above all others that McGill had a warm and personal affection. In his restrained eighteenthcentury manner, he always referred to her as 'Miss Porteous', but often with an added endearment such as 'the amiable Miss Porteous'. In his last years, he wrote very feelingly of this girl for she 'went into a decline'; that is, she contracted tuberculosis. To his friend John Askin, McGill wrote in December 1811: 'Miss Porteous, my amiable Miss Porteous, 1'enfant cheri of poor Madeleine, is threatened with a decline and her situation wrings my heart with woe.' Two months later he wrote she had fallen into consumption 'which I fear will rid us of the greatest consolation that either Mrs. McGill or I possess'. His almanac-diary in which he usually wrote only weather notes has at the entry for i July 1812 the bleak comment: 'This morning at two o'clock I had the distressing misfortune to lose Miss Porteous by decay.' Himself a childless man, James McGill was nevertheless a generous father to his many foster children and was not spared the deep distress of a father bereaved. James McGill was a big man physically and possessed of an exceptional force of character. He was, as we have seen, a man of many parts -—-fur trader, merchant, churchman, magistrate, military officer, civic administrator—and in each of these roles he was accorded as if by right a place of pre-eminence. There is no doubt that he took himself seriously, but his contemporaries took him seriously also. In his determination in the face of competition that the new thoroughfare should be named McGill Street,10 in a provision in his will that young James Cartwright should as a condition of receiving a substantial bequest 'take upon himself the surname of McGill after his own surname, and shall take and bear the family arms of McGill as I the said James McGill do now bear the same', and above all in his requiring that the university benefiting

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from his handsome bequest should establish a college to be 'named and perpetually be known and distinguished by the appellation of McGill College', he was undoubtedly moved by a desire to perpetuate his memory; but that is not an ignoble ambition. He was a childless man; his own family had all died before him; he had achieved much, but there was none to conserve his achievement or to build upon it further. We can well understand that he wanted some small piece of immortality, and education the world over would have been an infinitely poorer thing if this same consideration had not, through the centuries, moved rich men, nobles and merchants alike, to princely benefactions. We have reason to be glad that James McGill gave considerable thought to the disposal of his fortune, and acted in this matter as in everything else with so large a measure of public spirit.

NOTES 1. This Mr. Grant may be the William Grant who later sat with McGill in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada. M.W. Hamilton, ed.3 The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany, 1957), pp. 194-952. M. M. Quaife, ed., The John Askin Papers (Detroit, 1928 and 1931). 3. MUA 1207/6. 4. Joseph Frobisher's diary records little beyond the list of his dinner guests. See MUL manuscript collection, 'The Frobisher Papers'. 5. Part of the land cleared in this operation became a new street, and after something of a struggle, McGill succeeded in giving the thoroughfare his own name, which it continues to bear. 6. A. Fortescue Duguid, History of the Canadian Grenadier Guards, 1760-1964 (Montreal, 1975),?. 10. 7. See the two letters he wrote to the governor general regarding this incident; they are given in Maysie Steele MacSporran, 'James McGill: A Critical Biographical Study' (M.A. thesis, McGill, 1930), pp. 21520. 8. Duguid, History of the Canadian Grenadier Guards, p. 19. 9. No initial is given, but John McGill had died and though Andrew was still living, 'McGill of Canada' is most likely to have meant James. (For John McGill of Upper Canada see reference to Peter McGill, p. I22n2.) Todd's name appears also. 10. See note 5.

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CHAPTER

II THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

ames McGill the man, the merchant, and the public servant has been largely obscured by James McGill the founder of a university, even though a concern for education was only one of his many interests. But he certainly had that concern. It is instanced by his willingness to help the schoolmaster Alexander Skakel acquire 'philosophical apparatus'. The costs involved were met by public subscription, and James McGill agreed to serve as one of the three trustees of the fund, to which no doubt he himself had contributed. Probably the form of his famous bequest owed much to the prompting of John Strachan. He was the young Scots schoolmaster whom McGill sent on his way to Kingston in 1799, and who in later years became a friend of the family, and indeed married Andrew McGill's widow.1 Some thirteen years after James' death, Strachan wrote a letter stating that it had been he who in 1811 put the idea of a bequest to endow a college into McGill's mind. That may be true, though it was by no means the first time that James had been made aware of the great need for a system of public education, for he had been in the midst of a debate upon the subject for more than thirty years. THE DEMAND FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

Before James McGill arrived on the scene, as early as 16 October 1764,

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C H A P T E R TWO

the Grand Jury of Quebec had pointed to the need for regulations relating to, among other things, 'a public protestant school and a Poor house'. Ten years later, having already been party to several memorials to the British government seeking the establishment of an elected assembly in Quebec, James McGill served as a member of a committee of seven appointed by a general meeting of the inhabitants of Montreal to prepare yet another memorial on the same subject. The committee took the opportunity to draw specific attention to the need for some form of Protestant education. The need was all the more urgent, they said, because the Catholics had 'lately established a Seminary for the Education of Youth in this Province, which is more alarming as it excludes all Protestant teachers of any science whatever'. By 1787 still nothing had been done, but a new inquiry into the general administration of the province gave the merchants of Montreal the opportunity to raise the matter once more: 'There remains for us to advert to a subject which we consider as the surest and best means of obtaining a chearful and dutiful obedience to the Laws, and Government, from Subjects in general, and that is by establishing throughout the Province at proper distances, Public Schools for the Instruction of Youth. We hardly know of a single School in any Country part of the District for teaching Boys, and it is to the zeal of the few Sisters of the Congregation, that we are indebted for all the little which is taught to Girls throughout the Country. The Captains of Militia who are frequently called upon to enforce Laws and Orders, are so illiterate, that not one in three can write or even read, the consequence is confusion and disorder, and frequent suits and Complaints between them and the Militia-men. It is not for us to point out the best plan for Establishing those Schools, but having understood that all the Estates which the Jesuits possess in this Country were granted to them for the purposes of Establishing proper Seminaries of Learning and that those Estates are likely to revert to the Crown, we humbly conceive that they could in no way be better employed than in that for which they were originally intended and granted.'2 The Montreal merchants had nominated twelve of their number to prepare this response to the Legislative Council's inquiry, and James McGill's signature is second in the list. The reference to the dangers arising from lack of education among militia men accords well with his interest in the efficient organization of that force, in which at this time he held the rank of major. The Jesuit Estates were the endowments which had been accumulated by that order in support of their educational work, but the order had been dissolved in Canada (as elsewhere in the world) and the estates declared forfeit to the crown.3 The college in Quebec City had been

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turned into a barracks and military supply depot, but it had been agreed that the surviving Jesuits should be maintained by the income from the remaining properties, and that not until the death of the last member of the order would the estates become finally disposable. They had already been the object of considerable attention and the governor general appointed seven commissioners to inquire into the current usage and future disposition of these lands. McGill was one of the seven, and with Quinson de St. Ours he was deputed to interview the last remaining member of the order, Pere Casot. The commission's task proved unexpectedly long and difficult, but in June 1788 its report was presented to the Legislative Council. In anticipation of the report, the council had decided in May 1787 to set up a committee on education which instituted an inquiry, parish by parish, on the current state of education and sought opinions on the possibility of cooperation between the French-speaking Catholics and the English-speaking Protestants with a view to establishing a nondenominational seminary, where secular subjects might be taught on an 'unprejudiced' basis.4 The most important response was from the Catholic bishop of Quebec who said that the province had neither the money nor the population to be able to sustain such a seminary. He pointed out that the kingdom of France had been in existence for seven centuries before it engendered a university. Further, he said, it would be very difficult to discover what 'unprejudiced' might mean in such a situation: in his view it connoted men 'living by the law of nature', something which he considered opposed to every religious principle. The first objective for the province must be to get more land cleared and more farms operative. The bishop's reply was in fact a polite refusal to cooperate in what seemed to him a disguised but nonetheless unmistakably proselytizing and anglicizing proposal. The suspicion of the French Canadians and especially of the Roman Catholic clergy with regard to any educational proposals emanating from the government was not without considerable justification. There had been at the beginning of the British administration of the province of Quebec a clear enunciation of an intention to turn a French Catholic colony into an English Protestant one. When the British military commander, General Murray, was confirmed as governor of the new colony, the detailed instructions issued to him directed that he should seek to further the British government's intention of weaning the French Canadians away from their allegiance to the Church of Rome and of setting up the Anglican Church as the established church in Canada as it was in England, Wales, and Ireland. The Quebec Act of 1774 gave recognition to the Roman Catholic religion and formally permitted its practice, and

William Smith

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was intended to be a liberalizing measure; nevertheless the original intentions were specifically reaffirmed: 'It shall be lawful for His Majesty, His Heirs or Successors, to make such Provision out of the rest of the said accustomed Dues and Rights, for the Encouragement of the Protestant Religion, and for the Maintenance and Support of a Protestant Clergy within the said Province.'5 By 1789, however, the government representatives in Quebec had both in practice and in policy moved a long way from these intentions; yet they were still maintained on paper, and there were in and around the offices of power a number of strongly opinionated individuals, especially among the Tory Loyalists who had immigrated from the United States, whose sentiments and activities encouraged the francophone-Catholic suspicion of every government move in the matter of education. CHIEF J U S T I C E S M I T H ' S R E P O R T

One of these individuals was William Smith. Formerly chief justice in the Province of New York, he came out to Canada with Lord Dorchester to fill the office of chief justice of the Province of Lower Canada. As a Loyalist, he was markedly unsympathetic to French-Canadian aspirations, both cultural and political, and it was unfortunate that the committee on education should have been placed under his chairmanship. He exerted a powerful influence on his committee, and its report, which appeared 24 December 1789 and declared itself to have been adopted unanimously, wholly ignored the negative character of the bishop's reply and advocated a highly centralized system of education, including at least the beginnings of a tertiary-level institution. It recommended the establishment of a free elementary school in every village, free schools for more advanced studies in every county, and, since the establishment of a university was not deemed advisable at that time, the erection of a secular college to serve the higher educational needs of the total population, both anglophone and francophone. The governor was to have the power to nominate all the personnel. It was not a scheme likely to commend itself to the majority of French Canadians, and certainly not to the Roman Catholic clergy. The report nevertheless received powerful support a year later from yet another petition of the merchants of Montreal. They drew the governor's attention to the fact that 'they had been without the means, owing to Want of an University or College of giving their Youth a Liberal Education'. They proposed that in such a college or university, youth (meaning of course only young men) 'may be instructed in the learned Languages and Sciences (excepting Theology) and that it may

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C H A P T E R TWO

be established on the most liberal Principles and Terms'. This enthusiasm for liberal, non-sectarian instruction was as honest and sincere on the one side as was the dread of Protestant or secular anglicization on the other. However, despite the Smith Report and the merchants' petition, no action was taken, and the matter was still unresolved when in 1792 the Legislative Assembly was finally established. E A R L Y PROPOSALS IN THE A S S E M B L Y

The elections were held in June 1792, and James McGill and JeanBaptiste Durocher were elected in the ward of Montreal West. John Richardson and Joseph Frobisher were similarly successful in the East Ward. All four were very active in the various matters which came before the House and the subject of education appeared early on the agenda and was to reappear frequently during the term of the First Assembly, which met for the first time on 17 January 1793. The first motion relating to education was made on 23 January by William Grant, seconded by Michel de Lotbiniere. They asked leave to present a bill entitled: 'An act for the Instruction of Youth in useful knowledge, by the establishing of schools in the different Parishes of this Province and to put the children of the Poor in a position to partake of the Common Good deriving therefrom'. At the second reading, on 4 April, Grant moved that the House go into committee of the whole to discuss the question, but this was defeated by a vote of 21 to 13, McGill voting with the majority. This vote killed Grant's bill, but he had already on 5 February proposed another bill to raise funds for the poor, for the insane, for parochial schools, and for other charitable objects. This also did not get beyond the second reading, since Richardson proposed its rejection and only three members of the House supported Grant. But on 3 March, still in this same busy year of 1793, 250 Quebec residents petitioned the assembly asking that the House should seek from the crown the allocation of the Jesuit Estates to the support of 'une education publique, organisee sur un plan liberal'. This petition gave rise to resolutions and counter-resolutions but finally a committee of nine was named to prepare an address to His Majesty, drawing attention to the fact that the Society of Jesus in Canada, in the person of its last member Pere Casot, was at the point of extinction and asking that the estates might be remitted to the assembly to be used for the support of 'une education publique fondee sur des principes de liberalite'. McGill was one of the nine members named, and the address was duly drawrn up and engrossed on parchment and delivered to the governor, who agreed to dispatch it to London.

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This done, the assembly turned to other matters and the needs of education receded from the forefront of concern. The months passed, but no reply came from London. There were one or two attempts to revive interest in the matter. In 1795 it was proposed to set every Tuesday afternoon aside for the House to meet in committee of the whole and discuss the subject, but nothing came of this proposal. In 1797 during the period when McGill was not a member of the House, Grant moved two general propositions in support of the provision of educational facilities in the parishes, and having gained acceptance of these propositions he went on to move that the House should resolve 'that for the instruction of youth in the higher branches of learning it is necessary for a University founded upon liberal principles, to be established in this Province as soon as circumstances permit', but the House refused to give consent to the introduction of that motion. There was obviously a considerable body of sentiment adverse to such an idea. Then on 18 March 1800, Pere Casot finally departed this world, and with his death the disposition of the Jesuit Estates became once more a live issue. That same day, however, the governor informed the assembly (of which McGill was now again a member) that the information gathered by the Dorchester Commission of 1787, together with the Address of the House in 1793, had been considered very carefully by His Majesty, who had decided to take possession of the estates on behalf of the crown. There was a long debate in the House whether to accept this response or whether to demand access to all the relevant documents, in order to push the matter further; but finally the House approved the motion of M.M. Joseph Plante and Joseph Papineau that the discussion of the matter should be deferred indefinitely. THE ANGLICAN EPISCOPATE

It must have seemed that any moves towards the public provision of education facilities had received a decisive check, but while these activities had been going on in the assembly, in the higher echelons of government another and, for the present at least, more effective force was coming into play. This was the Anglican Church, which had been present in the new province until this time in only the most tenuous form. The first Protestant services were conducted by Anglican chaplains to the forces. When the government did send in three clergymen to minister to the civilian population, they chose French-speaking pastors from Europe, thinking they would be more effective among the local population. These men may have been staunch Protestants, but their knowledge of the Anglican tradition was slight, and their ability in

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English was limited. There were of course no Anglican buildings, and the Protestant congregations worshipped in the council chamber of the old Bishop's Palace in Quebec, and in the Recollet chapel in Montreal. Most of the Montreal merchants were Scottish in origin and Presbyterian in ecclesiastical allegiance, and in 1786 they formed their own congregation. They erected their first kirk on St. Gabriel Street in 1792. The remaining Protestants, now recognizably Anglican, had moved in 1789 to the former Jesuits' chapel, but when that building was destroyed by fire in 1803 they too worshipped in the Presbyterian church. Not until 1805 did they commence plans for building a church of their own, to be called Christ Church, and even then it was not finished until 1814. The government provided £200 a year for the stipend of the minister of the congregation at Montreal, as it did also for ministers at Trois Rivieres and at Quebec. But in 1793, thirty years after the conquest, in all of Lower and Upper Canada there were only nine Anglican clergymen, distributed in three parishes and four missions. The salaries of the clergy in the missions were in part paid by a missionary society organized in England, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, generally in the proportions of £50 by the society and £100 by the government. Even the so-called parishes were not legally instituted until 1818. Not even the most fearful Roman Catholic could accuse the imperial power of having made undue haste in furthering its proselytizing intentions. The fact was that the British government's attitude to the presence of the Church of England in North America had been greatly complicated by its Erastian theory of Church and State. However, in 1787 Charles Inglis, a Loyalist refugee living in London, was consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia. He was the first bishop nominated for any British overseas possession, and he was also given episcopal oversight of 'the Canadas'. He visited Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal in 1789. The advent of a bishop of the Anglican Church in Montreal was recognized as a significant political as well as spiritual development, and was made the occasion of an address of welcome, signed by the leading members of the community, among whom was James McGill. A matter of similar portent was that the new constitution of Canada, instituted in 1791, not only provided for the long-sought Legislative Assembly, but also set aside one-seventh of all crown lands for the support of Protestant clergy. Two years later an English cleric, Jacob Mountain, was consecrated the first Anglican bishop of Quebec. He was provided with the generous salary of £2,000 a year, the splendid title of Lord Bishop of Quebec, and a seat not only on the Legislative Council, but also (after some hesitation and delay) on the Executive Council. He was clearly intended to be part of the Canadian establishment. A naval frigate was put at his disposal to bring to their new home himself,

Bishop Jacob Mountain

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his wife and children, his brother (also a clergyman) and his family, and two unmarried sisters, 'thirteen Mountains in one ship'.

JACOB M O U N T A I N ' S INTERVENTION The first of the instructions to governors general, those to Murray in 1763, had combined references to religion and education in the same paragraph, and the two subjects were constantly linked in various official documents for the next thirty years. It has to be borne in mind that the modern assumption that education is the concern of the State did not arise until comparatively recent times. In eighteenth-century England, education was still assumed to be the responsibility of parents and various religious and charitable societies, and the few elementary schools that did exist were run by voluntary organizations. That the governor and his administration in Canada and the colonial secretary in London were prepared to give any consideration to the educational needs of the province may have derived in part from a sense that more should be done for a young struggling colony than was necessary in the established mother country. But a far stronger motivation was the recognition that it would be good politics to be active in this matter, both in order to assimilate the francophone population more quickly and to stop the anglophones from going off to the States where they might imbibe the subversive principles of republicanism. It followed therefore that the endeavours on the part of Bishop Mountain to promote educational developments within the area of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction were not considered in any way in excess of his responsibilities. On the contrary, his representations were received by the authorities with considerable attention. He first arrived in Quebec in November 1793, and in September of the next year, he was already urging the colonial secretary to take some form of action: 'You will see no doubt, Sir, all the mischiefs that may arise of sending our youth for education to the schools of Foreign America, a necessity which at present certainly exists, and to which I know some worthy and prudent parents reluctantly submit.' In 1795, Mountain had a long interview with Dorchester and later wrote him a letter to reinforce the points he had made in their conversation: 'I w'd also beg leave to introduce here a subject by no means remotely connected with that which I have thus far had the honor of submitting. I mean the general state of Education in this Province. Had the appoint, of S.[chool] Masters taken place under yr. Administration, I have no doubt that we should have found the bounty of Gov't accurately applied to the purposes for which it was originally designed—the liberal instruction of youth; the inducing the Inhabitants to embrace by degrees the protestant

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Religion—etc.' But while he was listened to with deference, no tangible results were forthcoming. In 1796 Dorchester went back to England with nothing set in motion, and Sir Robert Milnes became the lieutenant governor of Lower Canada. Mountain once more set out the educational needs of the province in a lengthy memorandum which he submitted to the lieutenant governor, and he in turn placed the bishop's proposals before the Executive Council. The bishop had made much, of course, of the dangers inherent in the necessity for young men to seek their education in the States and he continued: 'To obviate this danger, it would seem expedient to found at least one good Grammar School in this Province and to invite able Masters from England by the liberality of the endowment.' Such a school, he suggested, already existed on a small scale in Quebec City and could be upgraded to meet the evident need, given some encouragement from the government.6 He then took up the need for elementary education. He stressed the need for the new Canadian subjects to have the opportunity to learn English and suggested that school masters should be placed 'in each of the cities and towns, and in the most considerable villages for the purposes and under the express obligation to teaching the English language gratis to a certain number of Canadian children, and writing and arithmetic when required at an easy rate'. In effect, he proposed to provide a service which would require only that those for whom it was designed should take advantage of it. The attractiveness of this proposal from the government point of view was that it offered an apparently practicable means of anglicizing the French-speaking Canadians, and the Executive Council readily approved the scheme. It was sent by Milnes to the colonial secretary in London, and he too received the proposals with favour, and told Milnes to procure their execution. The minister even went so far as to say that the governor general might recommend the disposition of some crown lands to support the new ventures. As a result in 1801 a bill was prepared, presented, and passed by both the assembly and the Legislative Council; unlike other similar bills, it was not set aside 'to await his Majesty's pleasure' but received royal assent on 7 April 1802. It was entitled An Act for the Establishment of Free Schools in this Province. Audet is undoubtedly correct when he comments: 'L'influence de Jacob Mountain sur 1'elaboration de la loi scolaire de 1801 fut done tout a fait decisive.' THE ACTOF l 8 o i

The 1801 Act established the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and provided for the control of all State-assisted education to

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be exercised by the government through this body. It was still not conceived that the government should enter the field of education directly, and therefore responsibility in this matter was entrusted to this institution. It was, however, an institution which the government meant to control very closely. The governor had the power of appointing its members; he must give his assent to all acts of the institution; he had the right both to nominate the school masters and to approve the location of schools. The receiver general of the province was to act as treasurer of the institution, which would be the legal owner of all school properties. These were to be provided in each parish by local initiatives and were to be maintained by local assessments. There were, however, two important reservations. The one was that no school was to be placed in a parish unless a majority of the parishioners requested it. The act for all its intense centralizing tendencies was a permissive rather than a directive one. The other was that all private schools and all schools run by religious orders were exempt from the control of the Royal Institution, and this provision gave the Catholic majority liberty to continue as before if they were so minded. Even so, the only thing that persuaded a majority in the assembly to agree to such sweeping proposals was undoubtedly the assent of the Colonial Office to the allotment of crown lands to support the proposed schools. The Executive Council proposed that sixteen townships should be allocated for these purposes and it must have seemed as though this time something really would be done. Not everyone was happy with the proposals, nor was the passage of the act, as has been suggested, a hurried or perfunctory affair. The committee to draft the bill was set up on 17 January, and the amendments proposed by the Legislative Council were considered and agreed on 24 March. Between these two dates, there had been the requisite three readings, and the House had gone three times into committee of the whole for detailed discussion of the provisions of the bill. Thus discussion was carried on very actively over a period of two months. McGill, unfortunately, could not participate in these debates. His almanac-diary shows that he was confined to his lodgings in Quebec City from 29 January to 8 March by a severe attack of gout.7 However, a study of the debates and counter-proposals (which were only narrowly defeated) shows that there were those who, from the beginning, were opposed to the Royal Institution, and this opposition was to strengthen as the years passed. THE PROPOSED SCHOOL SYSTEM

The educational system the 1801 Act envisaged was as follows. The Royal Institution was to be set up as a body capable of owning real

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estate and entering into legal obligations. The majority of householders in a locality would have to petition the governor for a school in their parish or township and be prepared to provide the land and pay for the erection and maintenance of a building. The Royal Institution would then receive the title-deeds to the property and would make all regulations governing the operation of the school. The salary of the teacher would be paid by the institution, though curiously this is not spelled out in the act, nor, rather ominously, is any source of funds identified. The governor would appoint commissioners in each county to oversee the building plans, and these commissioners would appoint the local church wardens as trustees or syndics to apportion the cost of the building and its upkeep among the parishioners. The licensing and appointment of masters to teach in these schools would remain a prerogative of the governor. The system was thus a curiously mixed one. The Royal Institution owned the schools and made regulations for their operation, but the governor appointed the commissioners and through them the syndics, and he also appointed the schoolmasters. And, of course, he appointed the president and members of the Royal Institution in the first place. It was a very centralized system and the only advantage to the parish was the payment of the schoolmaster's salary. But there were, as has been noted, at least two points of liberality—the act is permissive rather than prescriptive, and private schools and those of religious foundations are exempted from the institution's control. There are also significant silences: what the schools are to teach is not stated, and specifically nothing is said either about the English language or about religion. In the discussion and debates which preceded the bill's passing, the purpose of the act had been subtly but decisively changed, and education and not anglicization had become its main object. Consequently, not only were the parishes free to enter into the scheme or not as they chose, but it was possible in French-speaking parishes for francophone teachers to be appointed, and for the Catholic cure to act as Visitor and for the Catholic religion to be taught and practised.8 Given mutual confidence between the francophone and anglophone divisions of the community, the scheme could have worked very well; and in a curious kind of pragmatic fashion, it proved not wholly ineffective. There were already four schools receiving government assistance before 1800. Despite the fact that the president and members of the Royal Institution had not been named, and that specific funds had not been allotted for the purpose, a number of communities applied for assistance in accordance with the terms of the act and the number of schools thus brought into being had grown by 1817 to thirty-four. These were all elementary grade schools, and the necessary funds were voted

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by the assembly. In addition, in 1816 two secondary schools teaching in English were established by the government, one in Quebec City and one in Montreal. The masters, both of whom were Anglican clergymen, were sent out from England by the colonial secretary, and the cost of these appointments was at first defrayed by the crown out of the income of the Jesuit Estates. Probably it was this kind of pragmatic operation which precluded any further serious discussion of education for over a decade. The act existed, even if in some respects it had never been implemented; those who wanted schools could, if they were persistent, obtain at least help with the schoolmaster's salary; those who wanted to have nothing to do with the scheme were free to continue on their own. Once the Royal Institution was established the number of schools under its care grew more quickly until in 1829 there were eighty-four. In that year, however, an act was passed in the assembly which effectively robbed the Royal Institution of any further role in the administration of elementary education in the Province of Quebec, and the number of schools under its care declined rapidly until in 1846 none were left. The measure in question was the so-called Syndics Act, and to understand its significance we must return to the years following the Act of 1801. The full operation of that act was impeded for a number of reasons. A primary one was undoubtedly a somewhat tardy but increasingly strong determination on the part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy not to take part in its operation. Sir William Craig, in a report to the British government dated May 1810, tells of a conversation with the Catholic bishop of Quebec, in which the bishop remarked: 'Vous dites que notre Eglise ne dort jamais, mais vous admettrez cependant que nous etions endormis, et tres profondement, quand nous avons laisse adopter cet acte.'9 The great majority of the cures found it by no means advisable to set about securing a Royal Institution school. Quite apart from the religious or cultural principles involved, it meant persuading parishioners to provide (in their terms) considerable sums of money, and the priests preferred not to stir up trouble for themselves. Nor was there much more enthusiasm on the part of the government. There was an attempt in 1805 to sell crown lands in order to implement the 1801 Act, but there were few buyers, even at the depressed price of half-a-crown per acre; only some six thousand acres were taken up. We may surmise that in this time of the Napoleonic wars, few were going to tie their money up in lands which might not increase in value over the next twenty years. As we have seen, schools could be set up under the act, even without the establishment of the Royal Institution, and so the years passed without the members of the board being named. It is most improbable, there-

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fore, that the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning would ever have come into being if that public-spirited Montreal merchant, James McGill, had not framed his bequest in the way he did. THE COLLEGE BEQUEST

James McGill served his final term in the Legislative Assembly in the years 1804-8, during the period of the lull in activity regarding education ; but as we have seen, during the succeeding years he was particularly busy in public service. Nevertheless he seems to have found time before 1811 to devote considerable thought to the determination of his will, for it is a document which has the character of having grown over a period of time, with different persons and causes being mentioned as they came to mind. Whether of his own volition or as a result of John Strachan's urging, one of those causes was that of education and McGill obviously took particular care with regard to the form of the bequest which was to support activity in that area. With the help of his lawyer, James Stuart, he prepared a testamentary disposition which established four of his friends and associates as a separate trust; this trust was to receive from the McGill estate the property known as Burnside, in order that they might convey it to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, so that a university or college might be built on it. The trustees were also to receive £10,000 and when the college had been erected, but not before, the trustees were to transfer those funds also to the Royal Institution, as an endowment for the new college. Lands and funds together were worth about £15,000, in those days a very considerable sum. Thus, no sooner had James McGill died in 1813 than the trustees named in his will immediately began to press for the Board of the Royal Institution to be established, so that they could transfer to it the Burnside estate, and so that the college could be started. They had good reason to be urgent in the matter. Knowing as he did the unpopularity of the 1801 Act with both the ecclesiastical and the political leaders of the francophone community, and familiar as he was with the readiness of the government to use this or any other circumstance as an excuse for procrastination, James McGill had shrewdly inserted into the terms of his bequest a time limit: if a college bearing his name was not erected on the Burnside estate within ten years of his death, the bequest of the estate and of the endowment was nullified. McGill obviously intended his bequest to be a catalytic contribution to the university cause, not its sole support, since the cost of the building was not provided for. He expected that to come from government funds in one form or another.10 He also expected that a university would be planned, of which his college

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would be only a part. These expectations of government funding were never to be realized, but the administration in Quebec and even the far-distant government in London were at least susceptible to the fear of losing a handsome endowment. However, only the Royal Institution could receive the bequest, and so the government was finally persuaded to take action. The board was established in 1818, five years after McGill's death. ALTERNATIVE PROPOSALS

When education became again a subject of much debate in the Legislative Assembly in 1814, no doubt it was because McGilFs testamentary disposition had given rise among the francophone Catholics to a renewed fear of the Royal Institution. While that corporation had remained nonexistent, and the 1801 Act provided only a modicum of educational facilities in the province for those who cared to avail themselves of its provisions, no strong antipathies were aroused. But when there was the strong possibility that the Royal Institution might become a reality, those who had opposed the 1801 Act quickly came forward with alternative proposals. Thus in 1814, a few months after McGilPs death, a bill 'for the more effectual establishment of schools, in the Country Parishes of this Province and for the teaching of the first rudiments of education' went through all its stages and received the approval of the assembly. The bill would have effectively bypassed the Royal Institution, but it was killed in the Legislative Council by the familiar parliamentary device of deferring a second reading to 8 May, a date after the end of session. The assembly returned to the attack in 1815 when it set up an inquiry into the effectiveness of the 1801 Act. In 1816 it was proposed that a sum of £ 10,000 be voted for the establishment of colleges in both Quebec and Montreal. It is interesting to speculate how this proposal would have accorded with McGill's bequest; there might well have been a University of Quebec with the Grand Seminaire as a constituent and a University of Montreal on the Burnside estate, with McGill College as a constituent. But the bill was defeated by two votes, and the proposal died. In 1818 yet another bill to encourage and expand education in the rural parishes passed through all its stages in both the assembly and the council, but the measure was reserved to await His Majesty's pleasure, and never again reappeared. However, the general dissatisfaction with the act establishing the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning had been made very evident, and there can be little doubt that the board would never have been constituted, if it had not been that

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James McGill's bequest was there, waiting to be received, and that only the Royal Institution could receive it. Yet once the board was established for that purpose, it also became de jure the legal owner of all the schools which had been or were to be established with provincial funds, de jure the regulatory body of the public school system, and de facto the body which (in the name of the governor) appointed the syndics, the visitors, and the schoolmasters in every parish in the province. It is not surprising that the francophone Canadians viewed its creation with dismay, and sought unceasingly the means to circumvent its jurisdiction. No such means had been found by the time the government at last constituted the Royal Institution by naming the president and the members of the board. T H E ROYAL I N S T I T U T I O N E S T A B L I S H E D

The determination of the membership of the Board of the Royal Institution was recognized by both the provincial administration and the Colonial Office to be a matter of considerable importance, so much so that it was not left to the governor in Quebec to decide the matter for himself but instructions on the subject were sent to him from London. 'The persons to be nominated in the first instance are the Governor, Lieut.-Governor or person administering the Government for the time being; the Right Reverend Jacob Mountain, Bishop of Quebec; Jonathan Sewell, Esq., the Chief Justice of the District of Quebec; James Monk, Esq., the Chief Justice of the district of Montreal; and the Reverend J. O. Plessis, Superintendent of the Romish Church.' This clumsy reference to the Roman Catholic bishop could not help but offend, and it is not surprising that Mgr. Plessis wrote to the governor in 1816, excusing himself from service on the proposed board. The grounds he gave were that the Royal Institution would administer a college which by designation of its founder was to be Protestant; moreover, it was to be funded, he said, by means of the Jesuit Estates, something with which he could never agree. The bishop was wrong in both these particulars; James McGill very notably says in his will nothing about the religious character of his proposed college; and the Jesuit Estates were never appropriated to the Royal Institution. As will be seen, the Royal Institution (and thereby McGill College) did later derive some small financial benefits from these funds.11 The estates themselves remained in government hands until 1831 when the income was handed over to the Legislative Assembly in support of its educational responsibilities, and so that dispute was ended, at least for a while. But Mgr. Plessis was right about the Protestant character of the Royal Institution in general,

Mr. Speaker Louis-Joseph Papineau

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and his declining to serve as a member of the board was only to be expected. The Royal Institution had all the appearance, if not the character, of an anglicizing and protestantizing instrument, and he could not be seen as acquiescing in its creation. After two or three further false starts, the board was finally constituted as follows: the lord bishop of Quebec (Jacob Mountain, who was also named president); the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada; the chief justice of Lower Canada; the chief justice of Upper Canada; the chief justice of the Court of King's Bench at Montreal; the Speakers of the Legislative Council and of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada (the latter office was held at this time by Louis-Joseph Papineau); John Richardson, one of the McGill bequest trustees; Ross Cuthbert, a member of the Executive Council of Lower Canada; and the Reverend Dr. John Strachan, who besides being another of the McGill bequest trustees was also a member of the Executive Council of Upper Canada. In December 1819 nine more members were named, including two more Anglican priests, Charles James Stewart and George Jehoshaphat Mountain. Louis de Salaberry and Michel de Lotbiniere, members of the Legislative Council, were also among the new nominees, and were obviously intended to increase the meagre francophone and Catholic element in the board's composition. Other members were added later, but there were never more than five francophones among them, even when the board grew to over twenty. THE ROYAL INSTITUTION IN OPERATION

As president of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, Bishop Mountain appointed one of his clergy, the Reverend Joseph Langley Mills, to be secretary of the board and upon this unfortunate man devolved a great deal of work for little thanks and for long periods with no pay. His salary was unprovided for, and he complained that he was at his own expense even for fuel and candles. But he and his slowly growing band of poorly paid teachers struggled over the next ten years to forge a school system for the province, and through their efforts Quebec's first system of public education came into being. By this means, education was provided for a great many children who otherwise would have had none. Despite its overwhelmingly Protestant and anglophone membership, the Royal Institution nevertheless did try to be fair. Taking advantage of the silences of the 1801 Act, it insisted that in Roman Catholic communities only members of that church might be appointed schoolmasters; and it required that in French-language communities, the schoolmaster must be either francophone or bilingual. Audet has

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reconstructed the rules whereby the institution administered the schools: only those textbooks which had been prescribed were to be used in class; one list was selected by Roman Catholics for their schools, and another was adopted for the Protestants. Priests and ministers were invited to inspect the schools and visit the pupils of their denomination, and separate provisions were to be made for religious worship for the two denominations in the schools where both were represented. Regular inspections of the schools were to be undertaken by persons named for that purpose by the Royal Institution; these visitors were to report their findings to the board through the office of the secretary of the Royal Institution. Various other regulations were to be observed regarding tuition, holidays, class hours, fuel, and the maintenance of buildings. The day-to-day work of the Royal Institution was carried out by the secretary, Joseph Mills, and he consistently displayed an ecumenical spirit far in advance of his own times. He wrote for example to one Roman Catholic cure as follows: 'Allow me, however, to hope, and I do so most sincerely that the time may arrive when Protestants and Roman Catholics forgetting the jealousies by which they are now divided may cordially cooperate in the important work in which the Royal Institution is engaged—"The advancement of learning" in a Colony, when [sic: where?] assuredly it is much more limited in its growth than in any other part of the civilized world.'12 But however conciliatory and ecumenical the Royal Institution might try to be in practice, it was feared and distrusted by the majority of the French Canadians, and especially by their clergy. When Bishop Plessis heard, while on a visit to Paris in 1820, that the institution had at last begun to function, he wrote back to his coadjutor, Bernard-Claude Panet: 'II n'est pas etonnaht qu'elle soit enfin sortie. Elle n'a pas besoin de la sanction du parlement provincial pour entrer en fonction, puisqu'elle n'est que 1'execution d'un miserable statut passe en 1801, le meme qui nous a donne les ecoles de campagne centre lesquelles j'ai toujours crie.' It could not be long before attempts would be made to find a way around 'ce miserable statut'. THE ROYAL INSTITUTION C I R C U M V E N T E D

Various proposals continued to be put forward in the assembly to provide for an alternative system of schools to those of the Royal Institution, but it was not until 1824 that a possible means presented itself. In reality the so-called Fabriques Act promised a good deal more than it delivered: in effect it allowed people to spend their own money, in that it permitted a parish which had first obtained the bishop's approval to support a school with parish funds at a yearly cost not exceeding one

National School, Bonsecours Street, a Royal Institution school

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quarter of the annual income of the parish. However, the establishment of these parochial schools was encouraged both by the assembly and by the bishop, and the number of schools grew steadily, until by 1828 there were forty-eight fabrique schools compared with the eighty-two schools under the care of the Royal Institution. But soon after the passing of the 1824 Act it became apparent that a permanent solution had not yet been reached. The Protestant and anglophone character of the majority of the members of the Royal Institution, which had as its titular head the Anglican bishop of Quebec, precluded adherence to the institution by Catholics and francophones; but the Fabriques Act did not do enough for those who chose to operate apart from the institution. As early as 1821, the governor general, Lord Dalhousie, spoke of the need to give Catholics an institution of their own that would be modelled on the style of the Royal Institution; and from 1824 to 1829 a series of initiatives was undertaken which strove to correct the fatal imbalance of the institution. The first proposal was to have two Royal Institutions, one English and Protestant and the other French and Catholic, but this was disallowed in London on the grounds that the 1801 Act contemplated one institution only. A second proposal, however, appeared to be more promising: it suggested two equal committees of the institution, one Protestant and one Catholic, each charged with the responsibility of administering its own schools. The negotiations to effect this development were carried on between Secretary Joseph Mills, the governor, Lord Dalhousie, and the Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec, Mgr. Panet. Slowly these three built up a degree of mutual confidence and reached a consensus of ideas. A bill was drawn up, giving expression to the consensus. It provided for the two committees, one Catholic and one Protestant, and it also proposed that the Anglican and Catholic bishops should alternate as president of the institution, and that in future equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants should constitute its membership. The bill was presented on 2 March 1829 and received second reading the next day. But on 7 March, the proposer, Vallieres de St.-Real, who had up to this point been acting in close cooperation with the authorities, suddenly proposed that further consideration of the bill be deferred until the next session. The bill was never reintroduced and all the careful negotiation of the previous years went for nothing. The motives which prompted Vallieres' strange behaviour (Audet does not hesitate to term it a Volte-face') have never been established. He appears to have offered no explanation. The legal difficulties ensuing from the nature of the 1801 Act and the displeasure of the Presbyterians, led by John Neilson in the House and the Reverend Henry Esson outside it, with the new proposals (they wanted to be represented equally with

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the Anglicans on the Protestant committee) were known to him before he proposed his bill for first and second reading. The reason for his actions is not therefore to be found in these matters. We can speculate that he may have judged that his measure was not likely to command sufficient votes to gain approval and that he thought that it stood a better chance if delayed for further modification; or he may have been persuaded by the opponents of the very idea of the Royal Institution to withdraw his bill to allow them to proceed with their own. Two days earlier their bill had been given both first and second reading on the same day. With the Royal Institution Bill out of the way, this so-called Syndics Act received third and final reading only another two days later. Thereafter it went speedily through all its stages in the Legislative Council and received royal assent on 14 March of that same year. Its smooth passage through the parliamentary procedures is all the more remarkable in that it was in its own way a revolutionary act: in effect it substituted the House of Assembly for the Royal Institution as the body controlling the schools and thereby made the secular State and not the Church, whether Protestant or Catholic, the authority responsible for education. In so doing it also succeeded in circumventing the Royal Institution. It did this, however, implicitly rather than explicitly. The Royal Institution had been receiving £2,000 a year to support the schools for which the institution was responsible, and this grant was not disturbed, at least not for some years; in fact, none of the privileges of the Royal Institution were in any way challenged. Rather, the new act concerned itself with the provision of elementary schools as if the Royal Institution did not exist. Each parish desiring to take advantage of the new program was required to elect five trustees or syndics (hence the name of the act) who would receive from provincial funds half the cost of providing a school up to a maximum of £50. These syndics were to report annually to the assembly upon the conduct of the schools. The act also provided comparatively generous grants for the payment of school masters: £20 a year plus 10 shillings for every poor child receiving free instruction, with a minimum of twenty and a maximum of fifty such pupils, which meant that the emoluments ranged from £30 to £45 a year. Seduced by these more liberal financial terms, the schools under the care of the Royal Institution began one by one to transfer their allegiance. The eighty-four schools in 1829 declined rapidly to forty-seven in 1835, and after the troubles of 1836-37 only three schools remained and they too soon disappeared. As the number of schools it administered declined, the annual grant to the Royal Institution was cut back and finally abolished altogether. By 1834 the number of assembly schools had risen to about

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fifteen hundred, and Lower Canada had achieved a truly public education system. T H E ROYAL I N S T I T U T I O N R E V I E W E D

At the end of the fourth volume of his study of the history of education in Quebec, Louis-Philippe Audet addresses himself to this question: 'Gette Institution fut-elle vraiment un faillite?' and in part his reply reads as follows: 'II nous semble, en effet, que si les chefs religieux et civils du Bas-Canada avaient accepte cette loi et decide de 1'utiliser, comme nos parlementaires le firent pour le gouvernement responsable, ils auraient tot ou tard amene les choses au meme point de controle democratique et auraient reussi a obtenir un system d'ecoles gratuites, bien avant 1'epoque ou ils les obtinrent en realite.'13 There is justification for that judgement, particularly since the principle of two equal committees within the one institution had been agreed in 1829, and would undoubtedly have become a fact had it not been for the passing of the Syndics Act in that same year. It was the solution to which in another setting the province would eventually turn. But that act was passed, with the result that the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning was effectively bypassed as an instrument of popular education, and it was left to manage its two grammar schools and the James McGill legacy. The grammar school in Quebec petered out in 1836, the grammar school in Montreal was absorbed by the new high school in 1846, and the Royal Institution was left to occupy itself with its sole remaining responsibility, James McGilPs bequest, and with the many problems associated with the establishment of McGill College.

NOTES 1. He was to go on to become bishop of Toronto, and be prominent in the founding of the University of Toronto. 2. For the 1774 committee of seven, see Shortt and Doughty, vol. i, part i, p. 502. For the 1787 response to the Legislative Council inquiry, see part 2, p. 919. 3. R.C. Dalton, The Jesuits3 Estates Question (Toronto, 1968). 4. Even at this stage, the categories Trench and Catholic', 'English and Protestant', were not wholly coincident, but broadly speaking the party groupings had coalesced around these religious and linguistic characteristics. 5. Shortt and Doughty, vol. i, part i, p. 572. 6. Probably he was thinking of the school established in Quebec City by James Tanwell in 1795. 7. The House was having difficulty in maintaining a quorum and made a

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8.

9. i o. 11. 12. 13.

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list of absent members including McGill's name, but with the extenuating comment 'sick'. Real Boulianne, 'The French Canadian and the Schools of the Royal Institution, 1820-29', Social History 5, no. 10 (November 1972) : 144-64. Also the same writer's Ph.D. thesis, 'The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning: The Correspondence, 1820—1829' (McGill, 1970), pp. 143, 144, and n. 96. Cited Audet, 3: 112. There was a provision that if the college had been erected on borrowed funds, the costs could be repaid out of the endowment, but the principle was maintained: no college, no money. About £730 in total, to pay the costs of legal actions to obtain the bequests from the Desrivieres family. MUA 100/1, pp. 143-44. Audet, 4: 390.

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CHAPTER

II THE YEARS OF LITIGATION

t was in the early years of the Royal Institution's existence, while Bishop Jacob Mountain was the president and Mills was the secretary of its board, that the first steps were taken towards giving tangible form to the objectives of the McGill bequest. Even before the incorporation of the Royal Institution there had been attempts to pressure the government into activity in the field of higher education, but these had resulted only in confused and ineffective correspondence between the colonial secretary in London and the governors in Quebec. There was one brief period in May 1816 when the Jesuit Estates were ordered to be handed over to the prospective Royal Institution that it might 'possess present means for establishing and maintaining the Seminaries which it may be necessary to found, and may possess the revenue which cannot fail progressively to increase in proportion to the improvement of the Provinces and the consequent demand for additional means of instruction'. But this action was countermanded a bare three weeks later. Nothing was done thereafter until 1819, when the colonial secretary again directed the governor general to proceed immediately with the building of McGill College on the Burnside estate, using the Jesuit funds for the purpose. But again nothing happened. These explicit instructions from London, being deemed unwise in Que-

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bee because of the offence they would give to local sympathies, could be and were effectively nullified by simple administrative inactivity. In 1823 the colonial secretary recommended to the lords of the treasury that £5,000 be loaned to the Royal Institution at a rate of 4 per cent interest, so that it might begin building McGill College, but this time it was the treasury which chose not to act on the recommendation. James McGill understood the delays and procrastinations of government very well. THE CHARTER OF 1 8 2 1

Once, however, the Royal Institution had been established, the members became highly conscious of the passing of time. Unless a college was erected before 13 December 1823, the Desrivieres heirs would be able to retain forever both the Burnside estate and the financial endowment. One of the first actions of the Royal Institution, therefore, was to ask the bequest trustees to transfer to the institution the legal title to the Burnside estate, and this transaction was completed on 7 June 1820. Another early decision was to apply to the crown for a charter whereby McGill College might be incorporated, and in his capacity as president of the Royal Institution Bishop Mountain wrote to the colonial secretary, enclosing a draft of the proposed document. At the same time, the board formally called upon Francis Desrivieres (Mrs. McGill having died two years previously) to surrender the estate so that the board might begin to build. Desrivieres, however, was not willing to comply, and so began the long series of lawsuits which characterized the early years of McGill. The attorney acting for the Royal Institution was Stephen Sewell, the brother of Jonathan Sewell, the chief justice who had had so much to do with the formulation of the 1801 Act. One of the counsel engaged was Joseph-Remi Vallieres de St.-Real, the son of the blacksmith whom McGill had engaged to work for a year at the French Royalist settlement in Upper Canada. Eight years later, as the one who first moved and then took steps to kill the bill which proposed two equal committees within the Royal Institution, Vallieres was to play an important role in the institution's affairs; but at this time he was engaged in the promotion of its interests.1 In order to strengthen the institution's claim and to show how serious was its intention to establish McGill College forthwith, the lawyers advised the board to press urgently for the charter of the college. In February 1821 Mountain wrote a second time to the colonial secretary in London, and again enclosed a sketch of the proposed charter, but the secretary replied that the previous draft had been submitted to the law

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officers of the crown who had compared it with the charter issued to King's College in Nova Scotia in 1802 and found it 'unexceptionable'. The charter was therefore being sent forthwith to Lord Dalhousie, the governor general. The document was dated 31 March 1821, and thus McGill College on that day came officially into existence. When the charter arrived, however, it was accompanied by a bill for £221.0.5, so that devoid of funds as it was, the university commenced its career in debt. Despite its inordinate verbosity the 1821 Charter established a fairly simple structure. Having rehearsed the bequest of James McGill to enable the Royal Institution to set up a university or college on the Burnside estate, and having declared it as the Sovereign's will that such a university or college be established 'for the Education of Youth in the principles of true religion and for their instruction in the different branches of science and literature', the charter ordained that there would be established 'from this time one College at the least for the Education of Youth and students in the Arts and Faculties' and that this first college was to be called 'McGill College'. The governing body was composed of the governor and lieutenant governor of Lower Canada, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, the bishop of Quebec, the chief justice of Montreal, the chief justice of Upper Canada, and the principal of the college. There were to be four professors, and such fellows, tutors, and scholars as the statutes of the college would provide for. The principal and professors were to be elected by the governors, but the crown reserved the right of approval. The governors, principal, and fellows constituted a body politic and corporate in deed and in law, which might sue and be sued, possess 'not withstanding any statutes or statute of mortmain', lands yielding after all encumbrances had been paid an income not in excess of £6,000 a year, and might in addition receive such benefactions and donations as be given to it.2 The charter further afforded the governors the authority to make all the rules governing the college, and to make all the other appointments and determine all the salaries. Appointments and statutes were, however, subject to confirmation by the crown. The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning was appointed the Visitor of the college. Finally, and most importantly, it stated, 'the said College shall be deemed and taken to be a University' capable of conferring bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees 'in the several Arts and Faculties'. Thus from the beginning there was never any doubt that McGill College constituted a university; it was expected that other colleges and a parent university body would follow, but they never eventuated. Until 1885 the University of McGill College was the usual designation, but after that time the governors

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adopted the style of McGill University and the term McGill College dropped out of use; the best-known surviving witness to the old designation is the name of the road leading to the lower campus through the Roddick Gates. The provisions of the first charter which were to prove the most significant were those which appeared to be merely formal, that is, the appointment of the Royal Institution in the role of Visitor, and the retention by the crown of the final word in the appointment of the principal and the approval of statutes. But before anything else could happen, the benefactions had to be secured. THE LAWSUITS

The story of the lawsuits is long and tortuous, but by no means devoid ot interest. When he heard that Francis Desrivieres was not going to surrender the Burnside estate and the financial endowment, John Strachan was indignant: 'I should hope,' he wrote to fellow trustees John Richardson and James Reid, 'that Mr. Desrivieres will have a greater respect for the memory of his greatest benefactor than to contest a Legacy which goes to establish an institution which he had so much at heart.' But there was at least enough of a case to be made on the other side to persuade Francis and his nephew James McGill Desrivieres that they were only acting within their due and legal rights. James McGill's clear intention had been to encourage and assist a government initiative with regard to the establishment of a university, and so far the government had shown no signs of any such activity. The bequest, in their view, was contingent on such government action and the Desrivieres believed that in the absence of such action the bequest must lapse. It is difficult to study the wording of the will with an unbiased mind and then pronounce them wrong. Moreover, the notion of a liberal arts college run on unprejudiced principles was most unwelcome to the Roman Catholic clergy, and the provision of anglophone higher education, especially in the absence of any similar provision for francophones, was viewed with disfavour by the French-speaking majority in the Legislative Assembly. As francophone Catholics themselves, neither Francis nor his nephew could be expected to be enthusiastic for the idea, and it is not without significance that 'Mr. Speaker Papineau' was at one time acting as their attorney. Moreover, by dragging their feet they could each expect to be £10,000 to £15,000 wealthier. The interest on the original £10,000 of the bequest was itself becoming a sizeable item. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Desrivieres family were prepared to fight for the bequests.3 The first attempt by the Royal Institution to obtain the Burnside

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estate, launched before the charter had been received, was countered by the argument that the institution could only claim the estate after it had erected a college; but the Royal Institution did not have the authority to erect colleges, this being a royal prerogative; therefore the plaintiffs had not and never would be able to fulfil the condition of the bequest which must therefore lapse. This was felt to be so cogent an argument that the Royal Institution withdrew its suit, and thus became liable for the defendants' costs as well as its own, which constituted a further embarrassment for the foundation. But once armed with the charter, the institution re-entered its suit, arguing that McGill College had now been established in law by the power which undoubtedly did have the authority to do so, to wit, the crown. At the same time, the remaining trustees of the bequest, John Richardson, James Reid, and John Strachan entered suit to obtain the endowment, for while they had conveyed Burnside to the Royal Institution they had not similarly transferred their rights to the money. They, too, and with even greater cogency, argued that until a college had been erected they had a right to receive the money from the McGill estate but not to hand it over to the Royal Institution until the college was actually in being. So the second suit was in their names, but at the further expense of the institution. To support counsels' contention that McGill College now existed both in law and in fact, the Royal Institution encouraged the governors named in the charter to appoint a principal of the college and four professors. It will be noted that the Royal Institution and the Governors of McGill College acted in concert, something they were not always to do in later years. For principal, the governors named Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain, the clergyman son of Bishop Mountain, the president of the Royal Institution. To the professorships they named a makeshift group: the Reverend Joseph Langley Mills, the secretary to the Royal Institution, was pressed into service as the professor of moral philosophy, the Reverend John Strachan was named the professor of history and civil law, the Reverend C. J. Wilson the professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, and Thomas Fargues, M.D., a Quebec City physician, the professor of medicine. The principal was also named the professor of theology. Thus of the five persons named, four were Anglican clergy; four of the five lived in Quebec City and one in Toronto, but none in Montreal. If these appointments observed the letter of the terms of the bequest with regard to 'a competent number of professors and teachers to render such an establishment effectual and beneficial for the purposes intended', they certainly did not fulfil the spirit, and we may reflect that it was just as well for the success of the strategy employed that the wording ran 'a

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competent number of professors' and not 'a number of competent professors'. Thus armed with a charter, a principal, and an academic staff, the Royal Institution and the trustees took Francis Desrivieres and his nephew James McGill Desrivieres to law a second time, seeking in two suits to obtain possession both of the Burnside estate and of the financial endowment of £ 10,000, with interest to date. The two suits proceeded independently but inevitably the same arguments were employed in both cases. An introductory argument for the defence was that since the Royal Institution did not exist when James McGill died, the bequest was invalid. To this the plaintiffs replied that the property passed directly at the time of the testator's decease to the trustees, who most certainly were in existence at that time, and were in law eligible at that time to receive the bequest. By the terms of the will, the rebuttal continued, Mrs. McGill and Francis Desrivieres were not to own the estate but only to enjoy its use and income until certain conditions were fulfilled, and the defendant (his mother being now deceased) from the time of McGill's decease had indeed derived his enjoyment of it from the trustees, who were the legal possessors. When, however, the Royal Institution came into being, the argument continued, the trustees had properly conveyed their title to the estate to that body, and the conditions prescribed in the will having been fulfilled, Francis Desrivieres now had no right to any further enjoyment of the estate and must hand it over to the Royal Institution. The senior counsel for the Desrivieres was James Stuart, whom Strachan had advised should be retained for the plaintiffs seeing that he had drawn up the will and could argue forcefully as to the testator's intentions, but he had chosen to be retained by the heirs of his original client. Stuart developed the main argument for the defence, specifically absolving both the defendants and the plaintiffs from any fault in the action, and laying the responsibility for what he argued was the invalid nature of the bequest squarely at the door of government. The Burnside bequest, he maintained, was only intended to supplement an activity of government which had not taken place, and as far as could be seen, was not going to take place, during the ten years which the will clearly specified. Therefore in his opinion the bequest devolved upon Francis, the residuary legatee. Sewell cleverly turned the tables on Stuart by saying that Mr. McGill had been advised in the wording of his will by one of the ablest of counsel, James Stuart; and that the latter had indeed framed a bequest which fully provided for the noble wishes of the testator, making clear his intention beyond any shadow of doubt: to establish a college of higher learning bearing his name. The Royal

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Institution, he said, had a charter for McGill College; therefore the college existed in law; further, the Royal Institution was now ready to erect the college physically; it was unreasonable to argue that the plaintiffs should have to erect the college physically before they could gain possession of the estate it was to stand upon; it was that possession they were now seeking from the court. The judgement handed down on 19 October 1822 in the Court of King's Bench by the Honourable Mr. Justice Foucher and the Honourable Mr. Justice Pyke declared for the plaintiff with costs against the defendant as far as the Burnside estate was concerned, though their claim for financial compensation for the time they had been denied its enjoyment was disallowed. Encouraged by this success, the Royal Institution pushed on with the second suit, brought against the Desrivieres defendants in the names ol the surviving bequest trustees. But the Desrivieres family appealed the Burnside decision and on losing the case in the Quebec Court of Appeal, chose to carry the suit to England, to be decided by the highest court of all, the Privy Council. The two lawsuits dragged on, seemingly interminably as the months lengthened into years. The members of the Board of the Royal Institution had no funds with which to pay the heavy legal fees they were incurring, and were forced to seek relief from the government, requesting assistance from that same old source of easement, the Jesuit Estates. In July 1823 they received a loan of £300, but that was soon used up; in August of the next year, Mills again wrote despairingly to the lieutenant governor of the Royal Institution's financial straits, but he received no reply. There can be little doubt that the hope of the Desrivieres family was that the Royal Institution would simply not have the funds to continue the litigation, and it was only the determination of the small group of men forming the Board of the Royal Institution which kept the McGill project alive. But if the institution lacked funds, it did have friends in high places, and in April 1824 Sew ell was much encouraged to hear from the Colonial Office that the Royal Institution's cause in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council would be pled by the law officers of the crown. There were, it appeared, some advantages in being 'a College of Royal Foundation'. This was further exemplified the following June, when the same two justices of the King's Bench in Montreal who had given judgement on the Burnside suit finally pronounced on the suit for the £10,000 endowment. Here the plaintiff's arguments were not so strong, but the judges took the view that when the King said something was 'to be and is' established, that thing thereby and at that time came into existence; the King had proclaimed in the Charter of 1821 that with reference to the Burnside estate: 'We, of Our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere

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motion, have willed, ordained, and granted and do by these presents for Us, our Heirs and Successors, will, ordain and grant, that upon the said land and in the said buildings thereon erected, or to be erected, there shall be established from this time one College at least . . . called "McGill College" '; therefore from that moment the Burnside estate and the buildings thereon became McGill College, and the conditions of the bequest having been thus fulfilled, the trustees were entitled to receive the £10,000 with 5 per cent interest from 20 December 1816 to the present date and 6 per cent interest thereafter until the date of payment. But the troubles of those attempting to bring the McGill College project to fulfilment were by no means at an end. The Desrivieres defendants immediately appealed this judgement as they had the others, and on losing their appeal in Quebec, they applied to take the second suit to the Privy Council also. For the Royal Institution this meant still further financial strain on a nonexistent treasury. Mr. Secretary Mills was so incensed at hearing this last news that he wrote to the Quebec attorney general urging that the defendants be required to put up £30,000 bail money as a condition of leave to appeal. No treatment for the ingratitude of the McGill heirs, he said, could be too harsh, and hinted darkly that if Mr. Desrivieres' ingratitude should go unpunished in this world, it surely would not escape retribution in the world to come. In June 1826 Mills received further bad news. Sewell wrote to him that the Desrivieres had put up the bail money and that John Richardson was still maintaining the view that if and when the bequest trustees did receive the money from the residuary legatees, they would not be legally justified in handing it over to the Royal Institution until McGill College was physically erected. Richardson evidently was not impressed by the reasoning of the King's Bench judges in their judgement. Thus even the happy event of finally winning the suits against the Desrivieres was not going to solve the financial problems facing the Royal Institution and its infant protege. At this point, Sewell proposed asking for an advance of £5,000 from the government against the college's expectations, but in November the Colonial Office replied that so large a loan would require British parliamentary approval, and such an action at that time 'was not expedient'. In January of the next year, 1827, John Richardson received a letter from Benjamin Hart, which he in turn communicated to the Board of the Royal Institution, to the effect that a well-placed informant in London had heard that the law officers there were of the opinion that the Privy Council case relating to Burnside was not likely to be settled in favour of the Royal Institution. So the rumours ran and anxieties deepened as the months dragged, but on the second day of June 1828,

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the Privy Council finally declared itself and pronounced in favour of the original judgement on the first suit. Consequently James McGilFs country estate, Burnside, passed into the legal possession of the Royal Institution and the McGill College project received a new lease on life. THE B U R N S I D E ESTATE

The McGill land was an attractive property of forty-six acres, situated on the gentle lower slopes of the southern side of the Montreal mountain. It was about a mile from the Place d'Armes to the property's southern boundary which lay along the line of what was to become Dorchester Boulevard. The estate was bounded on the east by a farm belonging in 1829 to the Desrivieres, but which later became part of the Phillips family holdings. The boundary ran down the middle of the present University Street. The western and northern boundaries were with the extensive McTavish properties, and the line ran fifty yards east of the road now named for McTavish, and passed south of the present Dr. Penfield-Pine Avenue limits. A brook, or 'burn' as James McGill would have called it, entered the property a little above where the Milton Gate is located, and flowed south parallel to the eastern boundary, receiving reinforcements from a spring about where the Macdonald Engineering Building now stands. This brook crossed the line of Sherbrooke Street before turning east again a little above the Boulevard de Maisonneuve. Sherbrooke Street in 1829 was n°t continued across the Desrivieres property, so that the one road on McGilFs estate, and the one means of access, was the continuation of Ste. Monique Street, which ran north from St. Antoine. It led to the house which James McGill had built for himself, and which he called Burnside Place,4 no doubt because of the brook and because it was a name familiar to him from his boyhood days in Glasgow. The land had long since been cleared of the forest which once covered it, and it was now used for orchards, vegetable farming, and cattle grazing. A number of trees had been left or had grown up since the original clearing, and around the year 1787 an elm took root in the upper meadow. This particular tree grew into a magnificent specimen. Since it had been growing some ten years before McGill owned Burnside, it is not likely that McGill planted it, but he certainly knew of it and by the early years of Dawson's principalship it was already called the Founder's Elm. It withstood all the onslaughts of storms and age until 1976, when it became unsafe and had to be taken down. Its passing was marked with real regret for it was the last living link with James McGill. The Burnside house was a comfortable country dwelling, built in a recognized Quebec style, but very definitely as the summer residence of

Burnside Place

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a gentleman rather than as a working farmhouse. It stood on the east side of what is now called McGill College Avenue, a little above the Boulevard de Maisonneuve, a thoroughfare first known in that part of its length as Burnside Place, in honour of the house. The ground floor of the dwelling provided servants' rooms and a kitchen at the front, and because of the slope of the land, cellars at the back. Steps led up to the front door and the spacious front rooms of the second floor opened on either side of the entrance hall. Each had three windows facing south. The high, sloping roof had dormer windows for the third floor rooms, only two of which had ceilings, while the rest of the area constituted a large, open attic. Comfortably furnished as it was in James McGilFs time, Burnside must have made an agreeable residence, much enhanced by the productive gardens and orchards which surrounded it. In McGill's own days, the estate was well cared for and often gave rise to admiring comments, but after the years of litigation the situation had become very different. The land was surrendered on 16 March 1829 and the next day Sewell wrote to Mills to say that he had taken physical possession of the property and that he had found it in a parlous condition. The house was 'much out of order', the garden 'neglected', and the meadows in 'a state of exhaustion'. Nothing had been done to maintain the farm, and even the manure from the stables had been carted off to fertilize James McGill Desrivieres' land which adjoined. Nevertheless, he commented favourably on the size of the Burnside house; there were two rooms twenty-four feet square and he estimated that it was large enough to accommodate between fifty and sixty boys in dormitories. He seems to have been thinking more of a school than a college. He and John Richardson were agreed that it would be unwise to delay opening the college, but a tenant would nevertheless be required to work the farm and thereby produce a modest revenue of about £ 16 a year. Sewell added that until the Royal Institution could obtain the financial endowment, the future looked dark indeed. Meanwhile, Mr. Secretary Mills was informed that the Privy Council had awarded costs against the Desrivieres only in the amount of £50, whereas the charges of the law officers of the crown in responding to the suit were nearer £300, and thus the Royal Institution was indebted to the treasury for £218.15.8. There were no funds to meet these expenses, and little prospect of any. The second suit had still to be decided. MCGILL C O L L E G E I N A U G U R A T E D

Despite all the problems, the success of the suit for Burnside was indeed a notable victory, and those who were determined to bring McGill

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College not merely into legal but also educational existence were much encouraged. They laid plans forthwith for an official inauguration. The date chosen was Wednesday, 24 June 1829, and on that day, after due advertisement in the newspapers, one of the commodious rooms of Mr. McGilPs summer residence was filled by 'the numerous and respectable individuals who had assembled to witness the ceremony. Among the company we noticed several officers of the government, the principal members of the Bar, the lecturers at the Montreal Medical Institution and several gentlemen more or less connected with the proposed College.' So ran the account given with remarkable fullness by the Montreal Gazette, and we have reason to be grateful to the reporter, for some of the things said on that day were of a notable character. Given the size of the room, the company could only have been numerous comparatively, but there can be no doubt as to its respectability. Yet there is the obvious comment to be made, that it was a very anglophone and Protestant gathering. The earlier dream of 'an unprejudiced seminary offering a liberal education' to the general population of Lower Canada had now been reduced to the provision of a liberal arts college serving the needs of the English-speaking minority of the city of Montreal. Moreover, it was a decidedly Anglican affair. The proceedings were opened by the new bishop of Quebec, Charles James Stewart, who presided in his capacity as president of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and the Gazette remarked that he was attended by Archdeacon G.J. Mountain and eight other clergymen. None other of the 'respectable individuals' is considered worthy of mention by name except the two ministers of the St. Gabriel Street Presbyterian church, Henry Esson and Edward Black. After the secretary of the Royal Institution had read the charter establishing McGill College, the bishop commented 'that he was authorised on the part of the Governors of the new College to state it to be their intention as far as it was in their power to carry into effect the liberal intentions of the late Mr. McGill. . . . He deemed it unnecessary to exhort them upon the advantages of education, as he was sure they were all of opinion that a moral and religious education on Christian principles, and a scientific course of studies on a true philosophical system were what it was their bounden duty to promote.' The interesting thing in these comments is that whereas James McGill had said nothing in his will as to the character of the education to be offered in his college, and whereas the charter spoke of 'the education of youth in the principles of true religion' and made but passing reference to the performance of Divine Service in the college, the bishop spoke of Christian principles. This was perhaps

George Jehoshaphat Mountain

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not surprising, coming from a bishop. Less expected were the repeated references to the liberality of the education to be offered. But the same emphasis is also characteristic of the remarks made by Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain. He rose in his capacity as the first principal of McGill. He must have known that, like the four professorships, his principalship was of a nominal and temporary nature, yet perhaps he was also conscious that he could do much to establish the future style of the institution over which he presided. He began by modestly remarking that he felt unworthy to occupy the eminent position to which he had been called and expressed the prophetic hope that he might be followed 'by a long line of eminent and learned principals'. He continued by saying that he and his colleagues had been busy drawing up a constitution and a set of rules for the government of the college, into the details of which he need not go, except to remark that those rules were liberal in every sense of the word, 'they imposed no test upon Professors or Students . . . all offices in McGill College were left freely open either to Protestants or Roman Catholics, and students of all denominations would be permitted to attend'. This was a sufficiently sensitive matter for the principal to expand somewhat upon it; the liberal character proposed for McGill must not be construed, he said, as a criticism of 'those noble and venerable Institutions of the Mother Country in which a test was properly exacted of conformity to the National Religion'. It will be recalled that while the Catholic Emancipation Act had just passed into law in Britain, and that this had been preceded a year earlier by the repeal of the Test Act, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been expressly excluded from the scope of the repeal, and were not to be open to Dissenters or Catholics for another fifty years. Thus the liberality of these declarations on the occasion of the opening of McGill College was indeed something notable. That the principal and his colleagues were truly intent on pursuing a broadminded and eirenic path was further illustrated by the explanation, bordering almost on an apology, which he offered for the fact that all the professors happened to be Church of England men. These references to liberality must be set in the contemporary context. There were in British North America three colleges, other than McGill, which were of royal foundation.5 In 1829 the King's College at Windsor, Nova Scotia, still required its students, before they could graduate, to sign the Anglican doctrinal confession known as 'the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion'. The King's College at Fredericton, New Brunswick, had only in the previous January liberalized its practices so far as to allow non-Anglicans to graduate, but it still remained in its governance a Church of England institution. The King's College in Upper Canada

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(which was later to become the University of Toronto) had received a markedly Anglican charter only two years earlier, and John Strachan was still embroiled in the controversies to which that charter had given rise. Strachan himself had probably not been responsible for the more contentious provisions. Indeed, there is evidence that Mountain had conferred with Strachan as to what the policy in a Canadian university should be, for the Montreal Gazette, in its account of the inauguration of McGill in June 1829, specifically refers to his advice: 'Before closing this subject, we deem it but justice to the Venerable Archdeacon Strachan to state that . . . to that gentleman is also due the very liberal arrangement which was announced by the Principal, with regard to the total absence of any tests for the admission of Professors and students.' Mountain and Strachan probably took it for granted, given the character of contemporary institutions in Britain and in Canada, that McGill would always be under Anglican control, but they were indicating that they were prepared to go along with the new notions of liberality as regards professorships (other than the chair of theology), matriculation, and graduation. However, many people who were present at Burnside on 24 June, or who read the account in the Montreal Gazette five days later, understood from the remarks that had been made that McGill College was to be from the very beginning free of any ecclesiastical allegiance, and this expectation was to give rise to considerable controversy in later years. It would be pleasant to record that after this impressive inauguration, McGill College registered its first students and began forthwith on a splendid teaching career. But the realities were that five paper professors and an old farmhouse isolated by open fields from even the outskirts of Montreal, and a completely empty treasury, were not able to achieve anything more than the fine rhetoric and noble expressions of its principal. No attempt could be made yet at a teaching program. THE MONTREAL MEDICAL INSTITUTION ENGRAFTED

One other very significant occurrence took place on that June afternoon. In his address Principal Mountain had referred to ca predisposition to engraft upon the College the well-known and respectable Medical Institution now in existence in the city'. The origins of the body to which Principal Mountain made allusion can be traced back at least to 1815, when the unrest which followed the close of the Napoleonic wars brought to Canada large numbers of poverty-stricken and often diseased immigrants. Their plight was so pitiful that a number of charitable efforts came into existence, and a lady named Mrs. Benaiah Gibb took the lead

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in establishing the Female Benevolent Society of Montreal. In 1817 a House of Recovery was established in the Recollet Suburb and was fitted with discarded army supplies. The financial support for these various ventures was obtained from charitable collections in the city. A few months' experience with this first attempt to meet an evident social need showed the necessity for more adequate measures. Appeals were made more than once to the Legislative Assembly, but when these produced no tangible response, it was decided by a group of influential citizens that they should go forward on their own initiative and with their own resources. The account of 'a meeting of the Subscribers for the establishment of a General Hospital in this City' records that the chair was taken by John Richardson, and that among the list of those who were voted managers of the proposed institution were familiar and significant names: Benaiah Gibb, John Molson, Stephen Sewell, Thomas Blackwood, George Moffatt, Robert Armour, and Alexander Skakel. It was, in fact, the same group of Montreal merchants and professional men who were soon to interest themselves in the attempt to establish McGill College. But there was this major difference between the two projects, that while the earlier charitable efforts of the women had indeed benefited greatly from the cooperation of the clergy, the leadership of the new institution was decidedly lay. Not a clergyman appears in the list. Nor is there mention of any officers of the government. This was strictly a citizens' operation. As a result of the meeting, a larger house was rented on Craig Street and opened as a hospital on i May 1819. The fact that the new institution was of such an unofficial character had two consequences, one minor and colourful, the other of truly major importance. In December 1820 it was decided that the Craig Street house was also inadequate to meet the ever-growing demands made upon it, and that a subscription list should be opened for the erection of a new building on land donated by John Richardson, William McGillivray, and Samuel Gerrard, to be called the Montreal General Hospital, 'for the reception of patients of all diseases usually admitted into such Hospital in Great Britain, without distinction of religious denomination'. The site was on the corner of what was to become Dorchester Boulevard and St. Dominique Street, and there on 6 June 1821 the cornerstone was laid with impressive Masonic ceremonies. Ships flew flags in the harbour, military bands played, and the Masonic Lodges paraded in regalia. The other consequence of the unofficial character of the hospital was, however, of greater importance. Once the citizens of Montreal had become convinced of the insensitivity of government, they decided to

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continue as they had begun, that is, by providing for the support of their institution out of their own substance. Whereas McGill College, richly endowed but entangled in its lawsuits, was always looking for government support, grandly promised but meagrely given, and in consequence had to struggle for forty years to maintain a precarious existence, and was not assured of even a modest future until the sixth decade of the century, the Montreal General Hospital, dependent from the beginning on the financial support of the merchant and professional classes, went steadily forward from strength to strength and only comparatively recently has the State taken over the main burden of its upkeep. Not until McGill College was finally disillusioned of its dreams of government support and turned like the hospital to the interest and generosity of the members of the Montreal English-speaking community did the future become promising for that institution also. The first physicians named to the medical staff were Drs. Robertson, Caldwell, Blackwood, Farrenden, and Christie. The last two were replaced after a short while by Andrew Fernando Holmes and Henry Loedel, and John Stephenson, who had just returned from medical studies in Edinburgh, joined them in 1821. In August 1822 Stephenson announced a course of lectures to be given by him to students of medicine at the Montreal General Hospital.6 A few months later he was joined in this venture by Holmes, Caldwell, and Robertson. In 1823 the Montreal Medical Institution was formally organized as the teaching arm of the hospital and a provincial charter was applied for, so that it might confer medical degrees recognized by law. In 1826 a draft charter was sent to the lieutenant governor for Colonial Office approval; the reply was finally received in 1828 that such a charter could not be given because the institution was not connected with any 'Seminary of Learning'. Thus no degrees could be given and the institution could have no legal existence. But McGill College had a charter which specifically empowered it to grant 'the degrees of Bachelor, Master, and Doctor in the several Arts and Faculties'. If the institution became part of the college, not only would this give the institution the legal standing and academic prestige necessary to its further existence, but it would also enable the college to claim that it was actively engaged in education. Thus the engrafting of the Medical Institution onto McGill College would be a. development of considerable benefit to both parties. The proposal met with general satisfaction and was implemented by recognizing the teachers in the institution as being members of the university, and by constituting the school its Faculty of Medicine. It was not possible to make all the teaching physicians professors in the new faculty, since the college charter referred only to a principal and four professors, and

The Montreal General Hospital, 1826 The Montreal Medical Institution, No. 20, St. James Street, 1823

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the college did not want to bestow all its chairs on medical men. So Dr. Fargues, the interim professor of medicine, was asked to resign and the Montreal Medical Institution was invited to nominate one of its four lecturers to the vacant professorship. 'The Statutes, Rules and Ordinances' of the Medical Faculty were then submitted by the McGill governors to the governor general, who signified the consent of the Colonial Office on 2 May 1832. At the same time, the four lecturers of the Montreal Medical Institution were confirmed in their appointment to 'medical professorships', and Professors Robertson, Caldwell, Holmes, and Stephenson were the first men to be in name and in fact professors of McGill University. One slight note of discord sounded in the midst of these affable and otherwise harmonious negotiations. In their correspondence on the subject, the Board of the Royal Institution pointed out to the Governors of McGill College that the board believed the governors had erred in appointing four professors additional to the principal; in the board's opinion, if the principal were to be a professor, then there were only three professorships left vacant. The secretary wrote: 'The Governors of the College have committed an oversight in some way or other. It had not escaped the previous notice of the Board.' The possibility had emerged that the Board of the Royal Institution and the governors might not always see eye to eye. In only a few years, the possibility was to become a fact, with very unhappy consequences. THE SECOND PRINCIPAL

From the inauguration of McGill College in 1829 until the year 1835, the second lawsuit continued its imperceptible progress through the red tape and legal delays of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. Burnside continued to be farmed by a tenant on a not very satisfactory basis, and the Montreal Medical Institution continued as the sole visible activity of McGill College in the field of education. Until the suit for the endowment was settled there was no money and nothing more could be done, but to the population of Montreal this inactivity began to look like a lack of enthusiasm. The whole project was acquiring a bad name. In 1835, however, the situation changed drastically. First, the presidency of the Royal Institution passed from the ailing bishop of Quebec, Charles James Stewart, to a lawyer, A. W. Cochran, who was secretary to the governor of Lower Canada. Secondly, since he was to leave shortly for England to be consecrated bishop of Montreal, coadjutor to Stewart, and with the right of succession to the diocese of Quebec, Archdeacon Mountain felt it incumbent upon him to resign as

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principal of McGill College. It became necessary therefore for the governors to appoint a successor. Thirdly, judgement was at last given in the second lawsuit and it was in favour of the respondent, the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, acting on behalf of the trustees of the James McGill bequest. The decision to appoint a new principal was, however, more easily reached than put into effect. Those who might be considered qualified for the post were by no means eager to undertake a responsibility which offered little prospect of reward either pecuniary or honorific. It was thought that a clergyman must be chosen, but the first to be approached, the Reverend S. S. Woods of Three Rivers, did not bother to reply and the second, the Reverend Thomas Littlehales 'of Christ Church College, Oxford', declined the offer. It was then decided (in a manner reminiscent of the way in which Joseph Mills used to be pressed into service) that the Reverend S. J. Lockhart, chaplain and secretary to the bishop of Quebec, should undertake the duties, but whether he ever agreed to serve is not clear: certainly, he never acted in the capacity of principal. There was, however, one man who was both available and willing to serve. True, he suffered from the disability that he had never attended a university and therefore possessed no degree, but he was a clergyman and he was rector of Montreal. His name was John Bethune. He was appointed principal on 18 November i835.7 By that date McGill College had been officially in existence for nearly fifteen years. They had been years of much litigation, but little progress. The Burnside estate remained a farm, poorly cared for, as land which suffers from absentee landlords so often is. It belonged legally to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, which had its corporate existence several days' difficult journey away in Quebec City. The governors of the college were a group of men so important in their various offices that it was almost impossible they should ever all be brought together in one place to effect the college's business. The college existed only on paper, apart from the Medical Faculty, and that had been a lively Montreal institution long before the college took on any substance. But now with the lawsuits decided, the estate and the endowment assured to the governors, and with a principal who lived in the city and was one of its outstanding personalities, one could surely look to the future with happier expectations.

NOTES i. In 1842 he became chief justice of Montreal and thus ex officio a Governor of McGill College and so played a further important part in its development.

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2. Lands held by charitable and certain other corporations were said in English law to be held 'in mortmain' (mortua manua, by a dead hand) because they were inalienable and in general not taxable: 'a dead hand yields no service' is an aphorism descending from feudal days. Hence the need to limit the extent of land a corporation might hold. £6,000 would have been in 1821 a princely income. 3. The fact that Francis Desrivieres and his nephew James McGill Desrivieres fought to retain the bequests did not arouse universal disapprobation or result in social ostracism. During the 18205 both men served as Governors of the Montreal General Hospital; James married Joseph Frobisher's daughter; Francis later cooperated closely with John Richardson in the Lachine Canal project. 4. 'Burnside Place' appears to have been the name McGill gave to his estate; his keys to the property, preserved in the McLennan Library's Lande Room, are so stamped. 5. There were other francophone colleges, but the first to receive university status (and a royal charter) was the Universite Laval in 1852. 6. There has been considerable confusion over these dates but they have been firmly established by Alan Ridge in 'The Minute Book of the Montreal Medical Institution', Journal of Society of Archivists 2, no. 9 (April 1964) : 435-38. 7. On the question whether he was appointed principal or only acting principal, see p. 75.

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CHAPTER

I

THE YEARS OF JOHN BETHUNE

ohn Bethune, rector of the parish of Montreal, was forty-four years old when he was appointed principal of McGill College and he was to continue in office for the next ten years.1 Hardly had his term of office begun when Canada received the long-awaited decision of the Privy Council on the second lawsuit. It had, indeed, been announced in England in October 1835, one month before Bethune was appointed principal, but the news did not reach Montreal until after the new year had begun. The previous decisions against the Desrivieres family and in favour of the Royal Institution were upheld. With Burnside now firmly in the hands of the Royal Institution, and with the financial bequest no longer a mirage but a very tangible asset amounting with interest to £22,000, the Bethune years should have been years of vigorous new developments and exciting growth. Instead, they were years of bickering, frustration, and debt, and they almost saw the demise of the whole project. Nevertheless, it was in this period that McGill College at last became a reality. ROYAL I N S T I T U T I O N A N D G O V E R N O R S O F MCGILL

The root cause of the various disagreements which characterized the principalship of John Bethune was undoubtedly that the control of the

John Bethune

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fortunes of McGill College was divided between two bodies, the one established by provincial statute, the other by royal charter, and both overloaded with officialdom and functionaries. The former was the Board of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and the other was the Board of Governors of McGill College. The governors contended that the Royal Institution, its work on the lawsuits now completed, should hand over all the McGill assets to them, and leave them to bring the college into operation. But the president and members of the Royal Institution were not ready to concede that they had no further role to play. The Royal Institution had been conceived originally, as we have seen, as the instrument whereby the government would at once administer and control public education; in 1829 it had been bypassed in this office by the Legislative Assembly; after 1830 it had few remaining responsibilities except to administer the McGill bequests. Therefore, to justify its own continued existence (and few committees or public bodies are ready to acquiesce in their own demise), the institution was loath to relinquish all control of the McGill project. Moreover, there were good reasons why it should not. First, the legal problems of the McGill bequest were still not ended. The Privy Council had given judgement in favour of the respondents, but these were not the members of the Royal Institution itself, but rather the bequest trustees, as named in the will. These trustees, John Richardson, James Reid, John Strachan, James Dunlop, if they were alive, or if deceased their heirs and successors, were the legal recipients of the bequest in trust —but, as John Richardson maintained, with the support of his fellow trustees and their heirs, the trustees might be vulnerable to suit by the McGill heirs if they handed the £22,000 endowment to the Royal Institution in accordance with any terms other than those of the will. Therefore, Richardson and the others, having received the money, refused to pay it over to the Royal Institution until such time as McGill College was physically 'erected or established'. This was exactly the argument which the Court of King's Bench had long since declared invalid, which decision had been upheld in the Quebec Court of Appeal and in the Privy Council; but John Richardson was displaying his usual caution and protecting himself and his fellow trustees against any possible liability. Therefore, the Royal Institution had to go to law yet once again, and sue the trustees for the money in an 'amicable' suit; Richardson himself seems to have been quite content that the Royal Institution should receive the bequest, so long as he and his fellow trustees were protected by a court order. But this complication was one reason for the Royal Institution to continue in active operation. Another consideration was that the board had for years been overseer

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of many schools, and was conscious of having exercised this role with considerable success; it believed that it should continue this supervisory role with respect to McGill College, especially as it had been specifically named in the McGill Charter as Visitor. Even though the term 'Visitor' is nowhere spelled out in any of the legal documents, and the English precedents cited in the disputes were, to say the least, not very pertinent, there can be little doubt that the generally accepted understanding was that of a trustee in the public interest, to ensure that a foundation was honestly administered for the particular purposes set out in its charter. Given that the governors of the college were appointed by the crown, and that the members of the Royal Institution had been named by the same authority from the same official and administrative group, and further that some of the members served on both bodies, it would have seemed hardly necessary for the Royal Institution to have exercised its supervisory functions in anything more than a merely formal manner. But in practice things had not worked out as intended, for the following unforeseen set of circumstances. When Bethune became principal, he also became a governor. The other governors were determined by the 1821 Charter to be the governor general, the lieutenant governors of both Lower and Upper Canada, the bishop of Quebec, the chief justice of Upper Canada, and the chief justice of Montreal. The governor general and lieutenant governors could seldom be at meetings. The episcopal member of the board, George Jehoshaphat Mountain, although he had succeeded to the diocese of Quebec (retaining, however, the Montreal title until 1850), did not, because of legal technicalities, have access to the episcopal seat on the McGill Board until i844.2 The chief justice of Upper Canada was far removed from the scene of action, and the chief justiceship in Montreal was held until 1838 by Mr. Justice James Reid, who was one of the bequest trustees, but because of age his involvement in college affairs was nominal only. Michael O'Sullivan was chief justice from 1838 to 1839; since his tenure of office was very brief, he did not concern himself with the college. From 1839 to 1842 the post was vacant, and after 1842 it was held by Chief Justice Joseph-Remi Vallieres de St.Real, who as a French-Canadian Roman Catholic had no natural commitment to the college, though he played his part conscientiously when called upon to do so. It was inevitable, in these circumstances, that on many occasions John Bethune was the sole effective governor in Montreal and he often acted in the name of the board without anyone to authorize or check his activities. The Royal Institution's continued supervision of the administration of the college was therefore, in the opinion of its members, highly desirable.

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But there were other and more human motives at work also. The members of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning met naturally enough in Quebec City. Most of its members were Quebec residents and officials. When Bishop Stewart surrendered the presidency, his successor in that office was first the governor's secretary and then Bishop Mountain, who continued to live in Quebec and to administer his diocese from that city. Consequently, the Royal Institution was very much a Quebec City organization. As long as Mountain had been the principal of McGill College, no problems could arise, but when he became president of the Royal Institution and John Bethune became the principal of the college, the situation changed decidedly. Bethune was very much a Montreal man, and he shared the general Montreal resentment against domination by Quebec interests, especially as the Royal Institution, through identification with the administration, could be represented as an instance of the unreasonable domination of colonial affairs by the imperial government in London. Neither the 'Downing Street influence' nor 'the Chateau clique' were popular in Montreal. Moreover, it has to be added that a strong personal antipathy existed between Mountain and Bethune, and this further strained the relations between the two institutions. The two clergymen were always meticulously courteous in their communications to each other; but the underlying dislike of the one for the other shows through only too plainly. They were in character and upbringing two very different men. The one was a restrained, cultured, even saintly, Englishman; the other a practical and tenacious Scot. The one was of the Establishment and the other was very much a Colonial. The clash of personalities was further aggravated by Bethune's determination to correct the liberal tradition and intentions of the Royal Institution and to make McGill a thoroughly Anglican institution. To the members of the Royal Institution, this determination appeared as just one more instance of Bethune's attempts to get the whole McGill enterprise completely and irreversibly into his own hands.

B E T H U N E ' S QUALIFICATIONS AND SUPPORT There was, however, a good deal to be said on John Bethune's side of the disputes. As we have seen, in England and in British North America the established church had administered the educational institutions recognized or supported by the State. It was natural to assume the same situation in Montreal. Moreover, by 1835, tne R°yal Institution had possessed the Burnside estate for six years and had accomplished nothing. It was far removed from the scene and left to itself was unlikely to

The City of Montreal, 1830

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achieve anything more in the next six years. Bethune, on the other hand, had already been in the city for seventeen years and had behind him a solid record of achievement. He had set up a National school as well as an institution for orphans, and he had cooperated in many other constructive enterprises, including the establishment of the Montreal General Hospital. He had taken over a church building incomplete and heavily burdened with debt, and a parish almost totally devoid of organization; he had provided the organization, he had retired the debt, and he had completed the building. Congregations in Christ Church had increased to the point where galleries had to be added to accommodate all those who wished to attend the services. In a single year he had presented no less than 150 candidates for confirmation. During the plague epidemic of 1832 he had played a truly heroic role by carrying out his parish duties indefatigably and without fear.3 When three years later he became principal of McGill College, he was no untried or obscure person; rather, he was a leading figure in the city, an experienced and able administrator, and one who stood high in public esteem. He must have seemed to many the man who would put the tardy college on the road to prosperity and success. Yet from the beginning there was a certain awkwardness with regard to his appointment. The members of the Board of Governors of McGill College present in Quebec City on 18 November 1835, when it was agreed to appoint him principal, were Lord Gosford, the then governor general, the aged and ailing Bishop Stewart, and the chief justice of Montreal, James Reid, three men who were not involved in any of the later disputes. Yet they attached conditions to his appointment which bespoke a certain hesitation, not to be wholly explained by the fact that he was not a university graduate. Bethune, they decided, was to be principal pro tempore and 'his appointment shall not interfere with any future appointment which the Governors of the College may see fit to make'. Bethune characteristically took immediate steps to protect his own position, and this he did by the nature of his reply: 'I cordially accept the appointment which the Governors of McGill College have done me the honour to confer on me, of Principal of the Institution pro tempore under the explanation given to me by the Chief Justice of Montreal of the following passage in your Lordship's communication "that the appointment shall not interfere with any future appointment that the Governors of the College may see fit to make", viz., that if the funds of McGill College should at any future period enable the Governors to offer the Principal a sufficient emolument to secure his exclusive services to the Institution, the present nomination shall not interfere with any such future appointment—but that the present nomination is

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not to be cancelled to make room for any future pro tempore appointment.'4 From 1842 Bethune's most powerful allies in his skirmishes with the Royal Institution were the two chief justices. Robinson of Upper Canada was sympathetic, but too far distant to be other than occasionally helpful, but Joseph-Remi Vallicres de St.-Real had already figured prominently in the affairs of the Royal Institution and now he was to become even more closely involved in the development of McGill College. The son of the blacksmith engaged by James McGill to serve an emigre French Royalist settlement in Upper Canada, Vallicres had articled as a lawyer and was elected to the Legislative Assembly. In 1823 he had served in the absence of Louis-Joseph Papineau as Speaker of the House, which suggests that he was well considered by the francophone majority. As one of the counsel for the Royal Institution in its suits against the Desrivieres family, he was familiar with its work and aspirations, and he had been a member of its board during a short-lived attempt to broaden its membership. He has already been mentioned for the part he played in the negotiations to introduce Catholic and Protestant committees into the structure of the Royal Institution.5 As chief justice of Montreal and so a Governor of McGill College, Vallieres regularly sided with the principal, and indeed at one stage he shared with Bethune and Robinson responsibility for borrowing funds on their own security to keep the college buildings heated in winter. Bethune and the two chief justices had some difficulty later in persuading the Royal Institution to reimburse them. Vallieres' sympathies were naturally with the Montreal protagonist rather than with his Quebec opponents, and probably all the more because of his own earlier dealings with the government. He had been suspended from the Bench in 1838 because he had allowed writs of habeas corpus in the cases of some of those arrested as a consequence of the Lower Canada rebellions. He was restored to office in 1840, and became chief justice of Montreal in 1842, but his readiness to support Bethune in his struggles with the Royal Institution must be viewed in the light of his own brushes with the established order. Another name that should be mentioned in this connection is that of Joseph Abbott, the clergyman appointed the first bursar, registrar, and secretary of McGill College.6 In man) ways he closely resembled his principal. He was a strong churchman, an efficient parish organizer, and a conscientious pastor; if anything, however, he was influenced rather more than Bethune himself by the new High Church tendencies beginning to cross the Atlantic from Oxford. He was representative of a small but influential group of Anglican clergy and laity who gave Bethune their wholehearted support in his endeavours to thwart the Royal In-

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stitution and to secure McGill College as a foundation firmly under Anglican control. DECISION TO B U I L D

John Bethune became principal in November 1835 and the following January, when the good news of the Privy Council decision had arrived, Cochran, then president of the Royal Institution, wrote to Bethune that a college building should be erected at a cost of about £5,000 to provide room for forty students and two professors. Somewhat incautiously he added that Burnside might be adapted to serve as a residence for the principal. During 1836 the Royal Institution was still waiting for the bequest funds to be transferred into its keeping, but in the meanwhile it agreed to convey the Burnside estate into the care and administration of the governors. Remembering Cochran's remark and thinking no doubt that construction was to commence very soon and he should be on the spot to supervise it, Bethune moved himself and his family into the Burnside house. The Royal Institution heard this news with surprise and great indignation, and said that Burnside should either be used as a temporary college or rented out to produce income. It should not be used to provide Bethune with rent-free accommodation. Bethune replied that his residence was in accordance with a decision of the Governors of McGill College, and that what the governors decided to do with their own property was no concern of the Royal Institution. Relationships had obviously deteriorated. In May 1837 the Royal Institution informed the governors that as soon as they received the bequest, they proposed to erect a building, and invited the governors to express their ideas on the subject. Bethune protested that the Royal Institution should hand the money over to the governors, and that they should be the ones to erect the college. He was however persuaded to submit his proposals to the Royal Institution, and they were immediately judged to be too grandiose. He wanted accommodation for one hundred students, each to have his own bedroom and a study shared with another student; he wanted apartments for the principal, vice-principal, and four other professors, though Burnside might serve as the principal's residence; a college hall (which could also serve as a refectory), a library, and a chapel. There should also be accommodation for a steward. In addition, he said, there would be needed a lecture room each for classics, mathematics, natural philosophy, and astronomy, and one for the Medical Department. Each lecture room was to be provided with side rooms for subsidiary activities, among which chemistry was specifically mentioned for the Medical Department. As

Joseph-Remi Vallieres de St.-Real

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for location, he suggested that the seventeen acres north of Sherbrooke Street,7 which had just been continued through the McGill property, would provide the best site, and he proposed that this area should be laid out in avenues, ornamental gardens, and kitchen gardens. It was not an unreasonable proposal, but the Royal Institution knew what the resources were and started to become fearful. They had not the funds, they said, to carry out such an ambitious plan, and even if they had, they would then be bereft of all capital, and would have nothing from which to produce an income for the payment of professors' salaries. As they saw it, they had enough money to put up a building containing a hall and lecture rooms, but they could not supply residential accommodation for either staff or students. Such a building as they contemplated would cost £5,000 (they returned to Cochran's figure), and they could then hope to fund three professorships, at £300 a year each, one of the professors to be the principal and receive for that office an extra £100. Without government help they could not provide for theology, law, or medicine, but must confine themselves to offering the rudiments of a liberal education. This more modest proposal was finally adopted and advertised to architects on 16 August 1838, but when the replies were received all the submissions were considered to entail too large an outlay of capital. Bethune now felt himself in need of allies, and he turned to the Medical Faculty, which after a lapse of two years, 1836-38, caused by the political troubles of the times, had resumed its teaching program. He saw a way of bringing their interests and those of his friends in the city into the support of the college and to that end he had the governors institute 'The Corporation of McGill College'. This body derived its membership directly from the 1821 Charter which said that the governors, professors, and fellows constituted a 'body politic and corporate', and the language employed permits the view that the professors of the university are fellows ex officio and that other persons may be so designated. When Corporation met for the first time on 27 November 1838 there were present with Bethune the governor general, the chief justice of Montreal, at that time James Reid, Professors Robertson, Stephenson, and Holmes of the Medical Faculty, and George Moffatt, a Montreal merchant and prominent member of the Christ Church congregation, who was also a member, though not an active one, of the Royal Institution. Presumably he had been named a fellow of the university by the governors, though there is no record of the appointment. At this meeting the views of the Royal Institution were reported and received with considerable displeasure; their concept of the college was considered too mean, and the medical men were particularly upset by the declaration that no teaching was taking place. The Medical Faculty was again

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operating, they said, as it had been for many years, at a high level of efficiency. The Royal Institution, in its reply, sought to be conciliatory, and informed the governors that it had been agreed that Bishop Mountain and George Moffatt should be authorized to meet with the governors in Montreal and decide with them upon a particular set of plans. In this way, on 2 July 1839, the plans of John Ostell were approved, and Bethune and Moffatt were appointed to oversee the work of construction. Ostell was also asked to propose the layout of the college grounds. Once the decision to build had been taken, it seems strange that no appeal for public support was issued, particularly in view of the success of other similar ventures. The Montreal General Hospital had steady and loyal financial support in the city from its beginnings. Canada Baptist College, a purely denominational effort, had been successful in raising £1,800 and therewith had opened its doors on 24 September 1838 'in a stone house among green fields and farms' and by 1845 its theological enrolment had increased to seventeen. A larger house was taken for the 1846 session and provision made for both an 'Academical department' to provide pre-college training for the professions and commerce and an arts training for college students not intending to enter the Baptist ministry. This was a solid achievement on a much less affluent financial basis than that possessed by McGill. Similarly, in 1842, the citizens of Montreal enthusiastically supported a proposal for the establishment of a high school, to such good effect that the school opened on 25 September 1843. It was provided with a headmaster from England, a Cambridge graduate who had been principal of Hull College, and with two well-trained and experienced assistant masters, one from England and one from Scotland. The success of these efforts makes it more surprising that no one connected with McGill seems to have contemplated an appeal for public support. Probably, the notion of a public appeal was inhibited by the college's apparent wealth (£22,000 and forty-six acres represented a considerable fortune) and its illusory prospects of government funding. BUILDING COMMENCED

John Bethune decided characteristically that the commencement of building operations must be marked with ceremonies befitting the importance of the occasion. The cornerstone was accordingly laid by the governor general, Sir John Colborne, on the seventh day of October 1839, and the next day the Montreal Gazette carried an account of the ceremony:

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His Excellency was received by a Guard of Honour consisting of a company of the 24th Regiment, stationed in front of the residence of the Reverend Dr. Bethune, Principal of the College. A Guard, consisting of two companies of the Grenadier Guards, lined the road from Sherbrooke Street to the ground of the College; and a company of the 8ist Highland Light Infantry was on the side of the building to receive the procession. . . . When the procession which had an imposing effect, reached the scaffolding erected to receive it, prayers were offered up by the Reverend Principal for a blessing upon the work which was about to be commenced. After prayers, the Hon. George Moffat addressed his Excellency in the following terms . . . 'I humbly invite your Excellency to commence the great and good work we have in hand, by laying the cornerstone of McGill College.' To which address His Excellency made a suitable reply, expressive of the gratification which he felt at being present at laying the cornerstone of an edifice for the promotion of the greatest of all earthly blessings—the cultivation and instruction of the human mind, and consequently the true and only foundation of morality and religion. The architect of the College then came forward and presented for His Excellency's inspection, a plan and elevation of the building. A glass tube, hermetically sealed, and containing an inscription and some coins of the present reign, and an account of the endowment of the college, were handed to His Excellency, who deposited the same in the cavity of the lower stone. The upper stone was then lowered to its place—the band playing during the operation. When properly adjusted by the architect, His Excellency gave three strokes with a mallet, when a herald proclaimed 'God save the Queen' and three cheers were given. The band then played the national anthem; and Dr. Bethune having again offered up a prayer, the ceremony was concluded amidst great cheering, and mutual interchanges of congratulations at the laying of the cornerstone of the first English and Protestant College in Lower Canada. It is to be hoped that the sun shone brightly upon the colourful scene that fall day in 1839, and that the trumpets blared out bravely, for a very notable step in the realization of many hopes was being taken. Four years after becoming principal, John Bethune had at last succeeded in getting the venture launched. But in 1839 the aftermath of the Lower Canada rebellion was still closely engaging the attention of government and private citizens alike, and the common assumption that the new college was to be English and Protestant marked a considerable departure from the first visions of 'a seminary on unprejudiced principles'

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which might serve the needs of the total population of the province. Nevertheless, a foundation had been laid on which not only a building but also great achievements would be built. FINANCIAL PROBLEMS

The buildings took four years to complete, and it is difficult to account for the slow progress. The work was carried out in the comparatively new style of cut stone;8 there was a change with regard to the site; and there were several changes with regard to the plans themselves, including the addition of a third storey to both buildings, and the erection of the famous cupola. Probably the delay in completion was due to a combination of these factors, but it gave time for an increasingly unhappy relationship to develop between the members of the Royal Institution and Dr. Bethune. The main reason was the financial problems caused by the building program. The Board of the Royal Institution had intended to spend only £5,000, but as delays occurred so the estimate of costs rose. To their dismay, the members found themselves facing a final bill three times as large as they had expected. There is some evidence that the governor general, Sir John Colborne, had vaguely indicated when Ostell's plans had been accepted that some government help would be forthcoming, but in fact it was never given. Despite careful husbanding of resources, the board found itself left with only £8,000 with which to endow a teaching program. It had envisaged engaging a principal and two professors but the capital remaining would not produce half the required amount. When Bethune asked for still further funds for furnishings, the board had grown wary, and it asked for lists and prices. When Bethune indignantly replied that the governors could not calculate beforehand the price of each length of stovepipe, the board responded that if the governors could not do so, they had better hire a tradesman to do it for them. The governors, or at least Bethune, went ahead and ordered goods, and when the college could not pay for them, the creditors forced a sheriff's sale to secure reimbursement. Such proceedings could not embellish the reputation of the college, however much Bethune might lay the blame on the absent members of the Board of the Royal Institution in Quebec City. The situation so exasperated him that he persuaded the governors (Colborne and Vallieres were present) to authorize a petition to the legislature, promoting a bill for the abolition of the Royal Institution and the transfer of all its assets and powers to the Governors of McGill College. Twice he travelled to Kingston to

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promote the bill and twice he was frustrated by the sudden termination of the parliamentary session. During this period the question was first discussed of leasing part of the Burnside estate to bring in additional revenue. The Board of the Royal Institution agreed to do this, and Ostell was instructed to draw up plans for roads and building lots for the whole area below Sherbrooke Street. The lots were to be assigned to tenants who would pay a ground rent on a ninety-nine-year lease. Only one prospective tenant applied, Mr. Joshua Pelton, the very respectable superintendent of the Protestant cemetery, and the whole estate was accordingly assigned to him. Shortly after, he moved into the Burnside house. But then Bethune disclosed that he had engaged Pelton to be his agent to sublet the plots, and to pay the rents not to the Royal Institution but to Bethune as representing the Governors of McGill College. Moreover, the lawyers discovered that the Royal Institution did not have the power to grant leases for more than twenty-one years, and therefore Pelton's lease was null and void. But Pelton had come to see how lucrative his arrangement with Bethune might prove and refused to vacate, and declined to pay any more rent until his lease was confirmed. While this dispute was being settled in the courts, the estate was producing little or no income and the debts of the college were mounting steadily. T H E COLLEGE O P E N E D

However, despite his financial problems and his battles with the Royal Institution, Bethune pressed on doggedly in his determination to make the college an active operation and a notable contribution to the life of Canada East. When the buildings were at last finished—that is to say, all but the portico, for which no funds were available, and for which a temporary wooden structure had had to be substituted—the collegeopening ceremonies provided him with another opportunity to convince the citizens of Montreal that McGill College could offer the benefits of higher education. The day chosen for the opening of the college was 6 September 1843. An academic staff had been assembled during the summer with the appointment of the principal as professor of divinity and the Reverend Francis James Lundy, described as 'S.C.L. of Oxford University and D.C.L. of this University', as professor of classical literature. Lundy had also been named vice-principal. It had been agreed that a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy should be secured, but when the opening took place, those negotiations had not been completed.9 Lecture-

McGill College, 1860

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ships in history and geography and in logic and rhetoric had been offered to the Reverend Edward Black of the St. Gabriel Street Church and to the Reverend J.J. Carruthers, a Congregationalist minister of Montreal, but these gentlemen declined appointment. So there were, apart from the medical professors and lecturers, only two academic persons present. However, Joseph Abbott was there, in his triple role of bursar, registrar, and secretary, and a Beadle had been appointed. Only three students had applied for matriculation, and two of those were nephews of the principal. During the first term, the number of students enrolled climbed to twenty, but on the first day neither the size of the academic staff nor that of the student body could have been thought impressive. Nor was the physical setting all that might have been hoped for, seeing that the preparation had taken so long. The two greystone buildings, executed in a severe neo-classical style, the larger one adorned by its handsome cupola, stood strikingly enough on a pleasant knoll, having the steep slopes of the mountain behind, and the level fields before. But the unkempt state of the grounds, the heaps of construction rubble still lying around the buildings, and the fact that the main building lacked its portico must have conveyed only too strongly an impression of inadequate resources. Nevertheless, the all-important final step had at last been taken, fourteen years after the inauguration of the college in 1829 and thirty years after the death of James McGill: the Arts Faculty of McGill College was at last in being. The ceremonies which attended the commencement were not so grand as had been those of the laying of the cornerstone, but they were still impressive. The Montreal Gazette reported the events the following day: The Senatus Academicus, consisting of the Principal, Professors, and other officers of the College, together with the students and graduates, several Members of the Legislative Council, of the House of Assembly, and of the Bench of Justice, walked in procession to the Hall of the University, where they were received by some four or five hundred ladies and gentlemen. The Principal, Dr. Bethune, having taken the Chair, the proceedings were commenced by the Registrar, the Rev. Mr. Abbott reading the Royal Charter constituting the University, after which the Rev. Principal administered the prescribed oath of office to the Professors and the students present matriculated. Dr. Bethune then read to the audience a very eloquent address, in which he narrated the rise and progress of the institution, and lucidly explained to them the reasons for the course adopted by

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himself and his co-trustees, in carrying out the intentions of the founder, Mr. McGill, in accordance with the requirements of the Charter which had just been read. Dr. Lundy, the Professor of Classical Literature, followed the Rev. Principal. The object of his address was to impress upon the audience, more especially the parents present, the inestimable advantages of a sound, classical education, and most ably did the Rev. Doctor fulfil the task. The Gazette editor added, however, a significant paragraph. He expressed the hope that 'notwithstanding the existing controversies as to the management of our infant University', it might in due time rank with 'the noble Seminaries of learning in our Fatherland'. It was as a consequence of those controversies that there were noticeably few city councillors at the college opening, but they were present and in force at a meeting held that same evening in the Congregational Church 'for the purpose of taking into examination the Will of the late Hon. James McGill', at which a very large company gathered. Speeches were made by, among others, the Reverend Henry Esson and Benjamin Holmes, a leading Unitarian, and a resolution was passed calling for the management of McGill to be conducted upon 'liberal and unsectarian' principles. It is significant that while the Gazette gave a bare half column to the opening, it reported the protest meeting in a full account of three columns. RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

The protest meeting was called to voice opposition to the attempts of Bethune and his supporters to ensure that McGill College remain a definitely Anglican institution. The principal had drawn up statutes for the governance of the college and these were agreed by the governors (the two chief justices and Bethune were present) early in 1843 and submitted to the governor general for the approval of the crown. As soon as the content of these statutes became known, there was considerable dissatisfaction outside the college with the requirements that all members of the university should attend the Montreal Parish Church on Sundays and be present at morning and evening prayers in the college each day and with the provision that the B.D. degree would be reserved for clergymen 'in full orders in the United Church of England and Ireland or the Protestant Episcopal Church of Scotland'. There was also a requirement that 'every Professor, Lecturer and Tutor shall take the oath of allegiance and of office' and the latter phrase was spelled out in the words: 'No Professor, Lecturer or Tutor shall teach in the College

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principles contrary to the doctrines or discipline of the United Church of England and Ireland.' It was probably these provisions which had caused Edward Black and J.J. Carruthers to decline their proposed appointments. The resentment aroused by these and similar features of the new college was widespread and petitions were organized not only in Montreal but also throughout the Eastern Townships, urging the legislature not to grant public funds in support of McGill College until it was determined that the institution was an undenominational venture and administered in accordance with liberal principles. When the prospectus for the proposed High School of Montreal had been issued in 1842, it promised that 'narrow or illiberal views were to be resolutely avoided', and that if McGill did not conform to the liberal principles envisaged for that college, the high school would extend its courses and fulfil the functions of a university. There can be no doubt as to the intensity of the feelings aroused. While these discussions were going forward at the institutional level, there were equally serious debates at the administrative level. Two years after he became principal, Bethune tried to procure a revision of the charter. In his Narrative he records his motive as a desire to ensure that membership of the board of governors would exclude Roman Catholics, but the effect of his proposals would have been to make the college not merely Protestant but also Anglican.10 The Board of the Royal Institution agreed that the membership of the board of governors needed revision, but said that it was desirable that members of Protestant denominations other than the Church of England should be included in the membership. The governor general and the Colonial Office in London, however, were unwilling to introduce any restrictions into the charter which were not in the original and for which, as they pointed out, there were no justifications in James McGilPs will. They declined, therefore, to proceed either with the amendment of the charter or with the approval of the proposed statutes, with the result that a competent board of governors could not be appointed, and the college had to function without the benefit of statutes to order its daily life. Both these circumstances retarded the development of a healthy institution. THE COLLEGE VISITED

Soon afer the opening of the college the disagreements between Bethune and the Royal Institution took on a more serious character. Since Bethune had refused to render an accounting of income received by him on behalf of the governors from Pelton and his Burnside rents, the Royal

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Institution declared that it was not prepared to pay over any further funds to the governors until it had received such an account. In particular, they said that Bethune had no right to retain any portion of the Burnside income as being due to him for salary. So matters stood until 15 January 1844 when a statement of college finances was at last received from the bursar. Joseph Abbott has already been introduced as Bethune's strongest supporter inside the college, and in that allegiance he never wavered. He lived on the premises, so that he was a continual presence, and his influence was pervasive because he touched the life of the college at so many points. He had been appointed bursar, and so kept the financial accounts; but he was also the registrar and secretary to the board of governors as well as to the Caput, when that body was established.11 In his time he was to serve as the chaplain, the vice-principal, and as lecturer in ancient and modern history, in geography, and in logic. For good measure he was also the first person to be named librarian of McGill College. How he performed in his other offices we have little evidence, but there is a great deal to show that as a bursar he left much to be desired. His first statement of monies owed by the college in connection with the opening and with its operation since that time amounted to no less a figure than £1,736.7.2^3. The members of the Royal Institution were profoundly shocked. They had suspected that money had been spent unwisely but this figure exceeded their worst fears. The operating expenses for five months were more than the foreseeable income for the next three years. Had they known how defective the bursar's bookkeeping methods were, the members of the Royal Institution would have had even graver cause for concern. The true extent of the indebtedness of the college had not yet been revealed. All through that miserable year of 1844, the pressure from unsatisfied tradesmen was mounting. A considerable part of the building costs still remained unsettled, and there were now sad rumours of strife and dissension among the professors, and in particular between the principal and the vice-principal. The vice-principal, Professor F.J. Lundy, appealed to the Board of the Royal Institution, and consequently at the end of the year the board decided that the time had come to 'visit' McGill College, not merely physically but also inquisitorially. The meetings took place in the council room of McGill College from 12 to 15 November, the last session being held in Rascoe's Hotel. Present were Bishop George Jehoshaphat Mountain in his capacity as president of the Royal Institution, the Honourable A. W. Cochran, the Honourable George Moffatt, Messrs. Trigge and Stayner, the Reverend Dr. Cook, the minister of the Church of Scotland in Quebec City, and R.R.

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Burrage, the secretary. That so many members of the Board of the Royal Institution made the journey to Montreal, and stayed with the business so long, indicates the seriousness of their intent. They interviewed each member of staff, they talked with Joshua Pelton, describing him rather oddly as the 'Manager of the Burnside Estate', and they spent a very long time with the unhappy Mr. Abbott. He produced among other things some figures of rents received by Bethune from the Burnside estate up to May 1843, but Bethune himself refused all cooperation on the grounds that McGill College was a privately endowed institution and that the Royal Institution had no rights as Visitor to interfere in the daily affairs of the college. Back in Quebec City, the Royal Institution met again in December and agreed to release £ i ,500 to meet the greater part of the outstanding liabilities, noting however that this would decrease future annual income by £90. The members then considered and approved their report to the governor general concerning their visitation of McGill College. It makes for melancholy reading. First, there was an expression of sincere regret that differences of opinion had grown up between the board and the governors, and a reiteration of the board's willingness to have the question of its continued jurisdiction over the finances of the college settled by amicable suit at law or arbitrated by the law officers of the crown. The main hindrances to the well-being of the enterprise was, the report declared, the delay in the approval of the necessary amendments to the 1821 Charter. The revisions the board itself had proposed would have permitted the appointment of other governors resident in Montreal, and so put an end to the 'most injurious' situation whereby Bethune made unilateral decisions. Then there were the problems caused by a lack of authorized statutes. In the board's interviews the teaching staff had expressed themselves as ready to be governed by properly approved regulations, but not by rules which could be arbitrarily changed overnight by the principal. The board went on to record with regret that the college was declining rather than growing, for there were only nine students in attendance. As for the financial situation, it was nothing short of disastrous. The annual income of the college was £500, yet the salary bill alone was £800; there were five members of staff to oversee the nine students! Moreover, the accounts were kept in a most disorderly fashion, and the board was not disposed to accept the excuses of the bursar, that 'he has no knowledge of matters of account'. The members of the Royal Institution had tried very hard to reach a rational account of the financial transactions in which Bethune himself had been involved. One of the major reasons for the lack of public confidence in the college, they

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declared, was the behaviour of the 'acting' principal. The board strongly recommended that his tenure be terminated and that a full-time, qualified, and resident principal be appointed with as little delay as possible. The board also recommended that the bursar be terminated and his duties shared by two of the professors, and that everything reasonable be done to cut the annual rate of expenditure. The board then recorded its knowledge that a Draft Bill had been prepared by the governors, asking the legislature to repeal the 1801 Act, thereby abolishing the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and transferring all its powers relative to McGill College to the college governors. If the legislature should pass such an enactment, said the board, the governor general should pause before according it the royal assent to consider whether, were the Royal Institution to be abolished, some similar body would not have to be created to take its place. A C O M M I T T E E OF I N Q U I R Y

Early in 1845 Bethune went a third time to Kingston, and was at last successful in getting his Draft Bill before the legislature. It proposed not only that the Royal Institution should be abolished and its powers transferred to the governors, but that an additional power should be granted, that of the right to alienate land from the Burnside estate. At its January 1845 meeting, the Royal Institution had found to its further dismay that a more careful inquiry into the bursar's accounts had established that the college debts then totalled £2,596. In this disastrous situation the board reluctantly agreed to promote its own bill in the legislature, seeking the same power to alienate some of the land holdings of the McGill estate. Thus in the early months of 1845, both the governors and the Royal Institution were seeking parliamentary sanction for an extension of powers and one body was seeking the dissolution of the other. The quarrel between the two had become a matter of such public knowledge and concern that the Legislative Assembly decided to appoint its own committee of inquiry. The meetings began in January 1845, w^tn tne Honourable C.C. Sabrevois in the chair, and continued through February. Bishop Mountain and the Honourable A. W. Cochran appeared before the committee in person, and written testimony was given by Chief Justice Vallieres, Principal Bethune, R.R. Burrage, the secretary of the Royal Institution, and Professor F. J. Lundy, the former vice-principal of the college. The inquiry naturally became a matter of debate in the newspaper columns and Bethune received rough treatment; he afterwards reported: 'Governors resident in Montreal, and myself in particular, were assailed in

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the columns of the Montreal Herald in a series of numbers, and vilified in the most scurrilous and libellous language.'12 Bethune also says 'every exertion was made before the Committee of the House to paint me in characters which might be denominated as anything but white', but as far as is revealed by the printed testimony, the witnesses for the Royal Institution were in fact very restrained. The whole minute of the 12 December 1844 meeting of the board containing the visitation report to the governor general was laid before the committee, and this document was left to speak for itself. Important testimony came from the Honourable Andrew William Cochran, who had served on the board for more than twenty years, including a brief period as its president. He had been the governor general's secretary and was a well-known lawyer, active for the crown, and so was listened to with respect. Neither he nor the bishop contended that the Royal Institution should continue unchanged; they concurred in saying that both the institution and the board of governors should be reconstituted, each with more representation from the city of Montreal. But Cochran's special points were that to abolish the Royal Institution would be to open the way to fresh lawsuits from the Desrivieres heirs, since the bequest clearly inhered in the Royal Institution and no other body; that the Burnside estate was intended to provide for a university, not just for McGill College—there might one day be other colleges than McGill, as the founder had hoped. He also argued that while the Royal Institution had husbanded its resources commendably, the governors had been prodigal in their expenditures. In support of this, he produced the college accounts, and testified that since the last accounting of college debts had been made, a more rigorous demand upon the principal had disclosed that together with salaries due upon i January 1845, the college debts amounted to no less than £3,348, of which only £ i ,760 had been known when the inquiry began. The report of the committee as tabled in the House on 14 March contained three clauses:13 that it was not expedient to grant the petition of the Governors of McGill College that the Royal Institution should be abolished; that the Royal Institution should be given authority both to lease land for limited periods and to grant 'unredeemable' perpetual leases;14 and that the governor general should be recommended to revoke the commissions of the present members of the Royal Institution and appoint new members, resident in Montreal, and fix their place of meeting in Montreal. When the members of the Royal Institution received news of the committee's report, their dignified comment on its third clause was not without a touch of pathos: 'The Members of this Board have for many years gratuitously discharged the duties entrusted to them with the

John Cook

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single view to the faithful and efficient execution of the Trust reposed in them, especially in what relates to the establishment of McGill College, but they regret to add, without the satisfaction of finding that cooperation on the part of others and that fair appreciation of their own exertions and motives, which they were entitled to expect. They had therefore personally no desire to continue in the performance of duties at once onerous and irksome; but they rely on your Excellency's justice that any measure to be adopted to discharge them from those duties may not carry with it the appearance, or create a public impression of, a censure on the manner in which the present Members of the Board have exercised their functions.'15 The minutes go on to say that it would be possible to retain the present membership and still have the possibility of a quorum available in Montreal by simply filling the three existing vacancies, but the governor general evidently thought that a fairly clean sweep was desirable and the commissions of all but two members, who were resident in Montreal, were revoked. Obviously, a change had to be made, and the control of the affairs of the college by a group of men based in Quebec City had to be terminated; yet in fairness to the bishop, to Cochran, Trigge, Stayner, and Cook, the most regular participants in the institution's activities, it has to be said that they had watched over the McGill interest with remarkable fidelity. Louis-Philippe Audet has noted that in the years 1837 to 1845 tne number of meetings of the institution at which business was conducted averaged fifteen, and only once was the number of meetings in any year less than ten.16 It was not fair to describe them, as Bethune did, as 'that inert body'. Had it not been for their care, the McGill enterprise would have ended (as many who were in a position to judge gloomily expected) in financial ruin.

B E T H U N E ' S LAST DAYS In May 1845 John Bethune seemed to have a considerable victory. He had not succeeded in getting the Royal Institution abolished, but it had at least been reformed and made a Montreal organization. The interference from Quebec City had finally ended. But it could not have taken him long to realize that from his point of view not all the changes were for the better. The presidency of the new board was offered to George Moffatt, but he declined the position and resigned from the board. At the June meeting, the new president was the Honourable R. A. Tucker, a former chief justice of Newfoundland. Associated with him were T. A. Stayner, Peter McGill, Thomas Brown Anderson, Robert Armour, Frederic-Auguste Quesnel, and James Ferrier. Of these, only Stayner

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remained from the old board, he having removed to Montreal with the government, but he served on the new board only eighteen months. Quesnel was a politician and lawyer, and represents the last attempt by the administration to preserve the joint Protestant-Catholic character of the Royal Institution, but he too soon took the opportunity to resign as did Tucker. The remaining members of the new Board of the Royal Institution were a fresh generation of energetic, successful, and publicminded men of business and the professions, and as such the true heirs of James McGill. At the beginning of the academic year 1845—46, John Bethune was still principal, but the disclosures made to the legislature's committee of inquiry had finally persuaded a great many people, and especially those in high places, that it was more than time for him to go. The bishop had reached the end of his patience and he wrote a confidential letter to the governor general saying that as a consequence of the act attaching to him all the legal prerogatives of the bishop of Quebec, he was now a member of the Board of Governors of McGill College, but he had to inform His Excellency that he did not think it appropriate that he take his seat on that board as long as John Bethune continued as a member.17 He asked outright that the governor general advise the colonial secretary to intimate the royal disapprobation of Bethune both as principal and as professor of divinity, and so clear the way for a new appointment. Having some knowledge of what was going on, or perhaps making a shrewd guess, Bethune made a last attempt to retrieve his situation by calling a meeting of the Corporation late in April 1846. In January of the previous year, the governors (that is, Bethune and Vallieres) had already gone on record as saying that McGill was a private foundation and its statutes therefore did not require the royal assent. Four months later this had been followed by a further resolution, denying the power of the crown to disallow appointments made by the governors. In line with those resolutions of the previous year, Bethune now presented a proposal to the Corporation for the reform of the board of governors itself. Corporation, however, did not have the authority to receive such proposals and the meeting can only be interpreted as a last act of defiance on the part of a man who knew that the forces coalescing against him had become too strong. The governor general agreed to recommend Bethune's disallowance as principal and he sent that recommendation to London. The newly appointed colonial secretary who received the recommendation was none other than William Ewart Gladstone, and he was not one to think lightly of his own duties, or those of others, and particularly not those of the clergy. He did not want, he said, to make a judgement on 'the various

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and somewhat complicated charges which have been brought against Dr. Bethune in his capacity as Principal of the College', but he went on to say that he had to recognize that the demands of Dr. Bethune's parochial duties must be too onerous and urgent to allow him adequately to serve the university as principal while continuing as rector of Christ Church. In signifying the royal disapprobation of Bethune's appointments both as principal and professor of divinity, Gladstone added that he hoped the governors 'will forthwith proceed to replace Dr. Bethune and in so doing they will anxiously endeavour to secure the services of a man in all respects qualified for such important posts'.18 Bethune entered a formal protest with the Colonial Office, and he drew up his long and circumstantial Narrative, but he did not even have the privilege of resigning. He simply ceased to hold office. The bishop was then able to resume his activity on behalf of the college by taking his seat on the board of governors and John Bethune returned to his career as parish priest. He stayed in the one parish for fifty years, and when the parish church became a cathedral, he became its dean. In time the old controversies were forgotten: 'Great was the satisfaction of Dean Bethune, now an elder statesman of the Church, who all delighted to honour, in ministering in Christ Church Cathedral, and preaching solid, dogmatic sermons, unadorned by rhetoric, to the large congregation which thronged it.'19 He died in his home on McGill College Avenue, within sight of the college he had helped to build, on 22 August 1872, when McGill was on a fair way to becoming some, if not all, of what he had dreamed for it. B E T H U N E IN REVIEW

John Bethune always contended that it had been he who prevented the Royal Institution from using the McGill bequest to set up not a college but a school, in direct contravention of the founder's wishes. There was at one time a proposal supported by the then governor general, Sir John Colborne, for using Burnside house for the purposes of an academy, as a preparatory institution for the planned university, but there was never a serious intention on the part of the Royal Institution to substitute a school for the college.20 Inconsistently, Bethune also claimed that had his own plans been adopted, there would never have been a need to establish the Montreal High School, and that the public support given to that institution would instead have been given to McGill. The success of the high school when it was founded in 1843 shows that in fact both institutions were needed, and it is difficult to see how McGill could have flourished if the high school had not been established to undertake the

Burnside Place, 1859

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preparatory responsibilities. Indeed, as we shall see, the two institutions for a while became one, and throughout their coeval histories have always worked closely together. But no controversies can alter the fact that the first college buildings were erected under Bethune's direct supervision on the location he had chosen and that it was he who engaged the first arts teachers and welcomed the first arts students on 6 September 1843. James Reid, one of the bequest trustees, went on record in 1845 ^ saying tnat until Bethune took over nothing had been achieved: but 'after your appointment as Principal, the interests of the College . . . were most closely pursued and attended to, principally by your exertions'.21 It was also Bethune who succeeded in getting the control of McGill affairs out of the hands of the Quebec establishment and into those of men living in Montreal and committed to the development of the city and its institutions. On the other hand, he was responsible for a scale of expenditures which endangered the very survival of the institution, he nearly lost the McGill land to Joshua Pelton, and he certainly alienated the support and interest of a large part of the anglophone community the college was designed to serve. An interesting reference to the Bethune years occurs in a letter written by the then Principal Emeritus, William Dawson. The occasion was a historical review of McGill fifty years earlier which had appeared in the Montreal Gazette to 10 October 1895. It was a reminiscent article, and gave a fair account of what it termed the university's 'struggling infancy' in contrast to its 'present lusty manhood'. But in so doing, it recounted the Bethune years under the subheading A Religious Quarrel, and Dawson felt that the review of Bethune's principalship was less than generous and should not pass without comment, even though the latter by that time had been dead for more than twenty years. He therefore wrote to Bethune's son: I was sorry to see in a newspaper this morning a scrap of old McGill history in which scant justice was done to the memory of your late father in his connection with the University and which may grieve some who regard his memory with affection and respect. For my own part as you know . . . I have carefully abstained from attaching any blame to the actions of the men who were then struggling in the face of almost insuperable difficulties to organise a teaching university in Montreal. I may add in reference to the position taken by Dr. Bethune on the controversies of the time that I am sympathetic with him in many respects as right in principle, though his opponents also had much in the circumstances of that period to justify their

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action; and the differences of opinion were not altogether religious but involved important educational questions which could not be settled until the new Charter was obtained and changes had taken in place in regard to the preparatory Schools. We do not enhance our own achievements by detracting from those of the dead, for we are also mortal men, and when the time comes for writing the history of old McGill under the first Charter I hope it will be done in a fair and considerate spirit and in view of the problems of the actors as stated by themselves in records and publications which still exist.22 Whether this history has succeeded in treating Bethune in a fair and considerate manner must be left for others to judge. What remains incontrovertible is that John Bethune, the second principal of McGill, was a person to be reckoned with, and that he will always retain his place as a notable personality in the history of the university.

NOTES 1. The first John Bethune was a Presbyterian minister who had served as chaplain to the Royal Militia of the Carolinas in the American War of Independence. He organized the original Presbyterian Congregation in Montreal, which became the St. Gabriel Street Church. His sons John and Alexander were educated in John Strachan's school, John becoming the rector of Montreal and Alexander succeeding Strachan as bishop of Toronto. A third brother, Angus, rose to prominence in the Hudson's Bay Company. A great-grandson of his, Dr. Norman Bethune, held fellowship and research appointments in the McGill Faculty of Medicine and later went out to China, where he became a heroic figure in the Chinese Communists' struggle against the Japanese. 2. In 1844 he was vested by Act of the Legislature with all the legal as well as the ecclesiastical powers of the bishop of Quebec, including the right to a seat on the McGill Board. 3. In a single grim summer's day, in the old Papineau Road Cemetery, he had buried fifty-three persons who had been stricken by the disease. 4. In the later disputes, when the Royal Institution was seeking to get him ousted, the president and others represented the terms of his appointment as meaning that Bethune was acting principal only. Bethune contended—and it would appear rightly—that this exchange of correspondence had clearly established that he was indeed appointed principal, but not, to use modern terminology, 'with tenure'; moreover, when his position began to be challenged he took the precaution of having his appointment fully reconfirmed by the board of governors meeting on 13 July 1843. 5. For these earlier activities of Vallieres see pp. 42-43. 6. Joseph Abbott was bursar 1843-52. He has the distinction of being the first McGill author of international reputation for his agricultural tracts, and for his novel Philip Musgrave (London, 1846). His son

THE YEARS OF JOHN BETHUNE

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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John was to become dean of law at McGill and prime minister of Canada (1891-92) ; his great-niece Maude Abbott (1869-1940) was the internationally renowned cardiologist. See S.B. Frost, 'The Abbotts of McGill', McGill Journal of Education 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978) : 253-70. This placed the college inconveniently distant from the city, but gave it its splendid location on the lower slopes of the mountain. The alternative site on the corner of University Street and Dorchester Boulevard, where later Burnside Hall was erected, would have been at that time much more convenient, but far less impressive. An interesting and detailed account of the first McGill buildings (MUA 2273) has been prepared by John King, for Phyllis Lambert's forthcoming book, The Greystone Buildings of Montreal. William Wickes, M.A. of Cambridge University, arrived in October from England and was appointed tutor; in February 1844 he was appointed professor of mathematics, but at the time of the opening the position was still unfilled. After he was 'disapproved' as principal, Bethune wrote a long defence of his activities under the title 'A Narrative of the Connection of the Rev. J. Bethune, D.D., with McGill College, as Principal of that Institution'. It was not published, but circulated privately (MUA 2088/5). Caput was the name given to the academic council set up by Bethune in accordance with the 1843 Statutes. Since, however, those statutes had never been approved, the constitution and the authority of Caput were in question, and this occasioned many of the disputes which arose within the staff. Bethune's 'Narrative', p. 11. LAJ(C), March 1845 and appendices. The condition was attached that the rents were to be subject to a 25 per cent increase every twenty years for the first century. M-Rial 26 April 1845. Audet, 3: 244. It became public property when included in the papers forming appendix GGGG, LAJ(C), 10 April 1849, item 18. Appendix GGGG, as in note 17, item 21. Bethune's protest to the Colonial Office is item 22. T.R. Millman,'The Very Rev. John Bethune, D.D., Acting Principal of McGill College, 1835-1846', McGill News 24, no. 4 (1943) : i6ff. M-Gov. 26 April 1834. But Bethune was not inventing unreal fears. Charles Dewey Day in a memorandum (MUA 2383/431/2) dated 31 March 1842 (ten years before his own connection with the college) advocated such a proposal; the memorandum appears to be prepared as an advice for the governor general. Letter, Reid to Bethune, LAJ(C), 1845, Appendix 10: MUA 2^B2/ 431/216. MUA gogA/3.

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CHAPTER

V

A TIME OF INTERMISSION: 1846-1852 he reorganization of the Board of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and the disapprobation of Bethune were two events which coincided closely enough to mark the end of a period. The time that followed, however, was in the nature of an interim. Until the 1821 Charter could be amended, no great changes could take place, and the college could not determine the lines along which it would develop. Indeed for some years it was a question whether it could survive. THE THIRD PRINCIPAL

The meeting of the board of governors which followed the departure of Bethune could not have been a very happy one. Present were Lord Cathcart, the governor general, John Robinson, the chief justice of Upper Canada, and George Jehoshaphat Mountain, the bishop of Montreal, who though no longer president of the Royal Institution was again active in McGill affairs by right of his seat on the board of governors, and the secretary, Joseph Abbott. Chief Justice Vallieres was 'unavoidably absent on public business'. The meetings began on 6 June 1846 and lasted intermittently through 10 June, but the amount of business accomplished was small. The college debts were again reviewed

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and divided into two lists: list A consisted principally of the debts incurred by the building operations; list B consisted principally of salaries. Those on list A were to be paid immediately and those on list B when the college statutes were confirmed—there was some doubt as to the legal propriety of paying any salaries until the authority of the statutes had been established. What the college professors were to live on until the salaries became payable is not mentioned; they lived rent-free and had some small amounts from student fees, and presumably they had subsidiary sources of income as clergymen or private tutors. But even so they must have found the going very hard. One wonders why they worked for no pay and little prospect of ever receiving any. Bethune addressed to the governors a letter protesting his disallowance, and this gave Chief Justice Robinson the opportunity to comment at length and with considerable asperity on the fact that Bethune had been disapproved by the crown largely on the strength of a private letter from the bishop to the governor general, who had communicated it to the Colonial Office. In the chief justice's view, any charges his bishop saw fit to make against Dr. Bethune should have been made openly to the Governors of McGill College. As for Mr. Gladstone's saying that a benefice and a college leadership were incompatible, both England and the colonies could offer numerous instances which had been approved, and indeed established, by the crown. But Dr. Bethune had appealed to the Colonial Office, protesting the legality of his disapprobation, and there the matter must rest until an answer was received. Although Sir John's comments were submitted in writing and entered in the minutes, there is no record that the bishop saw fit to reply. It had been agreed, however, that the post of principal should not be left vacant and the board moved swiftly to appoint a new incumbent. The choice fell upon Edmund Allen Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and the younger brother of a rising member of the Quebec bar. The elder brother, William Collis Meredith, who was already conducting a good deal of McGill business, became in due time chief justice of Quebec and was later knighted. Edmund was appointed not only principal of McGill but also lecturer in mathematics and natural philosophy. A few months later a motion to name him professor was deferred, and in October 1847, on being named assistant provincial secretary for Upper Canada, he resigned his lectureship while continuing in office as principal. Two years later, on 26 October 1849, he sought to relinquish the position of principal also, but so disorganized were the affairs of the governors at the time (and of the country, it should be added) that there was no one around to accept his resignation. The Rebellion Losses Bill had been

Edmund Allen Meredith, 1863

James Ferrier, 1827

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accepted by the governor general, Lord Elgin, with the result that severe riots had broken out and the Parliament buildings were burned. In response, the government moved to Toronto, and Meredith went with it. For the next four years it was not clear whether McGill had a principal or not. Not until 21 June 1853 did a competent body formally accept his resignation. This muddle created problems which surfaced thirty years later when in 1885 Meredith asked the board of governors for salary for the years 1846-49. The board of that time discovered from the matriculation records that if he had lectured at all, he could never have had classes of more than six students; further they found that his successors both in his lectureship and in his principalship were specifically appointed without salary; and therefore they decided that his appointments had also been without salary and declined to make any payment.1 The decision sounds extremely cavalier but it was in keeping with his services, for Edmund Allen Meredith made in fact a negligible contribution to the progress of McGill College. Even before he removed to Toronto, he does not seem to have been very energetic and for the years after his removal, that is, from 1849 to 1852, the governors' minutes consist solely of the brief record each year that the secretary of the Medical Faculty had written to the principal in Toronto proposing a date for the conferring of medical degrees, and that the principal on behalf of the board of governors had concurred in the date named. T H E N E W M E N O F T H E ROYAL I N S T I T U T I O N

Fortunately there were others who were seriously committed to the struggling institution and very active on its behalf. They were the group of men who had been named to the Board of the Royal Institution in 1845 to replace the Quebec establishment. Montreal business and professional men, they were determined that McGill College should be rescued from its unhappy state and made to flourish. The new president, the Honourable R. A. Tucker, was not typical of the group, and he lasted only eighteen months, but during that time he gave the board both stature and the benefit of shrewd legal leadership. Tucker resigned at the end of 1846 and James Ferrier was appointed president in January 1847. The new president was to play a leading role in McGill affairs for the next forty years, If the restoration of financial stability to the McGill enterprise is to be attributed to one man more than another that man is undoubtedly James Ferrier. He served as president of the Royal Institution from 1847 to 1852, a time of great economic uncertainty and distress, of political disorder in the community, and of intense frustration in the institutional affairs of the

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college. There was effectively no board of governors and Ferrier and his colleagues in seeking to make good the deficiency were forced to play a role for which they had insufficient authority. There was for the greater part of the time no principal active in the college, and the members of the Royal Institution were powerless to appoint one. What Ferrier and those associated with him aimed to do in those years was to hold the enterprise together, to bring order into its financial chaos, and to work steadily for the revision of the charter so that a new start could be made. Ferrier is an interesting character from many points of view. He came to Montreal in 1821, a penniless Scottish clerk with little education; after a year or so he set up in business in the first store on Notre Dame Street, and in 1839 he moved into larger commercial activities and into public office. He became mayor of Montreal in 1845 and was appointed to the Legislative Council; with Confederation he became a senator of Canada. Ferrier was active as a promoter of railways and he played a leading part in founding the Bank of British North America. He was very active in religious matters but he also found time to serve as lieutenant-colonel of the First Battalion of the Montreal Militia, James McGilPs old command. In later years he was a great traveller, and in this connection, he became the founder of the university's collection of Near Eastern antiquities. Those who were associated with him in the affairs of the Royal Institution were men of like character and often of similar, if not identical, interests. Peter McGill had preceded Ferrier as mayor of Montreal, being the first to hold that office after the inception of the new constitution in i84i. 2 He was interested in railways, and had been one of the founders of the Bank of Montreal and was president of that institution for twenty-six years. Robert Armour was in business as a bookseller and stationer and was another of the founders of the Bank of Montreal. Hew Ramsay was Armour's partner. He joined the board in September 1847, and immediately began to exercise leadership in the areas of educational and academic concern. Unfortunately he died in middle age in 1857, and the board deplored his loss 'as one of great magnitude to the University', which indeed it was. David Davidson, who also joined the board in 1847, was a banker who had received his college education in Scotland; Christopher Dunkin, on the other hand, who joined the board rather later, in 1852, was a graduate of the University of London and had held a tutorial position at Harvard before coming to Canada. He had acted as secretary to the committee appointed by Lord Durham to inquire into the state of education in Canada, and so had a share in the preparation of the famous report. He later served as the minister of agriculture in the Dominion Government 1869-71,

Peter McGill

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and finally became a judge of the Superior Court of Quebec. McGill was indeed fortunate in the calibre of the men who came onto the board in 1845, or who joined it in the period before Dawson's arrival, and who were active in the early and still uncertain years of his principalship.3 They were the founders of a tradition which was to make the board of governors one of McGilPs strongest assets. The first task of the new Board of the Royal Institution was to attempt to correct the financial situation. Meeting every one or two weeks, the members sought to ascertain the magnitude of the college debts, and then to propose ways of coping with them, while at the same time exploring the possibility of increasing the college income. Like their predecessors, they discovered that the financial books were in total disorder and after several attempts to determine the situation for themselves, they decided to appoint a professional auditor. The facts uncovered were disastrous, and the minutes reveal how seriously the board viewed the prospects of the college's survival. On 18 September 1845 they spoke of 'the present melancholy condition of the College, tottering as it were on the very brink of ruin'; two months later a committee reported that its members 'have felt that the very existence of McGill College might possibly be involved in the result of their deliberations; and they have consequently experienced in every step of their proceeding an intense anxiety, which has been sensibly aggravated by the difficulty of obtaining a correct knowledge of the exact amount of the existing debts of the Coll: '.4 They then go on record: 'The members would even go to the length of recommending that every farthing that can be made available to the purpose should be applied to the extinction of the existing debt; but since its amt. as stated by the Bursar considerably exceeds the means of discharging it, an unpaid Balance wou'd still remain, sinking the Coll: to the Earth.' The language was flowery, but the facts were grim. The debts that had been incurred amounted to £2,754, and this in addition to £2,555 which had already been paid. These very large sums were exclusive of building costs. The one recourse available to the board was to develop the McGill property. In August 1845 the board had agreed to open University Street, and Lots 1-18 thereon were to be offered on one-hundred-year leases; two months later the land for University Street and Victoria Street was ceded to the City of Montreal, in order to open up the area and facilitate sales. At the same time, it was agreed to open Dorchester and St. Catherine Streets, Union Avenue, and Metcalfe Street. But the number of leases taken up were few and after two years of unsuccessful efforts the Board decided that the sale of further lots must be postponed because of 'the severe Commercial shock which the City in common with others both in the old and new World

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has recently suffered', there having been 'a great depreciation in the value of every description of Real Estate and particularly of Landed Property'.5 Montreal was feeling the effects of the conversion of the British Prime Minister Robert Peel to the idea of free trade. Within two years more than a thousand merchants and politicians in Montreal, despairing of prosperity ever returning to a British North American colony, were to sign the manifesto advocating the annexation of Canada to the United States. But the minutes of the Board of the Royal Institution show that in these difficult times, the members continued to meet almost weekly in their efforts to find a solution to McGilPs financial problems. Ferrier recognized that it was essential to come to an arrangement with the college's creditors, and it was he and David Davidson who 'kindly and promptly undertook the troublesome task imposed upon them' of persuading those to whom money was owing to forgo immediate payment. They managed to secure agreements for a first payment of ten shillings on the pound, with the balance to be paid over five years at 5 per cent interest. At the same time, Pelton was at last forced to vacate Burnside, and that property again became available for leasing. It was discovered that many tenants on McGill properties were not paying their rents, some of them because the city had not undertaken road improvements promised when the land for the thoroughfares had been ceded. Peter McGill undertook to look into the matter, and the secretary was instructed to be more assiduous in the task of rent collecting. These measures brought some relief and a welcome increase in income, but towards the end of 1847 tne board decided that the general situation had become so bad that it must again exercise its visitorial powers, and so there occurred the Royal Institution's second visitation of McGill College. THE S E C O N D VISITATION

The 1847 Visitation Committee was chaired by Hew Ramsay. The report was delivered to the full board in April 1848 and it makes for no more cheerful reading than did the first visitation report. The committee took a very broad view of its responsibilities, and by no means confined its inquiry to financial matters. It proposed to discover, among other things, 'if the Statutes were faithfully acted upon',6 'if the Book of Accounts were kept in orderly and correct manner', 'if the courses of study pursued were susceptible of improvement', 'if any means could be devised of raising that highly important department—the Faculty of Arts—from the state of almost total prostration in which it has so long

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remained'.7 With regard to the grounds and the buildings, the committee reported that the original plan for the buildings far exceeded what was either necessary or, in the circumstances of the trust, what was prudent. The centre of the main Arts Building had been left unfinished 'and if not speedily completed, dilapidation must inevitably ensue'. The grounds 'are almost in a state of nature and are roamed over at pleasure'. The first necessity was a substantial fence and then a small porter's lodge at the principal entrance on Sherbrooke Street. With regard to finances, Mr. Abbott was judged unfit to act as bursar and registrar, and the report recommended that these offices be abolished and the duties assigned to the vice-principal, but without any increase in his salary. It found that revenue was scarcely sufficient to meet operating costs, and that every effort had to be made to reduce regular expenditures, especially since much of the revenue had perforce been used to settle old debts. The committee also considered and made recommendations as to the remuneration of professors: they proposed to allow the staff a meagre allotment of back pay, but for the rest the professors should be told that they must wait until more funds were available. The Board of the Royal Institution adopted the report unanimously but returned to the same inevitable conclusion, that no real progress could be made until a new board of governors had been appointed. They agreed that the present governors were incapable of fulfilling their duties; the number of governors should be increased from five to nine or eleven; they should be men residing in Montreal and they should be chosen from different denominations of Protestants. They further said that the governors should be expressly empowered to make statutes for the regulation of the life of the college, with the right reserved to the governor general of approving or disapproving them. Some members of the board, it was remarked, dissented from all that had been done to make McGill College an exclusively Anglican institution, but all were agreed that the professor of divinity should be a clergyman of the Church of England. The new Board of the Royal Institution was in fact performing all the functions of a board of governors, apart from the appointment of a principal and of professors. These were powers they did not possess. Nor could they implement their major recommendations. They could only make their report and wait for others to act. C O L L E G E LIFE IN THE FIRST D E C A D E

Up to this point the history of McGill University has necessarily been concerned with official bodies such as the Boards of the Royal Institution and of the Governors of McGill College. But the Visitation Report of

John OstelPs plan of the McGill estate

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1848 enables us to begin considering the deeper concerns of a university, that is to say, the curriculum, the experience of being a student in the institution, and the quality of the teaching staff. Materials are not plentiful, but they are not wholly lacking. There are the two visitation reports and there are the 1843 Statutes. There are also the minutes of Caput, the first academic council instituted in the college, a body to which the early statutes gave such a wide range of responsibilities that the record of its proceedings has a rich variety of interests. There are items to be gleaned from newspapers of the day, and very rarely there are the letters and recollections of early students. Life in McGill College in its earliest days must have entailed some very curious experiences. Bethune, as he was never allowed to forget, had not attended a university, and this may have made him all the more punctilious in trying to recreate in Canada the medieval legacy of college life in Oxford and Cambridge. The situation was, however, hardly favourable to the intention. Physically, McGill College must have presented a very unkempt image. The grounds were without a fence or any clear delimitation and while there was a central track, possibly a legacy of OstelPs planning, leading up to the Arts Building from Sherbrooke Street, it was in very bad condition, muddy in fall and spring, dusty and rutted in summer, and often snowbound in winter. Those who had business with the college generally preferred to approach it from an entrance on University Street, presumably near where the Milton Gate is now located. To reach the two college buildings, however, the visitor who had come by conveyance had to descend at this point, and cross a little bridge over the brook which gave Burnside its name. The bridge was in need of repair for we read of expenditures to patch it up and provide a handrail. The buildings themselves consisted of 'the Wing', as it was called, which was what is now named Dawson Hall, and the Arts Faculty building. Between the two buildings, mounds of contractor's rubbish still lay plainly visible, and no attempt seems to have been made to tidy up the area around the college. Two members of the staff had gardens at the rear, but these were utilitarian vegetable plots, not flower beds, and a third staff member was specifically accorded the right not only to keep a garden but also to pasture a cow. At least two academic families lived in the Wing, those of the bursar and the vice-principal, and in addition two single members of staff had rooms. One of these kept a female servant in his rooms, a situation which although permitted by the college authorities, caused considerable concern to the members of the Royal Institution when they discovered it. Each of the two families had at least one servant; there was also a

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bailiff and a steward, with their families, and they too had servants, for we read of their quarrelling. In addition, the Wing housed an undetermined number of students, and later they overflowed into rooms at the top of the Arts Building. The Wing had been built with a multiplicity of small rooms, and finding one's way about must have been a matter of considerable difficulty. Though the two buildings still stand, the interior of each has been gutted and reconstructed at various times, and only the facades can claim to be original. The Arts Building was provided with only a temporary doorway and this became so unsatisfactory that even in a time of great financial stringency it had to be repaired at a cost of £75. In the 18405 the college with its uncared-for grounds and mean entrance must have appeared very different from Bethune's Oxbridge ideal. Nevertheless, he tried hard to create the proper collegial ambiance. In the early years there was a refectory with a high table for the staff, at which 'gentlemen commoners' over the age of eighteen were also invited to sit (they had, needless to say, to pay higher boarding fees), and there was also a separate table for bachelors of arts and law students who had an arts equivalent. There was a third table or tables for ordinary students. All members of the college were required to wear 'academical dress' in Hall. When the medical students (who did not wear gowns) were permitted to reside in college, they were required to sit at yet another table. But the problems involved in the running of a college dining hall emerged early. Considerable amounts of money were lost in the catering operation and, after a year or two, the provision of 'commons' by the steward had to be given up; such students as still stayed in residence were boarded by the staff in their private rooms. One applicant for a lectureship was told that willingness to do this was a condition of employment, and Vice-Principal W. T. Leach was similarly told that if law students were to live in college, as he proposed, he must be responsible for their board in his own quarters. The religious aspects of college life were in the early days strongly emphasized. In 1846 the bailiff, in testifying to the nature of his duties, included among other things his responsibility for ringing the college bell for five minutes before divinity lectures and for fifteen minutes before morning and evening chapel. He also had to act as clerk and make the liturgical responses in the daily services, at which again academic dress had to be worn. Students were further encouraged to equip themselves with a white surplice to be worn in chapel on Sundays and holy-days and their eves. Every student was expected to attend morning worship on Sundays at the parish church, unless he had written

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permission to attend at his own denomination, and again academic dress was required. It was, indeed, enjoined that all members of the university should wear cap and gown when going beyond the precincts of the college, but no doubt the exigencies of the Canadian climate speedily effected practical modifications of such collegial injunctions. CAPUT AND STUDENT DISCIPLINE

Discipline and the regulation of college life were the responsibility of the Caput. This predecessor of today's Senate was instituted by Bethune in 1843 and consisted of the professorial staff and certain other academics. But the attempt to define in the absence of authorized statutes who those other members of the Caput should be gave rise to disputes among the staff, and these resulted in the dismissal of the first viceprincipal, the Reverend Dr. F.J. Lundy. The Caput lasted until 1850 and while it was in operation it took pretty well everything into its purview. The vice-principal was charged in the absence of the principal with the general supervision of the college community, and he brought to the attention of the Caput many matters of a purely housekeeping nature— for example, who was to occupy which rooms, the unsatisfactory nature of the students' meals, the amount of fuel to be provided to particular members of staff, and even the quarrels which broke out between the bailiff and the steward. Misdemeanours of students naturally gave rise early to the exercise of discipline. The first cases reported were of mild insubordination and merited nothing more than reprimands, but after a month or two (and especially after the medical students were allowed to reside in the college) the offences became more serious. Nine medical students were fined one dollar each for 'riotous behaviour'. We hear of two arts students, Messrs. Bethune and Holmes, who were charged with misbehaving while drunk, and Holmes was further charged with having struck a female servant. The grievousness of the charges was not lessened by John George Bethune's being the principal's nephew. He and his companion were sentenced to be excluded from residence for a month; but at the next meeting the sentence on Holmes was rescinded because he alleged that he was not in college on the evening in question. But only a month later, Holmes and another student had to be reprimanded for 'shouting out of the College windows in a violent and disorderly manner at people walking quietly past the College buildings'. It seems to have been a result of these incidents that the steward was told to discontinue the provision of beer and cigars to undergraduates and that all spirituous liquors were forbidden at meals.

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MATRICULATION AND C U R R I C U L U M

Of the three students who matriculated in arts on the opening day, two were nephews of the principal and the third was a young Jewish boy, Myer Valentine Hayes.8 It was to be thirteen years before the next Jewish matriculant in arts was recorded, but thereafter the numbers though small show this contribution to the student body to be an original and continuing part of the McGill tradition. Other students joined the first three in the ensuing weeks, and the numbers crept slowly up towards twenty.9 In June 1844, at the end of the first year, Caput decreed that to matriculate the candidate must have completed his fourteenth year, but the usual age of the matriculants was around seventeen, though one was as old as twenty-four. The candidate had to be able to pass examinations in Latin and Greek grammar and in the first book of Caesar's Commentaries. But there were prematriculation students who were probably younger and less qualified, and it may have been these who occasioned the remark in the first visitation report that many of the students were 'mere boys'. They paid tuition fees of £2 per term while the matriculated students paid £3. The curriculum was very heavily weighted with classical studies: the typical day consisted of two and a half hours of classical literature in the morning, followed after a lunch break by one hour of mathematics and a further half hour of classics; and on two days of the week there was an additional hour of divinity. The ability of the students varied so much that even though the second year was divided into senior and junior classes, the professors said they could not cope with them all in one class, and they asked for and were accorded teaching assistants who were given the title of tutors.10 Brown Ghamberlin registered as a student in the Faculty of Arts, 6 October 1848. He was at that time aged twenty-one and came from Frelighsburg, Quebec, though he is described as resident in Montreal and the correspondence shows that he had been living in the city for some time. Some of his letters to his sisters have survived and three of them dated from October 1848 through October 1849 give us a few glimpses of a student's view of the college at that time. He describes himself as a law student, but his name does not appear in the McGill law lists, so presumably he was articled to a lawyer in the city while taking arts courses at the college. He received the B.C.L. degree in 1850. Some of the relevant passages from his letters are as follows: 20 October 1848, 'I am studying Virgil's Georgics, the Greek reader, and Euclid, besides we have Greek and Latin Exercises on alternate days i.e. the translating English into Latin and Greek. . . . We have fifteen

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students now.' In April 1849 he wrote: 'We read and construe 50 lines of the Georgics and from 20 to 25 of the Reader and take four propositions in Euclid at a time. The Lent Term finished on Saturday. I won the second prize in Mathematics, none of the others have been decided yet. I believe I told you before, we have been reading Homer, Livy, Euclid, and Whateley's Logic. . . . For the Greek Examination we were kept writing from nine in the morning till 6 P.M., with the exception of a few minutes devoted to some bread and cheese and beer which one of the students smuggled in to us. ... Logic is in itself mighty dry and uninteresting and with Mr. Abbott for Lecturer it is doubly so.' These comments show that some at least of the students took their work seriously and that within the confines of a narrow curriculum, the students were being offered a fairly rigorous training. Joseph Abbott was at one point also designated as lecturer in history and geography but what the content of these lectures was is not clear; the history was probably ancient (that is, Greek and Roman) and modern (that is, British with some Canadian content). French was available, at least as an optional subject, from September 1844. When in 1849 it was proposed as an economy measure that the lecturer in French should be terminated, Principal E.A. Meredith dissented, declaring that 'it was desirable that students of McGill College should be enabled while there to perfect themselves in the French language, a thorough knowledge of which is peculiarly necessary in a country like Lower Canada where so large a portion of the population speak no other language'. French lectures were still available in the spring term curriculum of 1850, and the matter was not cleared up when the Caput ceased to operate a few months later. THE ACADEMIC STAFF

Any account of the academic staff of those early days necessarily begins with Bethune, who apparently did give some lectures in divinity in 1843. But he early found the task too demanding upon his time, and he asked for and obtained (by recommendation of the Caput over which he presided and by agreement of the board of governors which he and Vallieres constituted) the help of a lecturer, the Reverend D. Falloon, who the next year was given an honorary D.D. and so became Dr. Falloon. The vice-principal was at first the Reverend F.J. Lundy, who had been given a D.C.L. on his appointment. He had left what he said was a flourishing private academy in Quebec to take on the post of professor of classical literature. He quickly fell out with Bethune, and went off to become the rector of Grimsby in Upper Canada, but the

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incident reveals that, from the beginning, relationships within the college were by no means harmonious. The members of the Board of the Royal Institution often referred to this matter of staff relationships with great concern, and it had been Lundy's appeal against his peremptory dismissal by Bethune which caused the board to decide upon their first visitation of the college in 1844. Among the other early appointees to the McGill staff were Messrs. William Wickes and E. Chapman, who were both appointed tutors in 1843. The latter never seems to have received any salary, and he did not survive very long; but William Wickes was promoted to professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in February of 1844, and he carried much of the working load of the college for some time. He seems to have supported Lundy in some of his disagreements with the principal, and when Bethune was 'disapproved', Wickes did not associate himself with the testimonial to Bethune's efforts on behalf of the college, which was signed by Abbott and Chapman. He became vice-principal for a while in succession to Joseph Abbott (who had succeeded Lundy), but after two years he also departed. In 1853 he was still trying to get paid what was owing to him.11 It has to be remembered that while Bethune visited the college fairly regularly, the constant presence was that of Joseph Abbott, the bursar and most things else. He was not only a veritable Pooh-Bah in the multiplicity of his offices, but he introduced his son, J.J.C. Abbott, at that time a student in the college, as the acting secretary of Caput and of the board of governors, and he also employed him as his deputy in his office of bursar. Joseph Abbott was a strong-minded person and probably a difficult colleague to live with. He fell out with Lundy's successor, W. T. Leach, and at one period the two men were not talking to each other; and indeed with so many persons crammed into the rabbitwarren of the Wing, it is not surprising that such problems developed. McGill College must have constituted a classic instance of an isolated community living together in close quarters amid constant friction. One of the remarkable features of the history of the college during this depressing period is that there was always a considerable number of persons seeking to be associated with its teaching staff. In April 1844 a Dr. Picault and a M. Cadillac both 'prayed' to be appointed 'Teacher of French'. M. Cadillac was appointed to the position in the following September, but he was succeeded two years later by M. Montier. Montier was at first awarded no salary, but he was permitted to live in college, and it was he who had the right to a garden and to graze a cow on the college grounds. When he was dismissed in 1849, ne refused to leave and a year later issued an advertisement saying he was willing to

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board students in his apartments in the college. For this he had received no permission and Caput viewed the possibility with great alarm. 'The attention of Caput was called by Professors Holmes and Andrew to an advertisement by Mr. Montier proposing to receive boarders whereupon it was resolved that the Reverend the Vice-Principal of the College be authorized to take steps to restrain Mr. Montier within the rooms assigned to him, to prevent him from receiving boarders, and if he should be advised of his power to do so, to exclude him altogether from the College buildings, and that he be authorized to take legal advice respecting his authority, and the best means to be taken by him to enforce that authority as far as he may deem meet for the benefit of the institution.'12 Montier was finally got out of the building in 1852; a year later he applied to be reinstated. But the college had had enough of him, and Charles Markgraf, who was to become a notable member of the McGill staff, was appointed in his place. Another of the early appointments was that in April 1844 of Mr. Justice William Badgley to teach law. Later, however, he had to be called to task by Caput for not applying himself to his duties. He was told that if he persisted in not lecturing, his appointment would have to be cancelled; but he evidently changed his ways, for in March 1847 ^e was confirmed in his appointment. It appears that he gave instruction to students in his office in the city. As for mathematics, after Principal Meredith had said in 1847 that ne could not continue lecturing, the Reverend George Simpson, the rector of the high school, took his place, and a few months later Dr. Thomas Guerin was appointed lecturer in that subject.13 But when in October 1849 William Andrew was appointed professor of mathematics and there was no longer need of the lecturer's services, Guerin would not accept termination and like Montier insisted on continuing to lecture. Another extremely interesting figure was Dr. de Sola, an outstanding personality in Montreal where he was rabbi of the prestigious Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation. He was first appointed lecturer in Hebrew and Oriental languages in 1848 and was confirmed as professor in 1853. He had an international reputation as an historian of the Jewish people and as a Talmudic scholar.14 The other member of staff who emerges from this period as a man of stature is William Turnbull Leach. He was appointed professor of classical literature in April 1846, just three weeks prior to the departure of Dr. Bethune. Born in Scotland in 1805, he received his arts degree from Edinburgh in 1827, and was ordained a minister of the Church of Scotland in 1831. The following year he became the minister of St. Andrew's Church at York in Upper Canada and was associated with

William Turnbull Leach, 1864

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the group of Presbyterian ministers who founded Queen's University at Kingston. But he then experienced doctrinal difficulties with the Presbyterian authorities and transferred his ministry to the Church of England. In 1841 he came to Montreal to become first rector of St. George's Church, which then stood on St. Joseph's Street, now Notre Dame West. This position he held with considerable success for twenty years, and in 1865 he became archdeacon of Montreal. But concurrent with these ecclesiastical appointments he maintained his McGill position, having, it is said, been 'advised and requested' to accept the appointment by Bishop Mountain. He was named vice-principal in 1846 and continued to hold that office until his retirement in 1881, thirty-five years later. Dawson once said of him that had the governors not firmly resolved not to appoint another clergyman, he would undoubtedly have been made principal in succession to Meredith, for it was he who held the college together academically during the interregnum years. Things were at their worst in the years 1850-52. There were pitifully few students. The principal had gone to Toronto, and only Leach and Andrew were left as professors, so Caput could only meet when A.F. Holmes, the professor of medicine, could be prevailed upon to be present. But Andrew was about to resign, so further meetings of Caput could not establish a quorum. That body therefore resolved that all its powers should be vested in the person of the vice-principal.15 Two years later the city of Montreal began blasting out the reservoir at the rear of the college, and windows were shattered and heavy stones raining down on the McGill roofs caused them to leak badly, so that the greater part of the buildings became uninhabitable. It was decided to remove all occupants from the buildings except the vice-principal and his family, and it was he who remained in charge of the property. Academic activities were continued as far as possible in part of the high school buildings downtown. The Medical Faculty had already removed to Cote Street. During this critical period Leach carried on as professor of classical literature, vice-principal of McGill College, and custodian of the college property. Twenty years after his death in 1886, he was still remembered with esteem, and the McGill University Magazine of 1905 having paid tribute to his learning in both the classical and English literatures continued: 'Dr. Leach was a most industrious, and for a long period unrequited labourer in the cause of education, literature and science, and in the earliest and most gloomy days of McGill University worked with a zealous devotion in its behalf above all praise.'16 The university undoubtedly owes him a profound debt for his staunchness at this time, as well as for his long subsequent years as Dawson's lieutenant.

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STANDARDS

During the first decade of the college's operation we have two reports on the academic achievements of the college, the first by the original Board of the Royal Institution in 1844, and the second in 1848 by the same institution after its reform, for in addition to its concern with financial problems, the board took an interest in the scholastic affairs of the college. It is no surprise that the board's opinion of the academic life of the college was far from favourable. In the first report, that of 1844, when the college was only in its second year of operation, the Board of the Royal Institution noted that over half the students enrolled in the first year had by the time of the visitation withdrawn from the college and that even with new matriculants there were only nine students in attendance. The board unhappily described the academical attainment of the institution as 'not better than that of a third-rate grammar school'. Three years later their successors conducted their own visitation of the college, and their estimate of the scholarly attainments of the institution differed little from that of the previous judgement. The expectations aroused by the appointment of Meredith as principal had not met with fulfilment. At the time of the second visit, there were only six students, and at one point there had been only three. The members of the board deplored a lack of standards for entry into the college, including in this judgement both Medical and Law faculties, and particularly pointed in the arts curriculum to a lack of instruction in moral philosophy. They also regretted there were no courses in political economy, in civil engineering, and in agricultural chemistry. The subjects which were being taught were listed as classics, mathematics, history and geography, logic, and French. They drew attention to the fact that little or no law was being taught and recommended that two professorships in law should be established forthwith. These professors would, they believed, attract students both to law and to arts. Medical students, the board observed, could not receive their degree without evidence of attendance at classes, and they believed the same should be true of students in law. Joseph Abbott in a private letter to Chief Justice Robinson dismissed the members of the board as men of little education.17 In this he was less than just, for the men in question were already showing their awareness of the new ideas beginning to circulate with regard to the desirable content of a college curriculum. The old ideal of a classical education, which Lundy had praised so eloquently at the opening of the college only five years earlier, was already being found inadequate.

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The 1848 Visitation Report goes on, however, to another subject in a markedly different tone. 'It is agreeable to the Committee', it says, 'to turn to consideration of the state of the Medical Faculty, for many evidences were presented to them of the vitality and energy that characterize its management and of the benefits accruing from it to the community.' It will be convenient, therefore, at this point to turn our attention to the early years of the Faculty of Medicine, even though in doing so we shall have to retrace our steps and go back to the days when that faculty constituted the whole of the university.

NOTES 1. Not everyone agreed with the 1885 decision. When Thomas Workman left the money for the new building for the Faculty of Applied Science, he also directed that $3,000 should be given to Meredith for his services to McGill 'during a very critical period of its history'. 2. He had begun life as Peter McCutcheon but changed his name to McGill, as heir to his uncle John McGill of Toronto. There was no relationship with James McGill. 3. Dawson commented on the members of the board whom he found at McGill when he arrived, in the annual university lecture, 1893-94, pp. 6-7; Addresses, item 19. 4. M-RIAL 15 November 1845. 5. M-RIAL 28 January 1848. 6. The 1843 Statutes had finally been approved by the Colonial Office in 1846 but with the offending religious clauses stricken. 7. M-RIAL 4 April 1848. 8. The first Jewish graduate of McGill was Frederick Hart, M.D., 1835. Matriculation Book No. i (MUA 639/3) shows that by the end of the first year, the student body in the Faculty of Arts included one Roman Catholic and one Presbyterian. The rest were classified as 'Church of England'. 9. The numbers of matriculations in arts recorded for the years 1843-44 to 1854-55 are X9> nil> 2, 5, 2, 10, 7, 5, 2, 4, 7, 5. In law, in 1852-53 there were 3 matriculants; 1853-54, 6; 1854-55, 9. No record was made of students withdrawing, but obviously the numbers of students in the college at any one time (other than medical students) must have been quite small. 10. The provision of these tutors, each at a cost of £100 a year, was one of the extravagances which early brought the college into financial difficulties, n. M-RIAL 2 March 1853. Wickes claimed £20.10 as unpaid salary, and £100 as 'indemnity'. He received the unpaid salary in 1854, but the other claim was disallowed. 12. M-Caput 30 March 1850. 13. Guerin was an Irish Catholic, despite his name, and the father of James John Edmund Guerin, McGill M.D., 1878, who became the first professor of clinical medicine at Universite Laval a Montreal and

A TIME OF I N T E R M I S S I O N

14.

15. 16.

17.

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the last of the 'Irish Mayors' of Montreal in 1910. See Concordia University Magazine 2, no. 2 (October 1978) : 13-16. De Sola collaborated closely with Logan and Dawson in the work of the Montreal Natural History Society; in later years he lectured on Spanish literature in the university and on Hebrew in Montreal Presbyterian College. M-Caput 30 March 1850. McGill University Magazine 4, no. i (1905): 14-15. Leach also served in the hospital sheds on the Montreal waterfront during the typhus plague of 1847, with such notable devotion that it was he who was invited to consecrate the monument to the victims of that fearful epidemic. MUA 1766/20/18. The letter purports to express Bishop Mountain's views of the reconstruction of the board of governors.

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CHAPTER

VI

THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE

n describing the events of the year 1829, we noted the great readiness of the McGill governors to 'engraft' the Montreal Medical Institution onto the stock of McGill College. The reasons for this readiness were not far to seek. The Medical Institution, in becoming the McGill Medical School, gave substance to the college's claim to be actively engaged in the teaching function. In return, the diploma of the Medical Institution could be given degree status and carry with it the legal right to practise medicine within the Province of Lower Canada and in any other jurisdiction which recognized the McGill degree. The origins of the Faculty of Medicine are therefore very closely tied to the beginnings of the Montreal General Hospital and of the Montreal Medical Institution. THE FOUNDING FATHERS

The four men who conceived the Montreal Medical Institution as the teaching arm of the Montreal General Hospital were Drs. Stephenson, Holmes, Robertson, and Caldwell. As we have seen, because of the inflexibility of the 1821 Charter, only one of these four could be named professor and the honour naturally went to the eldest and most prestigious of the group, William Robertson. The other three had to be

William Robertson

William Caldwell

John Stephenson

Andrew Fernando Holmes

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content with the university title of lecturer. But in February 1832 the board of governors at last got round to submitting to the governor general 'The Statutes, Rules and Ordinances of the Medical Faculty of McGill College'.1 Only three months later, His Excellency signified the royal approbation of these statutes on 2 May 1832. A footnote to the printed version published in that year specifically confirms that Robertson, Caldwell, Holmes, and Stephenson were all given royal commissions as 'medical professors'.2 They were thus the first persons to bear the title and perform the function of professors of McGill University. Instruction had been given regularly since 1823 ^rst at tne hospital and later at 20 St. James Street, near the Place d'Armes.3 After June 1829, while the rest of McGill College lapsed into inactivity, the new faculty continued pertinaciously at its self-appointed task. It is probable that their change of status from teachers in the Montreal Medical Institution to professors in the McGill Faculty of Medicine made little difference to the character of their teaching. Although seniority gave Robertson pride of place in the eyes of his contemporaries, the first initiatives in teaching were undoubtedly taken by John Stephenson. He was a singularly attractive personality. He was born in Montreal in 1797 and educated at the College de Montreal, although by reason of his family's Scottish background he was a staunch Presbyterian. He chose medicine as his profession and was apprenticed at the age of eighteen to Dr. William Robertson. In 1817 he entered the Edinburgh Medical School and while there he passed the examinations of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and then went on to Paris where he had an interview with Professor Philibert Roux, who suggested that a surgical operation might remedy his serious speech defect, which was due to a congenital condition of cleft palate. Although the closing of the palate by surgery had not been previously attempted, Stephenson submitted to the ordeal. The operation (which in those days was of course without anaesthetic) lasted an hour, but it was definitely a success, and in 1820 he returned to Edinburgh to give a paper on the subject, under the title 'De Velosynthesis', as his graduating thesis. In later life he was described as 'an able and eloquent lecturer'. His tenacity in overcoming his disability appears to have been characteristic of his whole personality. He began the Montreal medical lectures in 1822, and the following year he drew up with Holmes the memorandum from which the Montreal Medical Institution took form and substance. In the later developments, he was named secretary to the faculty and registrar of the university, and in the period 1829 to 1835 he had personal supervision of the Burnside estate. He died in 1842 at the comparatively early age of forty-five, but in those years he had achieved more than most men achieve in a long lifetime.

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Andrew Fernando Holmes was born in Cadiz in 1797, the same year as Stephenson, his parents having been on their way to Canada when they were forced to land in Spain after capture by a French frigate. When he was four years old the voyage was completed and the family arrived in Montreal. Andrew Holmes was sent to Dr. Skakel's school and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Dr. Daniel Arnoldi; in 1816 at the age of nineteen he received from the Montreal Board of Examiners his licence to practise medicine in Lower Canada. He must have known Stephenson well at this early period and like him he decided to continue his studies in Edinburgh. Holmes received his M.D. from Edinburgh University the following year, one year ahead of his fellow Montrealer. While in Edinburgh Holmes pursued the scientific interests he had developed as a young man and which were to characterize his later career. He returned to Montreal in 1821 to become a partner with his former master Dr. Arnoldi, and to begin his long association with the Montreal Medical Institution and in due course with the McGill Faculty of Medicine. At first he lectured in chemistry, pharmacy, and botany, and later in materia medica, but all through his life he continued his interest in botany and geology. His plant collection formed the basis of the herbarium which is maintained at Macdonald College, and his mineral collection still makes its contribution to the geological holdings of the Redpath Museum. He wrote a number of highly regarded scientific medical papers and found time to take a great interest in the Montreal Natural History Society, of which he was one of the founders. He was slight in build and had a rather weak voice, but according to a former student he adopted a simple and lucid style of lecturing, his material being delivered 'in classical English'. In 1843 Holmes succeeded Dr. Robertson as (at that time the only) professor of medicine and was thus the head of the Faculty of Medicine, a position which was recognized in 1854 by the formal title of dean. He died suddenly in 1860, and the Holmes Medal, still given to the outstanding medical graduate of the year, was awarded for the first time in 1865. These two younger men seem to have been the initiators of the teaching proposal, but the two older men gave it their full support and each made a full and worthy contribution. Both were Scotsmen, both trained at Edinburgh, and both came to Montreal after a career in the British army. William Robertson was born in Perthshire in 1784 and became an ensign in a Highland regiment of the British army at the early age of thirteen; but he later entered the Medical School at Edinburgh and qualified as a physician before he was twenty-one, although he did not stay to obtain the M.D. degree. Instead, he returned to the army and served in Canada through the 1812 War. He settled in Montreal in

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I2Q

1815 and quickly became a recognized leader of his profession, being a member of the Montreal Board of Medical Examiners from 1817. He received an honorary M.D. from the University of Vermont in 1832. Robertson was associated with the Montreal General Hospital from its inception, and in 1829 when the Montreal Medical Institution became the McGill Faculty of Medicine, he became the professor of medicine. He also became a city magistrate and it was his magistracy which involved him in the political unrest of the 18305. On one occasion a mob, disapproving, so it is said, of his actions as magistrate, demonstrated its displeasure by breaking windows in the McGill medical building on St. James Street. At this period, it was still the magistrates who were responsible for the government of the city, and in particular for keeping the peace at election time. In 1832 feelings ran particularly high and the tension between the parti patriote and the British party was very great. A riot began and it was afterwards alleged that when the mob would not disperse, it was Robertson who, as one of the two magistrates present, ordered the troops who had been brought in as a precautionary measure to fire upon the crowd. Three of the rioters were killed and the two magistrates and two army officers were indicted by the coroner on a charge of murder. The case against them was dismissed because of conflicting evidence, but popular resentments persisted and the accusation against Robertson was repeated publicly by Louis-Joseph Papineau. Robertson, who throughout denied having given the order to fire, challenged Papineau to a duel, but the French-Canadian leader refused the challenge, saying that he was condemning Robertson for public not private acts, and that this was not proper grounds for fighting a duel.4 It is clear from these incidents that Robertson was a prominent figure in civic as well as in professional affairs and that he was a determined and resolute person. His public eminence explains why it was Robertson who was chosen to be the first head of the Medical Department and thereby became the forerunner of the distinguished line of medical leaders who would bear the title dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He retired in 1842 and died in 1844 after having served the Montreal General Hospital and the Medical School and Faculty for more than twenty years. William Caldwell was an equally colourful figure. His career closely parallels that of Robertson, even in the matter of challenges and duels. Born in Scotland, he also entered the British army and served in the Peninsular War and again in the War of 1812. In the intervals of army service he studied medicine at Edinburgh, but for some reason unknown he took his M.D. by attestation from Marischal College, Aberdeen. He settled in Montreal after the 1812 War, taking out his licence to practise

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in 1817. Two years later, John Molson presented a petition to the Legislative Assembly for public funds to support a general hospital in Montreal. Mr. Michael O'Sullivan, the member for Huntingdon, opposed the proposal for the new hospital on the grounds that it would be better to expand the Hotel-Dieu. He particularly attacked the idea of a teaching function for the proposed new hospital, and perhaps by way of misplaced humour he implied that an increase in the number of physicians in Montreal could only increase the danger to the health of the population—'he trembled for the fate of his fellow citizens'. Dr. Caldwell wrote a letter to the Canadien Courant implying that Mr. O'Sullivan knew he was safe in making such remarks because if challenged he had not the courage to respond; inevitably, O'Sullivan issued the challenge and the duel was fought with unusual determination, no less than five shots being exchanged. O'Sullivan was hit in the chest and Caldwell's arm was shattered—the pistols were loaded with one-ounce bullets. Astonishingly, both survived. Caldwell went on to serve in the hospital and in the school, where he lectured on the principles of medicine. He died in 1833, having contracted typhus fever in the wards of the Montreal General Hospital which he had advocated with such extreme tenacity. As for Michael O'Sullivan, he became in 1839 chief justice of Montreal and thus ex officio one of the governors of McGill. Had he lived to be Dr. Bethune's chief collaborator instead of Mr. Justice Vallieres, the relationships of the McGill Governors with the Faculty of Medicine might not have been so amicable as they were. But Chief Justice O'Sullivan died shortly after his appointment and McGill College was at least spared that further complication in its affairs. Caldwell's death in 1833 constituted the first break in the team of four founding fathers. The first replacement was Dr. John Racey, but after two years he removed to Quebec City. The next appointments were those of George W. Campbell and Archibald Hall. Although not strictly among the founders, they played roles of such importance in the early years that they deserve particular mention. Campbell graduated M.D. from Glasgow University and came forthwith to Canada. In 1835 at the age of twenty-five he was appointed professor of surgery and midwifery. He relinquished the teaching of midwifery in 1842 but he continued teaching the principles and practice of surgery until 1875, a period of forty years from the time of his first appointment. Moreover, it is said that to the end he kept abreast of new developments in his discipline. It is doubtful that such a record could ever be equalled. He became dean of the faculty in 1860 in succession to Holmes, and both as professor and dean left an indelible ma~k upon the character of the faculty. 'Devoid of mannerism, he tersely and in well-chosen Saxon

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13!

words dealt with the essential and more important features of the subject he had in mind.' So said Robert Palmer Howard of him when he gave the address introducing the faculty's fiftieth session. Archibald Hall, on the other hand, made his greatest contribution to the faculty in his extramural activities. He fought the battles of his profession with his pen and was the intrepid defender of its rights and responsibilities; one of his former students, D.C. MacCallum, called him 'a very Rupert of controversy'. He was a pioneer in medical journalism and as editor of the British American Journal of Medical and Physical Science wielded considerable influence. STUDENTS AND COURSES

There is some paucity of early administrative records of the faculty, probably due to the disastrous fire which destroyed the Medical Building in 1907, but the names of those who attended lectures in the Montreal Medical Institution from 1824 through 1828 are on record in the faculty student register, in some years with their hometown, as are also the names of those who attended the Medical Faculty of the University of McGill College, 1829 through 1842, with the exception of the years 1830, 1831, 1834, and i836~39.5 The earlier omissions are probably due to slack record-keeping, but the later hiatus, that of 1836—39, was caused by the Lower Canada Rebellion disturbances, when a great many of the normal patterns of life were disrupted. Teaching lapsed for two years but was resumed at the direct urging of the governor general, Sir John Colborne. He was genuinely interested in education and was concerned that an institution as valuable as the teaching arm of the Montreal General Hospital should not be lost to Lower Canada, The schedule of medical studies set out in the 1832 Statutes required two six-month courses in anatomy and physiology, chemistry and pharmacy, the theory and practice of medicine, midwifery and the diseases of women and children, surgery, materia medica and therapeutics, and clinical medicine and clinical surgery. One six-month course was required in the institutes of medicine and another in practical anatomy. Further, 'attendance on the Medical and Surgical Practice of the Montreal General Hospital, or some other respectable Hospital' was required 'for at least two years'. Lastly, the applicant for the degree must present an affidavit declaring himself to be over twenty-one years of age, and 'not bound Apprentice to any Physician, Surgeon or Apothecary'. The reason for this last requirement may have been a desire to protect the rights of older members of the profession by refraining from giving junior members any excuse for breaking engage-

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ments into which they may have entered. The statutes spelt out very carefully how students might obtain tickets to attend lectures, and under what conditions these were to be signed by the instructor at the end of each course. It was ordered that the winter courses were to be of six months' duration, as were also all clinical courses, but summer courses were to run for three months. Each lecture was to last one hour, and in each course (other than the clinical courses) there were to be five lectures weekly, one of which should take the form of an examination. At these examinations a roll call was to be made and those absent without sufficient excuse would forfeit their certificate of attendance. Discipline was strict. 'All students are liable to be reprimanded, or to be expelled from the University, upon being convicted of improper behaviour.' These punishments were, however, to be exercised only by the governors of the university, and the student had to be given a hearing at which he might offer a defence or explanation of his conduct; less formal reprimands could be given by the assembled professors of the Medical Department. From the beginning, the standards set with regard to general education were impressively high. The candidate for the M.D. degree 'must be able to render any Latin author at sight and to translate English or French grammatically in Latin'. It is with some sympathy for the candidate that we note the addendum, 'it being understood in the latter case, elegance will not be insisted upon'. As for his medical proficiency the candidate must face a 'General Public Examination on all the branches of Medical and Surgical Science, which examination shall not be less than one hour, unless it be previously found that the candidate is quite unprepared, when the examination can be closed'. If he survived this test, the candidate had still to 'publicly defend his inaugural dissertation before the Medical Faculty, within seven days before the graduation'. The Medical Library possesses the dissertation on 'Tic Doloureux' defended by Frederick W. Hart in 1835 'in the presence of Principal G. J. Mountain and the Medical Faculty of the said University'. While competent medical authorities have judged that it and most of the theses which followed it in those early years were little more than final-year essays, they nevertheless testify that encouragement of independent study was an early feature of the curriculum. An interesting matter is raised in the 1848 Visitation Report by the board's remark that the number of students had varied from a high of 56 to a low of 30, and that at the time of the visit there were 36 students: 'The falling off of the number of the pupils is not however in any degree attributable to neglect or incapacity on the part of the College authorities, but solely to the recent establishment of a New School of Medicine,

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which appears to have absorbed all the French Canadian Youths studying the profession.' The visitation report goes on to refer approvingly to an amicable arrangement reached by the two schools, whereby 'the Fees exacted in each are declared to be similar in amount, while the Lecturers in the College have agreed to conduct their prelections entirely in the English language, and those in the New School in the French'. However, while the members of the board approved of this amicable arrangement, it was not beyond them to suggest something even better: 'It has appeared to the Committee to be a subject well worthy of the consideration of the Governors whether a Union of the Two Schools might not be advantageously effected and both embraced within the College. Thus instead of appearing in opposition to each other, they would present a combination of Scientific Ability and Intelligence not to be surpassed in any medical school on this Continent. The effect, both directly and indirectly, on the welfare of the College could not fail to be highly beneficial.' This was to give a new currency to an old theme: a single educational institution serving all the inhabitants of Lower Canada. As we shall see shortly, nothing came of the proposal in 1848, any more than it had in earlier times. The Matriculation Book No. i, as we have observed, lists the names and ecclesiastical allegiance of medical students from 1843, and while the majority bear Anglo-Saxon names, and the religion is generally given as various forms of Protestant, there is a good sprinkling of French names with the designation of religion as Roman Catholic. The student body in the Medical Faculty was, until the advent of the rival, francophone institution, rather more mixed ethnically and certainly more mixed religiously than the student body in arts. French names do not wholly disappear after 1845, tne date at which the new institution received its charter, but they are decidedly fewer. Of course, even at this time, names were an uncertain guide to linguistic adherence. But the general impression remains that from 1823 to J^43 tne Medical Institution, and its successor the Medical Department of McGill College, served a wider community than the purely anglophone, and that after 1845 it tended to be more closely attached, though by no means exclusively, to the English-speaking population of Montreal and the province. STUDENTS ON CAMPUS

In October 1845, for reasons which will be discussed later, the Medical Faculty moved into the Arts Building and stayed there until 1851. The inconveniences of the arrangement, particularly from the students' point

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of view, made themselves felt right from the beginning. In good weather the distance between the Montreal General Hospital on Dorchester Street and the college in the northwestern corner of the Burnside estate was sufficiently far to be very time-consuming, especially since the students had to get down speedily from the college after lectures ending at twelve in order to visit the hospital wards and get back again to the college for more lectures beginning at two—and, if possible, find time to eat. In bad weather and in winter, the problems were intensified. We are particularly fortunate in having an account of a medical student's experiences in these years. Duncan C. MacCallum was born in lie aux Noix, P.Q., in 1824 and registered in the faculty in November 1847. In r 9°3> fifty-six years later, Dr. MacCallum looked back to those early days and with a remarkably keen memory recalled some of his experiences: All the lectures, with the exception of the clinical lectures and those on chemistry, were delivered in the central Arts' building. The clinical lectures were delivered in the operating theatre of the Montreal General Hospital and the chemical in a building in Fortification Lane, about two or three hundred feet east of Place d'Armes Hill. . . . As the first lecture of the day, that of Dr. MacCulloch on Midwifery, was delivered from eight to nine o'clock a.m., the student had to rise early on the cold winter mornings, often before daylight, in order to dress himself and breakfast to enable him to reach the college in time for the commencement of the lecture. At all times the roads were heavy and not favourable to rapid walking, and not unfrequently heavy snow-storms rendered them almost impassable for many days. This was especially the case with the road leading from Sherbrooke Street to the college. This locality was much exposed to any prevailing wind, which piled the snow in drifts, and made it impossible to reach the college until they had been partially removed by a shovel brigade. On such occasions our kind-hearted Professor, Dr. MacCulloch, who drove to the college in one of those winter sleighs known as a berline or cariole . . . would pick up as many struggling students as he could possibly accommodate, and drive them to the lecture. I have seen as many as half-a-dozen students at one time occupying and clinging to his sleigh. Another great inconvenience resulting from the distant and isolated position of the college building, was the difficulty the student laboured under of prosecuting his studies in Practical Anatomy during the early part of the night. Dissections and demonstrations were made only at stated times during the morning and afternoon of the day. There evidently existed a marked disinclination on the part

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of both demonstrator and student to work at night in the highest story of a lonely building, far removed from other dwellings, imperfectly heated, and lighted by candles—the light being barely sufficient to render the surrounding darkness visible. Having occupied for two seasons the position of Prosector to the Professor of Anatomy, I had to prepare, during the greater part of the session, the dissections of the parts which were to be the subject of the Professor's lecture on the following day. This necessitated my passing several hours, usually from nine to twelve o'clock at night, in the dismal, foul-smelling dissecting room, my only company being several partially dissected subjects, and numerous rats which kept up a lively racket, coursing over and below the floor and within the walls of the room. . . . I must acknowledge that the eeriness of my surroundings was such that I sometimes contemplated a retreat, and was prevented from carrying it into effect only by a sense of duty and a keen dislike to being chaffed by my fellow-students for having cowardly deserted my work.6 FACULTY AND CAPUT

From reading Duncan MacCallum's memories of his student days, one can understand why the Caput minutes give evidence of a noticeable decline in discipline when the boisterous medical students moved in on the quiet academic calm of McGill College. On one occasion, the minutes record the theft of 'portions of a subject', and it was resolved that 'immediate steps be taken to find out the perpetrators of this horrible and disgusting crime'. But alas, no practicable steps presented themselves. True, the beadle and the porter were questioned, and it was established that they had indeed heard noises in the night, and they were very properly adjudged negligent in 'not exerting themselves when they heard the noise in the night to ascertain the cause'. But it appeared that they preferred to be solemnly censured by Caput in the daytime rather than enter the lonely dissecting rooms by night. To students who, as MacCallum says, 'were always ready to organise and lead an excursion' to obtain bodies from graveyards in the dead of night, a mere breaking and entering and making off with a few portions of subjects already obtained was not so heinous a crime as it might appear to the more sensitive members of the Caput. We have reason to think that the members of the Faculty of Arts were never too happy about their new neighbours. A night porter had to be engaged, with strict instruction to be on watch from 10 P.M. ; and Caput had to insist that no subject be brought into the college before midnight, except in coffins or cases. When Caput was established by the 1843 Statutes, it was specifically

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provided that its authority did not extend to the Medical Faculty. But when the faculty moved in to share the Arts Building, the resident medical students came under the disciplinary control of Caput, and even before the move took place that body was beginning to take an interest in medical staff appointments. On 19 June 1845 the Medical Faculty recommended to Caput that Robert MacDonnell be appointed lecturer in the institutes of medicine and that William Fraser be appointed lecturer in medical jurisprudence. These recommendations were agreed, but decision on a third proposal, that Dr. Lactance Papineau be appointed to the chair in botany, was deferred, because at a previous meeting Caput had declared that the testimonials for the candidates for this particular post 'do not appear sufficiently satisfactory'.7 Professor Holmes of medicine dissented from the proposal to defer, and said that the Medical Faculty would appeal to the board of governors. The recommendation went from the Medical Faculty to the governors in July, who said they would agree to the appointment when the faculty could testify to Dr. Papineau's competence in botany. In September he was duly appointed by the governors, so that in a trial of strength the Medical Faculty had successfully defended its independence from Caput. Thereafter, recommendations for medical appointments seem to have gone to the board rather than to Caput, but in June 1849 a further rearrangement of teaching responsibilities in the Faculty of Medicine was proposed by the faculty to Caput, which agreed to pass the recommendations on to the governors. The governors had met only rarely, but when the principal removed to Toronto further meetings became even more unpredictable. As a result, the Medical Faculty had recourse to Caput in order to give their new appointments some form of university recognition. This became evident when in October of that same year, the colleague whose appointment four years earlier had brought the two bodies into conflict was reported by the faculty to Caput as unable to lecture; and.thereupon Caput recommended that, because of 'the incompetency of Dr. Papineau, owing to his disordered state of mind under which he labours', he be removed from office. Thus Caput's right to pronounce on medical appointments seemed to have been reestablished. That was 2 October, but on 4 October a further very interesting discussion of medical appointments took place. Professor Holmes proposed on behalf of the Medical Faculty that Robert MacDonnell be appointed to give the lectures in clinical medicine and that James Crawford should continue to lecture in clinical surgery—previously he had been responsible for both subjects. This left MacDonnelFs former lectureship on the institutes of medicine vacant and the vice-principal,

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W.T. Leach, proposed that in accordance with a resolution of the Medical Faculty William Fraser, the lecturer in forensic medicine, be appointed to the position. But the bursar, Joseph Abbott, moved an amendment that Francis Badgley be appointed; a vote was taken and the professor of mathematics voted with the bursar-secretary in favour of the amendment but the vice-principal and the professor of medicine voted against; the vice-principal then as chairman exercised his casting vote and the amendment was defeated and Fraser was appointed. But Caput went on to add a rider that the members 'do not consider themselves in any way bound to act upon the recommendation of the Medical Faculty as to the mode of filling up the Lectureships of that Faculty in the College'. Professor Holmes naturally voted against the rider and required his dissent to be recorded. Caput then voted that Badgley be appointed to the lectureship in forensic medicine which Fraser had vacated. Again Holmes dissented and required to have his negative vote recorded 'because the usual course has not been followed, inasmuch as no recommendation has been received from the Medical Faculty who, as the best of the judges of what is necessary for the situation of Lecturer in that body, should under their peculiar relation to the University, be entitled to fill up vacancies in their own body'. Thus was raised overtly for the first time a question which was to become a matter of debate many times in the history of the university. The Medical Faculty is an obvious instance of the problem, especially where the appointments in question entail both university and hospital responsibilities. An amicable arrangement has been worked out through the years in relation to that faculty, whereby joint university and hospital committees, with both medical and lay members incorporated in the university component, consider the recommendations of the Medical Faculty; but in other disciplines it has not been so clearly established that a recommended appointment to a position within a department is not binding on the university administration. The board of governors has consistently given evidence of its determination not to abdicate its responsibility to control the direction of the university, and has done this specifically by retaining control over all appointments. When the new men of the Royal Institution were confirmed as the Governors of McGill College by the Amended Charter of 1852, one of their first actions was to rescind 'the 2nd Statute of the yth Chapter of the Statutes of McGill College'. This was the section which gave Caput and the principal the power to make certain appointments on their own authority, and the board went on to enact 'that the Lecturers and Tutors and Officers and Servants of the College shall be appointed by the Governors, to continue during their pleasure'. Since the charter already provided

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that the principal and professors were to be appointed by the governors, this regulation put all appointments within their control and this has continued to be the legal position into the present time, though inevitably in day-to-day practice there has been a considerable devolution of powers. FACULTY AND THE BOARDS

The minutes of the board of governors and those of the Board of the Royal Institution often have references to the Faculty of Medicine which shed further light on the early history of the discipline at McGill. Many of the references relate to the removal of the teaching operation from St. James Street to the McGill campus. The physicians who were responsible for the school's operation early recognized that some of its heavy expenses could be alleviated by a closer association with the college. It had been intended from the beginning that the Medical Department be housed in McGill College, and one of the reasons adduced by the architect for the increase in the costs incurred when the college was erected was that the Medical Department wanted more room than had been at first planned for it. The architects also alleged that the medical men had made several alterations in their requirements while the building was proceeding, a comment which has a very modern ring. The teachers in the Medical Department were, however, told in 1840 that they must content themselves with two lecture rooms and their 'appurtenances', so when the college opened in 1843 the Medical Department preferred at first to remain as a separate operation downtown. However, mounting costs made the idea of moving into the college more attractive. In 1839 the Medical Faculty had appealed to the McGill College Governors for a grant of £500 towards the expenses of their operation, and this request had been agreed by the governors, but had been refused by the Board of the Royal Institution on the grounds that all their resources had to be conserved for the Faculty of Arts. They did, however, prepare a joint appeal by the two boards to the government for aid for the Medical School. This appeal was successful, and from 1841 the faculty began to receive annual grants varying from £250 to £500. Even so, in 1845 tne Medical Faculty again asked to be placed on McGill funds, but while the Board of the Royal Institution expressed great sympathy with the work of the department, it had to repeat that it had no funds available for its support. Similarly, a request by the faculty at that time for rent-free land on Dorchester Street had to be declined because it was alleged the presence of a medical school and its

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dissecting room would depreciate all the other properties being offered for sale.8 Thus there can be little doubt that the decision to transfer the medical operation to the McGill campus later that year, despite all the inconveniences which the move involved for both the staff and students, was closely connected with these attempts to reduce the costs of operation. The Medical Department's requirements had been provided for, to some degree at least, in the original specifications for the Arts Building so that it should have been simply a matter of making the rooms available. But in the event a number of alterations were felt to be necessary, since those who lived in the Arts Building were no more pleased with the proximity of the dissecting room than anyone else. The relevant minute concludes: 'The Medical Faculty are hereby authorised to make such alterations in the rooms appropriated to their use as may be necessary for their convenience, provided that all communication between the rooms appropriated to the anatomical lectures and dissections be so effectually cut off from the rest of the building and so ventilated as to prevent any effluvia from those rooms being perceived in any other part of the building, which the Governors conceive can only be done effectively by lath and plaster partitions.'9 It has to be said that while the attitude of the two boards towards the faculty was always appreciative of the good work the school was doing, this benevolence did not result in many tangible advantages for the medical operation, and it remained for many years a very independent and largely self-sufficient enterprise. Given the history of the association, that was perhaps inevitable. FACULTY AND PROVINCE

Another issue of major importance which arose in these early years of the Medical Faculty related to the validity of the McGill medical degree to confer a licence to practise medicine in the Province of Lower Canada. On 24 May 1833 the degree of Doctor in Medicine and Surgery was awarded to William Leslie Logic.10 He has the distinction of being the first person to hold a McGill degree, and the first person to hold a Canadian medical degree.11 His inaugural dissertation was on 'Cynanche Trachealis' (more commonly known as croup), and while no copy survived at McGill, one has been located at Edinburgh University. Armed with his degree Logic applied to the Montreal Board of Medical Examiners for a licence to practise, but he was told that he must undergo a further examination by the board. There were, however, more than

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professional qualifications at stake.12 In 1822 the active members of the Montreal Board of Examiners had dwindled to three—William Robertson, Daniel Arnoldi, and Henry Loedel, the father of H. P. Loedel, one of the early Montreal General Hospital physicians. A year later Robertson persuaded the governor general to abolish the old board and to appoint the medical officers of the hospital staff to be the new one. This, coupled with their teaching function in the Montreal Medical Institution, put the control of the medical profession of Montreal in the hands of a small, wholly anglophone group. Representations were made to the legislature and in 1831 a new act changed the character of the board, making its membership not appointive by the governor general but elective by the members of the profession. As a result none of the Montreal General Hospital staff was elected, so that when Logic appeared before the board in 1833, ^ was a largely francophone body and one dominated by sympathizers with the Reform party. Daniel Arnoldi and the three Nelson brothers, Wolfred, Robert, and John, were prominent members; Wolfred and Robert were to take leading parts in the Lower Canada Rebellion. The board showed its resentment of the earlier developments by refusing to recognize the McGill degree without further examination, citing ambiguities in the act and in the statutes of the Medical Faculty. Logic refused to submit to further examination, and with the encouragement and support of the Medical Faculty he took the matter to court. The legal proceedings moved slowly from their beginning in July 1833 to judgement in May 1835. The decision was in favour of Logic and the McGill Medical Faculty, but by this time Logic had left for Louisiana and he never practised medicine in his native province.13 The Logic case was crucial for McGill, and its victorious conclusion was a major step forward in the history of the faculty and the university,14 but the political and professional resentments engendered persisted into the next decade when the medical profession sought incorporation and other medical schools sought to establish themselves in the city. A RIVAL FACULTY

Thus the position of the McGill Medical Faculty as the one Montreal medical school offering high quality teaching and professional accreditation was not to go unchallenged. While in its first two decades the faculty had catered to both anglophone and francophone students and had repeated some lectures in French, its program was of service only to those francophones who were able and willing to take most of their medical education in English. A rival establishment appeared on the

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scene which was prepared to meet francophone needs more generously, and it was to this school that the Board of the Royal Institution had referred in its report of 1848. The name of the new institution was advertised as The Montreal School of Medicine and Surgery—1'Ecole de Medecine et de Chirurgie de Montreal, but the French version quickly predominated. The school was founded in 1843 by Drs. Francis Thomas Arnoldi (the son of Daniel Arnoldi), Francis Badgley, Peter (later Pierre) Munro, and William Sutherland. They were soon joined by Horace Nelson, the son of Wolfred Nelson, and in 1845 the school received a provincial charter which enabled the holders of its diploma to practise medicine in Lower Canada. The founding physicians were rather ironically almost all anglophones (Arnoldi was actually of German-Italian extraction), but all could lecture in French and at first the school operated bilingually, each lecture being given in English in the morning and in French in the afternoon. The school received visiting rights at the Hotel-Dieu, even though Badgley and Sutherland were Protestants, as was probably Arnoldi. In 1847 the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Lower Canada was formed and this body enacted that only those who possessed a university degree in medicine could henceforth receive a licence to practise. This posed a major problem for the Ecole; it had to obtain university affiliation somewhere, and it was in view of this situation that the Royal Institution had proposed that the Ecole should become formally a department of McGill College, which would thus have two schools of medicine, one English and one French. An affiliation is said to have taken place in 1847, and was reported in the newspaper La Minerve on 17 May that year, but no mention of an event of this nature appears in the minutes of Caput, or of the board of governors, or of the Royal Institution. On the McGill side the arrangement was probably regarded as a practical working agreement at the faculty level, rather than as a formal affiliation, since the Royal Institution recommended such a relationship in 1848. In 1847 the Ecole had announced that in future lectures would be given only in French and it was this which made the Royal Institution proposal seem reasonable. The Minerve announcement had also said that Ecole graduates would hold their degrees from McGill University, after having taken one 'annus medicus' at that institution. However, relations between the two groups were not easy, and no doubt the Ecole felt itself to be in a junior and indeed humiliating position. It decided therefore to petition the legislature for the power to give in its own name either a university degree or at least a licence to practise. At this juncture Arnoldi, Badgley, and Sutherland left the Ecole and the two events can hardly have been unconnected.15 All three

The Faculty of Medicine, Cote Street

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eventually joined the McGill staff in various capacities, Sutherland becoming the first professor of chemistry in the university. The three anglophones were replaced at the Ecole by French Canadians, and the Catholic and French influence rapidly came to preponderate. Thus after 1849 the staff became wholly francophone. When the petition to the legislature proved unsuccessful, McGill was asked by the Ecole if the arrangement with them still held; but the petition had strained the relationship between the two schools still further, and the reply the Ecole received was so unsatisfactory that the school council resolved that the response was in violation of the agreement, and that the Ecole must hold McGill solely responsible for the possible consequences.16 The first step was to renew the application for licensing authority, and a bill which would have conferred this power was promoted in the legislature by friends of the Ecole; but A. F. Holmes, who had succeeded Robertson as the professor of the McGill Medical Faculty, presented a counter-petition signed by twenty-six Montreal physicians claiming that there was no need for a second school in Montreal, and that the proposed Universite Laval in Quebec City would be able to accommodate all the medical aspirations of the French-Canadian population.17 This view, supported it is said by the adherents of Laval, prevailed in the legislature and the bill was defeated. Nevertheless, the Ecole valiantly refused to be put out of business and continued its teaching and its service of the wards of the Hotel-Dieu, having in the meantime removed its headquarters to Lagauchetiere Street. This was a location so much more convenient for access to either the Hotel-Dieu or the Montreal General Hospital than the Medical Faculty's lecture rooms away in McGill College that despite the problems involved in obtaining a licence to practise, students who had enough French preferred to take at least their early years at the Ecole. They then probably took their 'annus medicus' at McGill and so received the McGill degree, or finished their studies at some other university in Canada or the United States. This arrangement obviously deprived the McGill faculty of students in the earlier years of medicine, whom it would have liked to enrol. To increase the effectiveness of its competition, the McGill faculty decided to remove again to town, and at the beginning of the school year in 1851 it established itself very handily to the hospitals in a new building on Cote Street. This put increased pressure on the Ecole. Seeing that any arrangement with McGill which would have preserved the autonomy of the Ecole had been ruled out, it made overtures for affiliation to the Universite Laval, the University of Toronto, and the Universite d'Ottawa, but the replies from all three proved equally unhelpful. The problem with

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Laval was that the Ecole insisted on preserving its corporate existence, which the university was not prepared to have continue. An arrangement was worked out, however, with the University of Victoria College at Coburg in Ontario. It provided for the autonomy of the Ecole and its right to present candidates for the Victoria degree. In this way the Ecole became officially the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Victoria College. This unlikely marriage of French-Canadian Catholics and Protestant evangelicals lasted until 1890, when the Coburg institution removed to Toronto to become one of the constituents of the Federated University of Toronto. At that time, the Ecole became part of the Faculty of Medicine of the Universite Laval a Montreal, and so is one of the earliest ancestors of the Universite de Montreal, and one of which that university has every reason to be very proud. For the history of McGill, the significance of these events is that they exhibit the tendency of the anglophone and francophone communities in nineteenth-century Montreal to develop their own institutions. The success story of the Ecole de Medecine in its efforts to survive is at the same time the failure story of the McGill faculty to develop as a bilingual institution serving the whole city and the western areas of Lower Canada generally. Like its parent institution, McGill College, the faculty was to develop along essentially anglophone lines.18 EARLY A L U M N I

There is a pendant to the matters described in this and the preceding chapter which, although it concerns events in later years, and transcends the immediate concerns of the Medical Faculty, nevertheless falls conveniently into place at this point. Corporation, it will be recalled, had been derived by Bethune from the charter of the university as a council designed to bring together in one body the governors, the senior teachers, and the representatives of the general public. Until 1854 Corporation had met only twice, but in this year the governors revised the role of Corporation giving it much more academic responsibility and also providing for it to meet at least every three months. At the same time they appointed three men to represent the three faculties as fellows of the university,19 and for the Medical Faculty they chose Wolfred Nelson, one of the leaders of the Lower Canada Rebellion. He had been among the eight who had been exiled to Bermuda, but he took advantage of the amnesty of 1843 to return to Montreal. He reestablished himself in the life of the city to such good purpose that when in 1848 Daniel Arnoldi and he were elected president and vice-president respectively of the newly created College of Physicians and Surgeons of Lower

Alexander Morris

Wolfred Nelson

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Canada, McGill recognized their professional standing by conferring upon them both an honorary M.D. To name Nelson a fellow of the university was a truly eirenic gesture, indicative surely of a reconciliation of old dissensions. The same year this remarkable man was elected to the first of his two terms as mayor of Montreal. The second fellow was Alexander Morris. He had taken arts courses in Glasgow, but had not graduated from that university. He came to McGill in 1848 and was granted recognition of his earlier studies, so that although he only matriculated in January, in May he applied for and was granted his bachelor's degree and later the same year his master's degree. He was the first person to receive the McGill arts degree.20 He graduated B.C.L. in 1850 and was granted the D.C.L. in 1862, so that in all he held four McGill degrees.21 Further, he was the first McGill graduate to become a member of the board of governors to which position he was elected in April 1857. In later life he became an influential political figure. He played a considerable role in the preConfederation negotiations, and he also had much to do with the founding of the Province of Manitoba, of which he became the first lieutenant governor. The third fellow appointed in 1854 was Brown Chamberlin, whose student letters to his sisters we have already noted. He graduated B.C.L. in 1850, and after a short period as a practising lawyer, he turned to journalism and as editor of the Montreal Gazette exercised considerable influence. He was accorded the degree of D.C.L. in 1867, the year in which he entered politics and was returned to the House of Commons as the member for Missisquoi. He rounded out his career by becoming in 1870 the Queen's Printer, an office he retained for the next twenty years. Thus the fellows appointed in 1854 as representatives of the three Faculties of Medicine, Arts, and Law exemplified the way in which McGill alumni and associates were beginning to play their part in the life of the emergent nation. It is worthy of note that all three fellows were sufficiently sensible of their university responsibilities to be signatories of the notice calling McGill alumni to the founding meeting of the Graduates' Society.

NOTES 1. The 1832 Statutes also refer to 'the Medical Department of McGill College'. The terms 'department', 'school', and 'faculty' were used from 1829 indiscriminately. The first dean was named in 1854. 2. The letter conveying the royal approval of these appointments is to be found MUA 1766/20/7. Whether 'medical professor' was meant to imply something other than 'university professor' is a matter of some

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confusion, for in 1834 the board of governors reported all four university chairs as filled by medical men (M-Gov. 14 November 1834) but in 1843 there is again only one professor of medicine, and yet there is no record of any demotions. It seems that sometimes it was convenient to identify the two kinds of professors, and at other times to distinguish between them. 3. Stephenson began lecturing in 1822; the institution was fully operative in 1823. 4. E.H. Bensley, 'William Robertson, M.D.', The Montreal General Hospital News, Winter, 1978, pp. 9-10. See also Elinor Senior, 'Imperial Garrison, British Regulars in Montreal, 1832-54' (Ph.D. thesis, McGill, 1976) ; pp. 2off. give the military's views of the 1832 riot. 5. Faculty of Medicine, Student Register, 1824-76, MUA 38/37/75. The faculty had resumed teaching by the fall of 1838; see the reference to the meeting of Corporation, 27 November 1838, p. 79. 6. D.C. MacCallum, 'Reminiscences of the Medical School of McGill University', McGill University Magazine 2, no. 2 (April 1903) : 12435. Also, 'Sketches of McGill Medical Faculty', ibid. 3, no. 2 (April 1904) : 160-73. 7. For the sad story of this second son of Louis-Joseph Papineau see Lionel Groulx, Mes Memoires, vol. 2 (Montreal, 1971). 8. M-RIAL 7 August 1845. 9. M-Gov. 16 September 1845. i o. The degree given by McGill was first 'Doctor in Medicine and Surgery', for which the abbreviation was M.D. In 1862 the designation was changed to 'Doctor in Medicine and Master of Surgery', because surgery had become a separate discipline and it was thought the degree-title should reflect the recipient's training in both medicine and surgery. The abbreviation was M.D., C.M. In Canada most schools have reverted to the simple M.D., since the surgical specialty like any other has become a matter of postgraduate training and diploma. But McGill has stayed conservatively with its traditional designation. 11. Dr. E. H. Bensley of the McGill Department of the History of Medicine was able with the assistance of Mrs. Barbara Tunis to bring Logie back from complete disappearance to a full-length biographical sketch. See 'William Leslie Logie: McGill University's First Graduate and Canada's First Medical Graduate', Canadian Medical Association Journal 5 (December 1971) : 1259-63. 12. Barbara Tunis has made a study of the clash between the McGill faculty and the Montreal Board of Medical Examiners; see 'Medical Licensing in Lower Canada: The Dispute over Canada's First Medical Degree', Canadian Historical Review 55, no. 4 (December 1974) : 489-504. 13. Louisiana had particular attractions for medical men who had a knowledge of both French and English. Frederick W. Hart and Pierre Dansereau who graduated in 1835 both followed Logie to the same state. 14. The issue was contested afresh in 1877, and this time the university did not maintain its privileges. See p. 281.

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15. This provides the background to Abbott's proposing Badgley's name for appointment in the McGill faculty at the Caput meeting of 4 October 1849, as related earlier. Arnoldi's appointment followed soon after. Sutherland was appointed lecturer in chemistry in 1849 and professor of chemistry in 1853. He held the chair until 1867. 16. L.-D. Mignault, 'Histoire de 1'Ecole de Medecine et de Chirurgie de Montreal', L'Union Medicate du Canada 55 (October 1926) : 597674. Cf. p. 618 with M-Med. Fac. 26 January 1850, which shows that the McGill faculty saw the matter quite differently. 17. This apparently churlish attitude is explained in part by the fact that the annual grant to the faculty of £500 was cut in 1849 to £250, and a like amount given to the Ecole. 18. There also existed for a short while the St. Lawrence School of Medicine, which was associated with St. Patrick's Hospital, founded in 1851 to take care of the Irish Catholic population. Dean Craik in 1895 attributed the move to Cote Street as actuated by the prospect of this school; it may well have aggravated the situation. 19. M-Gov. 4 May 1854. Provision for the election of these fellows by the members of convocation only came with the revision of the statutes in September of this year. 20. The first men to earn arts degrees by studies at McGill were Peter Aylen and Charles Petit, who both graduated B.A. in 1850. In the same year the first law degrees were given to six candidates, among whom were Brown Chamberlin and Alexander Morris. 21. Elizabeth Silvester, coauthor of the McGill University Thesis Directory, has commented that these early master's and doctoral degrees appear to have been granted as a recognition of career achievement and were more nearly akin to an honorary degree than to degrees gained in course or by research.

CHAPTER

VII

A TIME OF RECONSTRUCTION: 1852-1855 THE AMENDED CHARTER

s the decade of the forties closed, and as the McGill enterprise was being nursed into health by the careful administration of its income and by a rigorous control of its expenditures, the demand for a new charter grew ever more persistent. Referring to the amendments which had been proposed along with their 1848 Visitation Report, the members of the Board of the Royal Institution declared that they would 'cheerfully cooperate with the Governors in any measure that may seem to them calculated to secure or expedite the passing of the amendments into law'.1 In the spirit of this resolution the board wrote in April 1850 to the governors individually, seeking to organize a joint petition of the two bodies to the governor general that the 1821 Charter might be revised. Subsequently, the proposed amendments were sent with the tacit if not explicit approval of the existing governors to the governor general, who submitted them in September 1850 to the judgement of a committee of the Executive Council.2 They were in general approved by that body, but with two significant exceptions: the selection of members of the governing body should not in their opinion be limited (as the board had proposed they should be) to Protestants, and the appointment of a professor of divinity

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who should be a clergyman of the Church of England could not be sanctioned.3 The board gave way without too much reluctance on the second point—a professor of divinity need not be appointed, and theology need not be included in the curriculum; but they resisted strongly on the first point, setting out in another long letter to the governor general the arguments that James McGill was a Protestant, that McGill College had always been regarded as a Protestant institution, and that the first charter referred to the education the college dispensed as being expressive of 'the principles of True Religion'. On the lips of a Protestant sovereign, they asked, how could that refer to anything other than the Protestant religion? Their letter then continued: Relying, therefore, on the conclusions at which His Excellency cannot fail to arrive on this head, and anxious to promote any just arrangement which may impart to McGill College a character of practical usefulness, the Royal Institution without abandonment or waver [sic], or in any way defeating, impairing or otherwise affecting their rights and powers present and future, so far as regards the property real and personal, held by them for the benefit of McGill College under the Will of Mr. McGill or under any of the provisions of that Will, reduce their suggestions, for simplifying the government and securing an efficient administration of the affairs of the College to the following propositions. First. That the Members of the Board of the Royal Institution should be relieved from the Visitatorial [sic] power conferred on them with regard to McGill College by the Royal Charter of 1821. Secondly. That the Visitatorial power should be transferred to the Representative of the Crown in this Province. Thirdly. That all future Statutes of McGill College to be made by the Governors thereof, should, in the making, altering, amending or revoking the same, be subject to the approval of the Representative of the Crown in this Province, and not, as heretofore, to the approval of the Sovereign in England. Fourthly. That the Members of the Royal Institution should, by the amended Charter, be declared to be The Governors of McGill College and that (omitting all ex-officio nominations as contained in the present Draft of the Amended Charter) the election of the Board—to consist of not fewer than nine or eleven Members—should be left, as heretofore, to the discretion of the Crown.4

Notre Dame Street, Montreal, 1850

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This document constitutes a turning point in the fortunes of McGill. The members of the Board of the Royal Institution proved to be oversanguine in their confidence as to the conclusions at which His Excellency must necessarily arrive on the subject of the Protestant character of McGill. The governor general declined to be persuaded on the point, and refused to introduce into the amended charter exclusions which were not in the original Charter of 1821. He was, however, sufficiently sensitive to the realities of the situation to give an undertaking that he would in practice only appoint Protestants to the board.5 This would not, of course, bind his successors, though once the precedents had been established future governors general might be expected to follow his practice. But the important item in the Royal Institution's letter, and the one which proved to be the brilliant solution to McGilFs administrative problems, was the last of the four quoted. Once it was agreed that the members of the Board of the Royal Institution, as appointed by the governor without any religious restrictions (other than the informal understanding expressed above), should become the Governors of McGill College, the undenominational character of the college was seen to have been established and the opposition which had persisted in some quarters to the issuance of an amended charter melted away, and events thereafter moved relatively swiftly. It would be interesting to know who first mooted the simple and elegant solution to the old administrative problem. Since it must have been first proposed within the Royal Institution, the name which immediately comes to mind is that of Hew Ramsay, the most active member of the small committee which had been appointed to pursue the matter of charter amendment. Christopher Dunkin was credited by Dawson with having been 'the acting member of the new Board in the amendment of the Charter', but he only joined the board at the time the amended charter became operative. Whoever first thought of it, the proposal quickly gained general approval, and was accepted with considerable relief both in Canada and in the Colonial Office in London. Everybody was anxious to have the matter brought to a satisfactory conclusion. An agent, Mr. Alexander Gillespie of Gordon Square, London, was appointed to ensure the amended charter safe and if possible speedy passage through the shoals and quicksands of the imperial government offices. The letter informing Mr. Gillespie of his appointment stressed that it must be not a new charter but an amended charter that was procured, 'it being the opinion of eminent Counsel, on this and it is believed also on your side of the water, that consequences affecting even the tenure of McGill College property might ensure from the interval of time which, in the eye of the law must necessarily lapse

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between the annulment of the old and the creation of a new Charter'.6 It was not merely the eye of the law but even more the watchful eye of the Desrivieres heirs of which the board was still very conscious. There is one small exchange between the governor general and the board at this time which deserves mention. The governor, mindful that McGill College had not been able to pay the fees for the first charter, required assurances that the Royal Institution would be able to pay the fees for the amended charter, if it were granted; the board replied that it could indeed pay those fees, but seeing that all the funds must be vigorously applied to the reduction of the college's debt, would the governor general graciously recommend that the fees might on this occasion be remitted? Mr. Gillespie in the event secured the remittance of what were called the crown fees, but there were still his charges and in due course the college had to pay £224.9.n. T But this was a payment which for once no one begrudged making. THE NEW B O A R D OF G O V E R N O R S

The amended charter arrived in September 1852 and with it began a new era for McGill College. As they had recommended, the members of the Board of the Royal Institution were named the governors of the college; the governors were empowered to make statutes for the college, subject only to the governor general's confirmation; the board could appoint the principal and as many professors as it saw fit; the limitation on its annual income from lands was raised to £12,000 (this must have seemed to the unsatisfied creditors an ironic gesture); and the nomination of the membership of the Board of the Royal Institution still remained with the governor general. When eleven years later the last vestige of government control was lifted and the board of governors became a self-perpetuating body,8 the Royal Institution had completed its transformation from an arm of government to an autonomous institution, and McGill College had acquired all the forms and character of a private university. But even in 1852 the way had at last become clear for McGill to succeed or fail by its own efforts. The new era began with a remarkable act of self-abnegation. A contemporary said of Ferrier 'that he would attempt nothing which overreached the measure of his ability to perform'.9 This characteristic was remarkably exemplified by his behaviour when the Royal Institution took on its new character. He recognized that the changed status gave the body of which he was president new responsibilities, foremost among which was the choice of a new principal and the rebuilding of the academic life of the college. These were tasks for which he believed him-

Charles Dewey Day

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self to be unfitted. The financial and business affairs of the college he could and would foster, but he asked the governor general to allow him to resign as president while remaining a member of the board. He is also said to have suggested the man who should be his successor—Mr. Justice Charles Dewey Day. That appointment was duly made, but Ferrier continued to work assiduously for the rehabilitation of the financial fortunes of the college. Day was to continue as president of the Royal Institution (with the title after 1864 of chancellor of the university) until his resignation in 1884, but Ferrier was still serving the university as a governor at that time, and he succeeded Day in the office which he had voluntarily relinquished thirty-two years previously. In all, James Ferrier served the university in outstanding fashion for forty-three years. The new president had been born in Vermont but was brought to Montreal at the age of six and was educated in this city. He was called to the Bar of Lower Canada in 1827. I*1 ^38 ne was appointed judge advocate general at the courts-martial held for the trial of those who had been arrested in the aftermath of the Lower Canada Rebellion. In 1841 he was appointed solicitor general for Lower Canada in the first administration of the Union, but he was opposed to the ideas of the Reform party and was glad to leave politics for the Court of Queen's Bench. He was transferred to the superior court in 1849, so that when he took on the role of president of the Royal Institution in 1852, Mr. Justice Charles Dewey Day was already a figure of considerable stature. When Meredith's resignation was at last accepted in 1853, Day agreed more than a little reluctantly to accept appointment pro tempore as principal. He resigned this position as soon as a new appointment could be made in 1855, but until then Day gave dignity and leadership to the McGill cause in both offices. It is very doubtful if Ferrier and his colleagues could have achieved success without Day's social and legal eminence and without the benefit of his intellectual contribution. Charles Dewey Day also played a major part in the reorganization of the civil code of the Province of Lower Canada, a task which occupied him and his fellow commissioners from 1859 until 1866, when the code came into force.10 Dawson was later to epitomize him in a single sentence: 'Judge Day was a man of acute legal mind, well educated and well read, a clear and persuasive speaker, wholly devoted to the interests of education, and especially to the introduction into the college course of studies in science and modern literature.'11 He is the only person apart from Bishop George Jehoshaphat Mountain in the history of the university to have held the offices of both president of the Royal Institution and principal of McGill College.

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The new board of governors quickly took a firm grasp of the McGill enterprise. They met for the first time on 30 August 1852. Not unexpectedly, the first item of business was to accept the resignation of their old bete-noire, the bursar cum registrar cum secretary, Joseph Abbott. They then amended the statutes to provide that Corporation should meet for examination of the college books twice a year, and that the governors should meet quarterly under the chairmanship of the president of the Royal Institution. Provision was also made for calling extraordinary meetings of both bodies in addition to these regular ones. At another early meeting, all academic appointments were terminated other than that of W.T. Leach as vice-principal. In the new year, the resignation of Meredith as principal was accepted (it had been tendered in 1849), but then the motion for the acceptance of the resignation was rescinded because of the reluctance of Charles Dewey Day to be named principal, even pro forma. But he was persuaded and the board finally notified Meredith in June 1853 of its acceptance of his resignation, and thereafter it was free to devote itself wholeheartedly to the business of reestablishing McGill College. When the members of the Royal Institution met for the first time as Governors of McGill College on the last day of August 1852, they decided not to advertise a new college year that fall, but to prepare to reopen the following September with a full and attractive program. The intervening year 1852—53 saw a quite remarkable series of decisions and actions on the part of the board. In November it set up two committees: 'The meeting having had under discussion the unsatisfactory and almost hopeless condition of McGill College, the lamentable deficiencies of its Educational arrangements, its heavy pecuniary embarrassments and its obviously inadequate resources' and having, nevertheless, expressed willingness to attempt its resuscitation; it was 'resolved that the Honorable the President of the Board and Messrs. Davidson, Ramsay and Dunkin be and are a Committee to deliberate and report upon the best means under the circumstances, of increasing the utility of the College. Resolved, further, that Messrs. Ferrier, Anderson and Holmes be and are a Committee to investigate the subject of the College debts and to effect, if possible, an arrangement with its Creditors upon terms compatible with the sum recently appropriated by the Legislature with special reference to those debts.'12 The reference is to a grant of £1,000 which the Legislative Assembly had made to the college; the board had asked for £4,000, but they were happy to receive what they did. Of the two committees they set up, the former group became by action of the governors on i February 1853 the education committee and on the same day by action of the Royal Institution the latter group became the

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finance and building committee.13 Both were to propose and to carry through programs which constituted the foundations of all the successes which were to follow. THE EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Mr. Justice Day as chairman of the education committee was ably supported by Hew Ramsay. Later the supervision of the academic program became the responsibility of Corporation, the predecessor of the Senate; but in 1853 the board of governors had to shoulder all the responsibilities of the college, managerial, financial, and academic. The education committee proposed for itself terms of reference and they arose out of the primary obligation laid upon its members the previous November of increasing the utility of the college. This was spelled out on that first day of February 1853 in the following resolution: 'that in conformity with the recommendation of the [November] Committee, that the Hon. the President of the Board and Messrs. Davidson, Ramsay, Robertson and Dunkin be and are an Educational Committee to arrange for the transfer of the government of the High School, to draft new Statutes and to correspond with parties applying for employment in the College'. This was a very ambitious program, but the board of governors guided by its education committee set out vigorously upon its implementation. The new board of governors, then, moved early to correct what they deemed were the urgent matters. The business of reforming the remaining statutes could be done in more leisurely fashion and was not completed until February 1854 when they were sent for confirmation to the governor general. Vice-regal approval was speedily given and the new statutes came into force in September. The 1854 Statutes rank with the 1852 Charter as marking the turning point in the history of McGill.14 The most notable change was that McGill no longer exhibited any distinctively Anglican features but presented itself to the population of Lower Canada as an undenominational college of a broadly Protestant character. Another important feature was that Corporation was reshaped by including in its membership the three deans of faculty and the rector of the high school and by providing for the three fellows representing the faculties to be elected by vote of Convocation, that is, by the governors, teaching staff, and graduates. Moreover, Corporation was assigned that control of the academic life of the university previously exercised by the education committee of the board. Thus the 1854 Statutes determined the bicameral structure of university government which has characterized McGill throughout its history.15

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The board held off from making any academic appointments until June 1853. It then appointed Vice-Principal W.T. Leach professor of moral philosophy and brought back William Andrew to be professor of mathematics. The Reverend Benjamin Davies was appointed professor of classical literature. Leach was permitted to continue for a limited period as rector of St. George's, but the board gave notice that it expected its professors from henceforth not to have other employment. Charles Markgraf was reappointed lecturer in French and German. The rector of the high school, Henry Howe, was appointed professor of ancient and modern history and Rabbi Abraham de Sola was reappointed professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages, but both appointments were without salary. So the Faculty of Arts became a reality once more, and to ensure that there was not only a staff but also some students, the grant from the legislature to relieve McGill of its burden of debt was recognized by the college by the establishment of twenty-four scholarships. Nor were the other faculties overlooked. Leach had been named not only vice-principal but also dean of the Faculty of Arts; in the Faculty of Medicine Professor A.F. Holmes was raised to that same dignity, while the nine lecturers holding chairs in that faculty were given the title of professor. There were also notable developments in the Faculty of Law. During the decade following the establishment of the Faculty of Arts there had been frequent references to the need for an active program in the area of law but little had been accomplished. It had always been the intention that the curriculum should include such a program, and as early as April 1844 William Badgley was appointed lecturer in law in the Faculty of Arts. He had no settled salary, but received fees from the students who attended his classes, which were given somewhat irregularly. The connection with McGill must have been fairly superficial. When the members of the Royal Institution visited the college in 1848 they had drawn particular attention in their report to the deficiencies of the arrangements for the teaching of law, and in 1853 they were in a position to effect changes. They appointed Badgley professor and dean of the Faculty of Law, and gave him two young colleagues: 'Resolved that Messrs. John J. C. Abbott and F.W. Torrance of this City be and are appointed from this date Lecturers in Law in McGill College. . . . Ordered, that in communicating this Resolution the Secretary do inform Messrs. Abbott and Torrance respectively that their emolument will be the subject of future consideration.' This Abbott is the son of Joseph. He had acted many times as secretary of the board of governors and of Caput and as his father's deputy he had helped to keep the college books, but, as has been noted, not very satisfactorily. But as law teachers he

Abraham de Sola

John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, c. 1861

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and his colleagues must have performed well, for in July 1854 all three teachers were awarded £50 each 'in consideration of their services during the past session', and the comment was added: 'The Board regrets its inability to award them a larger sum or, for the present, to attach a fixed salary to their office.' In November 1855, when Badgley retired temporarily from teaching,16 Abbott was promoted to professor of commercial and criminal law and appointed dean of the faculty.17 Torrance was promoted to professor of civil law and subsequently two further appointments were added. These changes proved successful and occasioned a new interest in the study of law, for in 1856 nineteen students registered in the faculty. Clearly a new era was opening up with regard to the study of law at McGill College. The most venturesome development proposed and undertaken by the committee was, however, the one relating to the High School of Montreal. The school had been founded in 1843 to take over the work of the old Royal Grammar School of Montreal and a charter of incorporation had been granted by the legislature in 1845. The men who had promoted the school were much the same group as those who were busy trying to save the college. Prominent among them were James Ferrier, David Davidson, Benjamin Holmes, and W. C. Meredith, the elder brother of the future principal of McGill and the counsel to the Board of the Royal Institution. From the beginning the high school had many links with the college, and when in 1852 it was in financial difficulties and in urgent need of new accommodation, at the same time as the Faculty of Arts was in urgent need of rehabilitation, the men who were interested in the welfare of the two institutions decided to meet both their problems with a single remedy. They arranged for the college to provide land on the northeast,, corner of Dorchester and University Streets and for a new building to be erected there to rehouse both the Faculty of Arts and the high school. They called the new building Burnside Hall to signalize the connection with the McGill estate, and the school was adopted officially as 'the High School Department of McGill College'. The financial risks involved were great but they hoped not only to cut the operating costs of both institutions, but also to secure a valuable source of future college students. The Medical Faculty had already decided to move back into town, and the staff had provided themselves with quarters at 15 Cote Street in a building which three of their members had erected at their own expense and which they rented to the faculty. So the McGill College buildings were left empty, though parts of them were later adapted to residential purposes for both staff and students. The education committee had further tasks. It had been asked to

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consider and decide upon the courses of study to be offered in the college and upon the composition of a pamphlet intended to serve as a prospectus. In this pamphlet the board of governors not only expressed its educational philosophy but also announced to the public of Lower Canada that the McGill enterprise was, as the commercial phrase goes, under entirely new management. First, the governors acknowledged with a fine degree of understatement that 'the adjustment of the financial difficulties of the College, requiring much care and attention, have necessarily occupied a good deal of time', and then went on to point out that the divinity chair had been abolished with 'all tests and rules which characterized the University as belonging to one denomination', though they added that degrees could be conferred on graduates of theological schools affiliated with the college. They drew particular attention to the reorganization of the Faculty of Arts, detailing its offerings and saying that 'instructions upon the more prominent branches of Natural History, in Architecture and Civil Engineering and, probably, Lectureships on Agriculture and Political Economy' would be made available in the near future. A very interesting comment is to the effect that 'it is proposed to adopt a course of scientific studies, to which the alumnus may at his option devote himself to the exclusion of classes during the last two years of his residence in the University'. The developments in the high school and in the Faculties of Law and Medicine were mentioned in turn, and these notices were followed by the very modern-sounding, 'As a further and important advantage peculiarly adapted to the wants of a large class in this community, a plan has been under consideration by which young men in business may attend the College Sessions as their other engagements will allow and thus complete a University course and be entitled to rank with its other Graduates.' Nor were the academic needs of students the only ones to receive consideration. The board recognized that many of the students would come to the college from a distance and that therefore provision had to be made for their board and lodging. It is typical of the new approach to university education which the prospectus exhibits that no attempt was made or contemplated to provide collegial-type facilities for all, but a choice of college residence organized by 'the Professors resident in the College buildings' and accommodation in 'Boarding-houses licensed by the Governors' was said to be available 'upon settled economical terms and subject to proper rules of discipline and conduct'. Finally, the English pattern of three terms to the academic year, 'a division hardly adapted to the circumstances of this country', was abolished in favour of one long session. The governors intended their new McGill to be thoroughly Canadian and truly adapted to the needs of the

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community from which it had sprung and from whence it must draw its strength. The title page of the prospectus bears the image of the seal of the Universitas Collegii McGill Monte Regio and the imprint Hew Ramsay Montreal. For the next and succeeding sessions the preamble to the prospectus was shortened somewhat and the courses of study in the Faculty of Arts and in the high school were set out in considerable detail. These early documents are clear indications that the members of the education committee took their responsibilities seriously and did their work well. THE FINANCE AND BUILDING COMMITTEE

The other committee set to work on that same first day of February 1853 was the finance and building committee. It was, as has been remarked, a committee of the Royal Institution, in distinction from the education committee which was a committee of the board of governors, and it too was given by its terms of reference considerable tasks. Briefly stated, its function was to make the program of the education committee possible. However, this responsibility was broken down into specific objectives, all of great importance: 'Resolved, in conformity with the recommendations of the [November] Committee of the Governors appointed "to deliberate upon the best means of increasing the utility of the College" that Messrs. Ferrier, Anderson and Holmes be and are a "Finance and Building Committee" to superintend the settlement of the old debts of the College, to effect a loan of £3,000, to sell portions of the College property and to direct the construction of the new building and the necessary repairs to the existing ones.'18 After the ineptitude and the quarrels of the earlier years, it is pleasant to note the harmony and close cooperation which prevailed among the major participants in the new venture—Day, Ramsay, and Dunkin the moving spirits in the educational sphere, and Ferrier and Anderson the leaders in the managerial and financial activities. The tasks confronting Ferrier and his friends were indeed formidable, yet within a few months they had effected a remarkable transformation in the expectations of those engaged in the McGill enterprise. In September 1852 the members of the new board of governors were still trying to assess an apparently hopeless financial situation. When former members of staff appealed for the arrears of pay to which they were entitled, they were told 'that the Governors are at present utterly destitute of the means of liquidating any of the several pecuniary claims against them, but that so soon as the state of their funds shall allow of their doing so, they will proceed to the examination of their accounts'.19 In November the board

Christopher Dunkin

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was still considering 'the unsatisfactory and almost hopeless condition of McGill College, its heavy pecuniary embarrassments and its obviously inadequate resources'. Yet in March 1853 the amalgamation of the college and the high school was undertaken, even though that decision involved an obligation to erect a new building at a cost of £3,000, and to assume responsibility for the high school masters' salaries at the heavy annual charge of £865.20 Further, in the summer of that year the governors engaged (or re-engaged) an academic staff for the Faculty of Arts whose annual salaries amounted to another £760, and soon thereafter commissioned Ramsay and Davidson to look for a new principal at a salary with residence of £500. The change of attitude is so marked as to demand an explanation. The matter of the debts turned out on closer examination to be largely unpaid salaries of present or former members of staff and the grant from the legislature enabled the governors to come to terms with those to whom the college owed money. The salary owed to Leach, for example, was settled by a part payment in cash and by having deeded to him Lot 89 of the college property. Other smaller debts were steadily accumulated and paid off. On the other side of the ledger, action was taken to pursue those who had taken lots on lease and had not kept up their payments; anyone more than six months in arrears was to be sued and in certain instances of flagrant violation of agreements the lands were to be repossessed. In this way, and with a new efficiency of bookkeeping, the college accounts were "brought if not into balance at least into order. The funds which permitted the erection of the new building were made available by an enlargement of the college governors' financial powers: an act of the legislature had authorized borrowing by the governors of an amount not exceeding £3,000. In April 1853 they decided to take advantage of this provision. Giving as security the land north of Sherbrooke Street and the house owned by the college on Jacques Cartier Square, they borrowed the full amount from William Forsyth Grant, a former Quebec merchant who had moved to Ecclesgreig in Scotland. The rate of interest on the loan was 6 per cent, requiring the provision of a further £180 a year. The fact is that the Governors of McGill College were embarking courageously on a considerable risk, if not an outright gamble. Possibly they felt—indeed some of their language suggests—that the enterprise had reached the point at which it must either be carried forward vigorously to success or be closed down. In an appeal for further financial help from the legislature in 1854 they put the alternatives plainly: 'If the Legislature be disposed to come to their aid with a just and enlightened liberality, [the Governors] will cheerfully bestow their time

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and labour to give effect to the noble designs of the founder of the College, which for 40 years (to the shame of the country be it said) have been absolutely barren of result. But without such aid they will be compelled, in the honest and prudent discharge of their trust, to close the doors of the College, insofar as all the higher departments of learning are concerned, and to leave the income at rest until, by the accumulation of years, it shall be sufficient to pay the debts, and to enable their successors to make new arrangements.'21 Thus in venturing upon their new program, the governors were looking for further and more substantial help from the government, and in this they were only partly successful. In 1854 they received £500 for current expenditures and a further capital grant of £2,000. But two years later they were back again. The new Burnside Hall had been partially destroyed by fire and old debts were still unpaid. 'In order to enable the institution to maintain its high position, as the only nondenominational University in Lower Canada, and to enter with vigour on the new departments above indicated, as well as to repair the loss occasioned by the late calamitous fire, it appears absolutely necessary that the annual grant to the University should be considerably increased, and that further aid should be given for the restoration of the building recently lost, and the liquidation of the remaining debt. The Governors are fully convinced that the bestowment of such additional grants would, in the circumstances, be an act of wise and enlightened liberality.' But sympathetic as the authorities had shown themselves to be, they evidently felt they had gone as far as they could and there were no more large sums given. The College could thenceforth expect to receive £500, or $3,000, by way of annual support, but no further capital sums would be forthcoming. For the rest the college had to look to its own resources. In 1854 and 1855 there were in fact two other resources available to Ferrier and his colleagues and while not ceasing to appeal to government they turned with renewed attention to the sale of college lands and to an appeal for private benefactions. THE LAND SALES

After the Board of the Royal Institution received permission to alienate college property in 1845, sporadic attempts were made to sell parts of James McGill's estate to raise funds for the project. But little success had attended these efforts. An attempt had been made to incorporate a perpetual lease as a condition of sale, but Montrealers had been slow to take up the lots that had been offered. In July 1848 the board had decided to suspend sales until 'a future and more fitting season'. Six

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years later, however, Montreal was on a rising tide of prosperity. The effect of the Reciprocity Act with the United States was beginning to compensate in part for the loss of Imperial Preference in the United Kingdom, while the advent of railways was breaking down the winter isolation of Montreal and making it into a great transportation centre for northeastern North America and the expanding trade of the Great Lakes. James McGill's choice of that trading area at the beginning of the century over the more immediate allurements of the northwest fur country was now being justified. Moreover, the city of Montreal was ready to expand westwards. The large block of McGill land had been a major barrier to its progress towards the west and to the lower slopes of the mountain. Ferrier, Peter McGill, Benjamin Holmes, and T. B. Anderson were of a mind, therefore, that both Montreal and the college would benefit by the vigorous development of the McGill land.22 It stretched between University Street and Mansfield Avenue across Sherbrooke Street and the line of St. Catherine Street right down to Dorchester Boulevard. The widening of Sherbrooke Street had already been granted by the college and the continuation of St. Catherine had been sanctioned. Now the cross streets and the lanes were designated and a vigorous policy of land sales was adopted. Letting on lease was abandoned in favour of outright sales.23 But the rules to be observed by the purchasers of the lots were severe: no industrial premises might be set up on the land purchased nor might there be carried on any activities 'likely to disturb or discourage neighbours—such as stone masons' yards or tanneries or other noisome trades'. Rather, every attempt was made to keep the neighbourhood residential and select.24 The other resource, the appeal to private benevolence, was still in its infancy. McGill had begun to win the confidence of the anglophone community, but a great deal more had still to be accomplished. Consequently, in the absence of major grants from the government, and until the flow of private benevolence could be greatly increased, McGill had to depend at this time for its very existence on the judicious sale of its property south of Sherbrooke Street. GRADUATES AND EXTENSION

In the midst of all this busy activity, two small items recorded in the governors' minutes during these years might be overlooked, and yet they were to prove of greater significance in their developments than many matters of apparently much larger importance. The first is introduced somewhat obscurely: 'Submitted a letter from Dr. G. Fenwick of the

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3ist ultimo, as also a Memorial on behalf of the Graduates of McGill College. Whereupon it was resolved that Dr. Fenwick be informed that the enquiry made in his letter as well as the prayer of the Memorial will have meet attention from the Governors when the proposed changes in the Statutes of the College will be taken into their consideration.' Obviously, the memorial had something to propose about the revision of the statutes ;25 the Board's response was cautious. But the importance of the incident lies in its implication that there was already by the year 1853 a group of graduates who were interested in the well-being and development of the college. The formal organization of the McGill Graduates' Society followed not long thereafter. An announcement appeared in the Montreal Gazette on 23 December 1856: 'The former Alumni and Graduates of the University of McGill College are requested to meet at the Burnside Hall at seven o'clock P.M. on Wednesday the yth day of January next, to organize a Society for the promotion of more frequent intercourse and conference among themselves and for the advancement of the interests of their Alma Mater.' There follows a list of nine names, among them Brown Chamberlin, B.C.L., Fellow in Law, and Alexander Morris, M.A., B.C.L., Fellow in Arts, Wolfred Nelson, M.D., Fellow in Medicine, and R. P. Howard, M.D., Professor. It was a very prestigious group. The Gazette of 9 January 1857 reported that the meeting had been duly held and that the Graduates' Society had been brought officially into existence. Messrs. Chamberlin, Henning, and Lambe were named a committee to draft a constitution. Few things over the years were to prove so important to McGill as the existence of this society and the constant concern and support of its members for their alma mater. Traditions are hard to come by, but once established they are remarkably enduring; the university has been fortunate that the tradition was early established that McGill is not merely an institution but a community in which bonds of affection are strongly woven, so that a sense of belonging to McGill need not end with graduation but can be a lifelong experience. It is this tradition which the McGill Graduates' Society has so successfully encouraged.26 The other incident was equally insignificant in itself but full of promise as to its future development. Towards the end of that same year 1853, the governors resolved to appoint Messrs. Hew Ramsay and A. Robertson to be 'a Committee to arrange for the delivery of popular Lectures during the ensuing Winter'.27 What the subjects were and who gave them we do not know; what is important is that an idea had been born, which like that of the Graduates' Society, was to prove over the years of immense importance to McGill. Long before extension departments

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became a regular feature of universities in general, McGill was already beginning to weave the threads of communication between the university and the intelligent public of Montreal. The popular lecture by university professors became a notable feature of the city's life, and created ties of common interest between the institution and the community. It complemented the opportunities provided for young men in business to attend university lectures 'as their other duties will allow and thus complete a University course and be entitled to rank with its other Graduates'. Since that time, thousands of those who are not regular students of the university have nevertheless been able to come by day and by night to enrich their understanding and in many cases to acquire professional qualifications. THE FIFTH P R I N C I P A L

One major task remained to be accomplished by the members of the board—the appointment of a principal who could continue what they had begun. All their other achievements would be of no value if they did not succeed in this. Yet strangely enough, the members went somewhat hesitantly to work. They did not begin on their task until early in January 1854, sixteen months after they had taken over, when they appointed David Davidson and Hew Ramsay to make inquiries for a new principal in Britain. It did not occur to them to look anywhere else —the colonial habit was too strong. The relevant correspondence has not survived and we are dependent for our information on the minutes of the board of governors, and they are parsimonious in the amount of background information they saw fit to record. The members of the board knew they were prepared to pay the new principal £500 a year and to provide him with accommodation for himself and his family in the Wing of the college buildings, but from the way they went about finding their man one suspects that their further thoughts were not very clear. They seem to have been ready at first to leave the actual selection in other hands. David Davidson had presumably gone to Britain on business (he was absent from meetings of the board from November 1853 to June 1854) and had agreed while there to make inquiries about a possible principal and to write to Hew Ramsay on the outcome of his efforts. A minute of the board for 6 April 1854 reads: 'Upon communication made by Hew Ramsay Esqr. and upon letters received from D. Davidson Esqr. on the same subject, it was resolved, that Mr. Davidson be authorized to make an arrangement with Dr. Hodgson to fill the office of Principal of McGill College upon the salary previously fixed and on such further terms

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as Mr. Davidson may judge proper or necessary.' There was presumably a good deal of information conveyed in the letters; and given the distance at which the parties were operating, the board may have felt it had no alternative but to leave decisions to the man on the spot. Nevertheless, they were prepared to take Dr. Hodgson sight unseen. But the man to whom the McGill fortunes were so nearly committed presumably declined the appointment.28 The next minute on the subject is dated 8 June: 'Resolved that D. Davidson Esq. be authorized to write to Professor Pillans to the effect that, in regard to the appointment of a Principal for McGill College, he may use his discretion either to close at once with a gentleman whom he may consider suitable for the office, or to communicate further with Mr. William Davidson till his recommendation can be received and answered.' This sounds even more disturbing. David Davidson was back in Canada and the choice was left in the hands of Professor Pillans. It is not difficult to establish his identity. James Pillans was a notable professor at Edinburgh who had made an extensive study of educational systems in Prussia, Switzerland, and France and, in addition to his writings on the subject, had given evidence on such matters before a House of Commons committee. Pillans had also written on university curriculum and management, notably in A Word for the Universities of Scotland. The work had been published in 1848 and possibly some members of the Board were already acquainted with it. If anyone was to be given power of attorney in the matter of choosing a new principal, probably Professor James Pillans was as good a choice as could be made. The next thing that happened, however, was a letter addressed to Henry Davidson (Henry was David Davidson's brother—the William previously mentioned was presumably some other relative) written by Dr. Tait, dean of Carlisle, recommending a Mr. William Arnold for the post of principal. David Davidson read both the dean's letter and his brother's own commendation of Mr. Arnold to the governors at their 5 October meeting, whereupon it was resolved 'that Mr. Davidson be requested to authorize his brother to engage Mr. Arnold's services on the terms already determined on, provided on further enquiry, it should still seem to him that the arrangement is like to conduce to the advantage of the College'. Later that same month, David Davidson brought another communication to the notice of the board: 'Mr. Davidson submitted a letter from Professor Pillans, strongly recommending the Rev. Dr. Burgess for the office of Principal of McGill College, and likewise one addressed to the Governors by Dr. Burgess himself, accompanied by many flattering testimonials of that gentleman's abilities.' But the board revealed that it had one strong opinion on the subject: 'Whereupon it

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was Resolved: i st That in consequence of the peculiar position of McGill College and the public feeling with respect to it induced by the circumstances of its management heretofore, it is expedient that the office of Principal in that Institution be filled by a Layman.' But the minutes go on to express the hope that Professor Pillans 'will not be discouraged from affording them a continuance of his valuable counsel and assistance'. It would seem from the minutes that the governors were in danger of committing themselves to two candidates at the same time—Mr. Arnold had been offered the position and Professor Pillans was being encouraged to go on searching. But by the end of the year still no satisfactory solution had presented itself to the governors, and at their January meeting it was reported that Mr. Arnold had declined the appointment. 'Whereupon, after some discussion It was Resolved that Mr. Coffin be requested and authorized to take advantage of his intended visit to Toronto, to put himself in communication with Professor Wilson of the City in relation to that office and, provided that gentleman be in a position to be treated with respecting it, to make him, in the name of the Board, the same offer that was made to Mr. Arnold: Viz £500 Currency per annum and a free house.' This was coming nearer to home. Professor Daniel Wilson had but recently come to Canada. He had already made a name for himself in the field of Scottish archaeology and had been appointed in 1853 professor of history and English literature at University College, Toronto. But he replied to the offer in March, stating that he was not in a position to treat with the governors in the matter. He went on to become president of University College in 1880 and seven years later president of Toronto University, a post he held till his death in 1892. He would undoubtedly have been an outstanding figure in McGill history had he accepted the offer to become principal in 1855. At that same March meeting, the governors received a communication from Professor Pillans 'with regret'; the wording of the minute suggests that he was offended that his candidate Dr. Burgess had not been thought acceptable; at any rate he dropped out of the story at this point. So in March 1855, fifteen months after the search had begun, no suitable candidate had appeared. In something like despair, the board decided on a new approach. At the meeting held on Friday, 13 April 1855, Christopher Dunkin reported that as requested by the board he and James Ferrier had waited upon the newly appointed governor general to seek his advice in this difficult matter. The governor general in question was Sir Edmund Walker Head. Sir Edmund had been lieutenant governor of New Brunswick from 1848 to 1854, and because of his success there he was about to become the governor general of

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Canada. He was himself a scholar of some repute; and he would be, by virtue of his office, the Visitor to McGill College. It was appropriate therefore that the governors should seek his advice. Sir Edmund presented Messrs. Dunkin and Ferrier with two names. Mr. Pennefather was a young Englishman who had been his secretary for six years and whom he recommended as very able. But Richard Pennefather was indeed very young—only twenty-six years of age. The other name was that of John William Dawson, a man in early middle age whom Sir Edmund had met first in the company of the famous geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Sir Edmund had been much impressed with Lyell's companion, but, of course, he was not the polished product of an old-country university. He was a colonial. Mr. Justice Day and the hard-headed businessmen of Montreal considered the matter and decided that a good, hard-working colonial might be, in fact, just what they were looking for. But they decided to write to both Mr. Dawson and Mr. Pennefather and seek further information: 'After due consideration, It was Resolved that it is expedient to make further enquiry respecting the gentlemen named, and that, in the meantime the President be requested to address a letter to each of them touching his qualifications, views, former pursuits, etc., etc., and to communicate the same to His Excellency, the Governor General.' These things were done and subsequently the name of Mr. Pennefather disappeared from the record. On 8 September 1855 John William Dawson was appointed principal of McGill College. 'Resolved unanimously that J.W. Dawson Esq. of Pictou, in the Province of Nova Scotia be and is appointed Principal of McGill College for and during the pleasure of the Governors and no longer, in place of the Hon. Mr. Justice Day resigned.' The appointment made that day was to prove of the very greatest significance. The Governors of McGill may have gone about finding their new principal in a somewhat inept and uncertain manner, but when they appointed Dawson they found the architect of their success. ANGLOPHONE, PROTESTANT, PROFESSIONAL

Thus as the sixth decade of the nineteenth century neared its halfway mark, it became apparent that the university and the community which had brought it into being had reached a turning point in their relationship. The community of Lower Canada, that unique emulsion of FrenchCanadian and British traditions, had engendered McGill, but subsequent events had made three things very clear. The attempts to achieve an educational system bilingual and neutral as to religion came to an

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end in 1829 when the plan to provide the Royal Institution with parallel Roman Catholic and Protestant committees was circumvented by the passing of the Syndics Act. This statute established that the francophone community would have no part in any educational system or institution which was not dedicated to the preservation of its language and culture. Since McGill College was obviously not such an institution, the FrenchCanadian people made clear their intention not to participate in it. Successive governors general endeavoured to preserve the college as an institution in which Catholics and Protestants might equally share, but this was not a concern shared by the francophone Catholics. They had no objection to McGill being anglophone and Protestant, so long as they were enabled to have their own institutions francophone and Catholic.29 The procuring of a charter for Laval in 1852 is complementary evidence of this. For the next hundred and more years, until the 19605 and the 'quiet revolution' in French Canada, relations between McGill and the francophone majority of the community were to be conducted on the basis of a tacit agreement to live and let live. Within the English-speaking community, however, there was still room for considerable debate. With regard to religion, for example, it has to be said that the anglophone community was little more liberal in the eighteenth-century sense of the term than the francophone. The English-speaking community in general wanted its institution to be as clearly Protestant as its francophone neighbours wanted their institutions to be Catholic, and the only debate within the anglophone community was as to the style of protestantism. In particular it had to define 'Protestant' in such a way as to make it broader than Anglican and inclusive of acceptable believers like Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, while still remaining exclusive of Roman Catholics. Thus in 1850 the members of the community persuaded the governor general to promise only to appoint Protestants to the board. When in 1864, they received the authority to make those appointments themselves, they ordained that members of the board 'shall be Laymen of some Protestant denomination'.30 This provision remained in successive revisions of the statutes through to 1923 and only disappeared in the revision of 1934. But while those agreements were being worked out, another debate was proceeding which concerned itself with very important educational matters. The English-speaking community had indicated that it was not interested in supporting a pseudo-medieval Oxbridge type of college, specializing in classical literature and conforming to eighteenth-century notions of what might constitute a gentleman's education. The comments of the 'new men' from Montreal who constituted the reformed Board of the Royal Institution were indicative of this, as can be seen

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from their Visitation Report of 1848, where they indicated quite emphatically their views as to the kind of educational program they considered desirable. As noted earlier, they approved wholeheartedly of the professional education given in the Medical Faculty, and they expressed unreservedly their regret that there was no comparable operation in the field of law, and they attributed a good deal of the weakness of the Faculty of Arts to 'an absence from the College course of study of many of those important Branches of Education now taught in most schools of Repute—such as "Moral Philosophy", "Political Economy", "Civil Engineering", "Agricultural Chemistry" '.31 By such comments, the English-speaking community was saying that what it wanted from McGill was an education suited to the needs of Canada, and such as would prepare a young man for a career in commerce or one of the professions.32 Thus by 1855, the community which was giving support to McGill had made clear to the college the kind of institution it was expected to be. It was not perhaps what James McGill had envisaged, or even what he would have preferred. He had probably looked for a liberal University of Lower Canada, serving the total population and having McGill College as one of its constituent parts. What he got was the University of McGill College, definitely anglophone, broadly Protestant, and aspiring to be in the widest sense of the term professional. These ideas had been set out in the 1853 prospectus and in the 1854 Statutes, and the governors then looked for a principal who would both exemplify and realize them. They had found him in John William Dawson, but Dawson's great achievements were to be possible only because he conformed by background and experience so closely to the pattern which the men of Montreal—Day, Ferrier, Ramsay, and the rest—had already laid out before he arrived. There was no need for a period of adjustment or for the finding of acceptable compromises. Dawson was able to begin immediately on his many tasks, assured from the beginning of the governors' understanding and support.

NOTES 1. M-RIAL 19 December 1849. The letter they sent to the governors appears in RIAL-LB 17 April 1850, pp. 450-53. Most of the governors appear to have decided neither to support nor to oppose but 'to remain passive'. MUA 1766/25/24. 2. The draft amended charter with some pencilled marginal notes is to be found as MUA 1766/25/21. 3. The report of this committee of the Executive Council was deemed of such importance by the Board of the Royal Institution that they took the unusual step of transcribing it in full into their minutes. M-RIAL 1850, p. 326.

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4. RIAL-LB 20 December 1850. 5. MUA 1766/25/30, letter of governor general's secretary to RIAL committee on subject of amended charter. 6. RIAL-LB 3 April 1852. 7. MUA I766/2O/23V and 23vi. 8. XXVI Vic. Cap. 6; 5 May 1863. 9. Fennings Taylor in Portraits of British Americans (Montreal, 186568), 1:160. 10. J.E.G. Brierley, 'Quebec's Civil Law Codification Viewed and Reviewed', McGill Law Journal 14, no. 4 (1968) : 522-89. 11. 'Thirty-eight Years at McGill', annual university lecture, 1893-94; Addresses, item 19, p. 7. 12. M-Gov. 10 November 1852. The Legislative Assembly had granted the college not only £1,000 to help retire the debts, but also £350 for current expenditures. In addition, the Medical Faculty received £250 as its yearly grant. 13. From 1852 to 13 June 1856 the Governors and the Board of the Royal Institution, although they were composed of the same individuals, continued to keep separate minutes; but on the later date the minutes of the Royal Institution were formally closed off by resolution of that board, it being ordered that in future all acts of both bodies should be recorded in the minutes of 'the Board of Governors of the University of McGill College'. From that time on, while still legally distinct, the two bodies have acted as one. 14. See Dawson's annual university lecture, 1888-89, 'The Constitution of McGill University'; Addresses, item 14. 15. On the practical effect of the bicameral system of university governance, see p. 193. 16. He was reappointed professor of public and criminal law in 1859 and continued in that position until 1880 when he became emeritus professor. 17. M-Gov. 13 November 1853. 18. M-RIAL i February 1853. 19. M-Gov. 22 September 1852. 20. The plans for Burnside Hall were agreed in March 1853 and the building was taken into use in the early summer of 1854, a very different building history from that of the original McGill buildings. 21. The document is headed simply 'Memorial', and has no date, but see M-Gov. 5 September 1854 and 27 September 1854. The document is bound with the university calendars for the years 1853—56, in a volume in the Rare Books Collection, McLennan Library. 22. A comment by Fennings Taylor gives a contemporary view of the effect of the land sales on the City of Montreal: 'In aiding the College they [Ferrier and his colleagues] had the opportunity of selling "the Burnside property", which had been comparatively an unremunerative burden to the institution, as well as an obstinate barrier to the extension of the city. When the inhabitants of Montreal talk complacently of the westerly progress of the "commercial capital", they would do well to supplement these observations with the question, "to whose

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

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sagacity are we chiefly indebted for this beneficial result?" ' Portraits of British Americans, i: 164—65. The reluctance of purchasers to buy lease-hold property militated against sales on an English-style, stated-term lease, while the low income derivable from perpetual 'rentes a fonciere' rendered agreements of that kind insufficiently productive to meet the college's urgent need. The decision to sell plots outright was taken only after much debate. E.A. Collard, The Saint James Club (Montreal, 1957), pp. 34~35The minute is M-Gov. 12 November 1853. It appears from the minutes of Corporation that the subject of the memorial was to request the governors to remit to convocation the right to elect the fellows of the university, rather than have them appointed by the governors. The board agreed. The Graduates' Society had a number of beginnings; it was renewed in 1870 and 1876. See Faith Wallis, 'The Graduates' Society; that Excellent Mystery', MUA Fact Sheet, no. 13, June 1977. M-Gov. 15 November 1853. The idea of popular lectures on scientific subjects was by no means new. Alexander Skakel gave lectures on natural philosophy to the general public in 1813, and A.F. Holmes offered 'experimental lectures' on chemistry in Skakel's house in 1822. The new development was that McGill College should organize a regular series. For an attempt to identify the various persons who came under consideration, see McGilliana, no. 4, September 1977. Professor Pillans had already been used successfully to secure a headmaster for the Montreal High School in 1848. At this time, the distinctive needs of English-speaking Roman Catholics were not sufficiently formulated to become part of the debate, though the time was not far distant when those needs would become a matter of active discussion. Statutes of 1864, MUA 1766/40/2. See 'The Early Statutes of McGill', McGilliana, no. 5, September 1978. The 1864 Statutes also ordered that the president of the Royal Institution should 'bear the title and discharge the functions of the Chancellor of the University'. See Chapter 8, n. 5. In a letter to Dawson before his arrival in Montreal, Day summed up the former troubles of McGill College as due to its adherence to the traditional classical education, which is, he says, 'not addapted [sic] to our State of Society. The Education offered is not the Education the People want.' MUA 1463/27, 20 August 1855. Day particularly mentioned 'the Sciences and the Modern Languages' as being desirable subjects.

CHAPTER

V

DAWSON: THE EARLY YEARS

ohn William Dawson was born at Pictou, Nova Scotia, on 13 October 1820. He came to McGill in September 1855, to a college which had been revived and reorientated by its new board of governors. This remarkable group of men had come to some very definite conclusions as to what kind of institution they wanted the college to become and they had invited Dawson to become principal and implement those ideas. Dawson also had thought long and hard about the role of educational institutions in society, and had come to some very decided opinions of his own, and it was to prove of immense importance for the future that his ideas and those of the governors coincided closely. PICTOU A N D E D I N B U R G H

James Dawson, John William's father, emigrated from Banffshire in Scotland in the year 1811. He ventured into trade and after initial successes met with a series of reverses so serious as to plunge him into debt for the next twenty-five years. Thus William (the family used his second rather than first name) grew up in a money-conscious home, though by the time he was thinking of marriage the debt had been retired and the family had reached a modest affluence.1 His father had

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retrieved his fortunes by becoming a bookseller, stationer, and publisher of a weekly newspaper, and there were sufficient resources in the family business even in the earlier days to send William to the local grammar school and to Pictou Academy. The two major interests of his life William inherited directly from his parents: a deep concern with religion, which permeated the Dawson family life, and a continual interest in the world of nature, accessible at the Dawsons' back door. James was a very pious man, an Elder of the Kirk, who took a great part in organizing the new Sunday School movement in Pictou County and who wrote his own spiritual autobiography not once but twice,2 and the parental influence in this regard was greatly reinforced by the death from scarlet fever of his younger brother when William was seventeen. 'I can date from this time my first serious impressions of the realities of life, as distinguished from the merely visible things with which we are chiefly concerned in this world.'3 Religion was to remain his constant preoccupation at a deep personal level all his life. James Dawson also passed on to his son a lively interest in the natural phenomena which he found abounding on every side: 'A somewhat wild garden, with many trees and shrubs, was full of objects of interest; within easy walking distance were rough pastures, with second-growth woods, bogs and swamps, rich in berries and flowers in their season, and inhabited by a great variety of birds and insects. Nothing pleased my father more than to take an early morning hour, or a rare holiday, and wander through such places with his boys, studying and collecting their treasures.' William early developed into a young naturalist, with collecting as a hobby. When in later life he achieved his dearest ambition and had a whole museum to fill with his specimens, he set up near the door a plaque bearing a verse from the Psalms which brought together the two abiding passions of his life: 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! All of them in wisdom Thou hast made.'4 The world of science was the window through which he gazed on the craftsmanship of the Creator. Pictou Academy had been established by Thomas McCulloch. The King's College at Windsor was an Anglican preserve, so the Presbyterian minister established first his grammar school and later his academy. The education it offered had already departed from the strictly classical model. When he became president of Dalhousie College, McCulloch expressed his views plainly, but they had been implicit for many years in the curriculum of the Academy: 5 it included some Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew for those who wanted it, but it also offered logic and moral philosophy and more especially natural philosophy, or as we should say, science. To help him cope with this wide range of subjects,

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McCulloch had only two assistants, but he himself was a tower of strength. One of his students wrote in later years: 'During the whole existence of the institution Dr. McCulloch was its life and soul. As long as he continued in connection with it, he taught logic, moral and natural philosophy. Divers [sic] as were the branches devolving upon him, he taught them all efficiently. I have since had an opportunity of knowing something of the professors in Edinburgh University, but never till I saw them did I realize the greatness of Dr. McCulloch. We doubt not that every professor there would have excelled him in his own particular field, but I believe there was no man in that institution, who could have made the same appearance in all the branches taught that he did.'6 It was into the care of this remarkable man and institution that the young William Dawson was consigned and he had reason ever after to be thankful that he had been so fortunate in the matter of his education. McCulloch encouraged Dawson in his interest in the local geological phenomena, particularly in the matter of fossil specimens, and a visit to the area called 'the Joggins' was a revelatory experience: 'I was amazed at the great succession of stratified beds, exposed as plainly as in a pictured section, and was interested beyond measure in the beds of coal, with all their accompaniments, exposed in the cliffs and along the beach, the erect trees (Sigilaria] [sic] represented by sandstone casts, and the numerous fossil plants.'7 The elements of geology as then understood were presented to him in The Penny Magazine, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and a lucky chance at a booksale put into his hands Hadenger's translation of Friedrich Moh's Mineralogy. Visits to Halifax and Boston introduced him to other naturalists and to the Boston Natural History Society, and in 1839 he secured Lyell's composite volume The Principles and Elements of Geology, published only that year.8 Dawson's employment was at this time in the family business, to which he expected in due time to succeed. He was one of the many amateur scientists to be found throughout the western world at this time. Another, for example, was Charles Darwin in England. But Dawson's interests had grown to the point where he longed for more specialized instruction and in 1840-41 he was in Edinburgh attending the lectures of Robert Jameson in mineralogy, James David Forbes in natural philosophy, John Hutton Balfour in botany, and the many other 'able and enthusiastic teachers' he found there, while receiving 'much personal kindness and useful guidance' from the professors and from 'other teaching men connected with the University'. Here too he met Margaret Mercer, whom after a courtship by letter extending over six years he succeeded in winning as his wife.9

John William Dawson, 1859

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He returned to Pictou regretfully after only one session in Edinburgh but he afterwards regarded this return as providentially timed, for it enabled him to meet in Nova Scotia the two men who contributed most to his intellectual development, William Logan and Charles Lyell. Logan was soon to be appointed director of the Canadian Geological Survey and visited Nova Scotia to examine the local carboniferous rocks. Lyell also came to Pictou in that same summer of 1841 in the course of his first visit to North America, and Dawson served as his local guide. The young bookseller so impressed Lyell that the British scientist became his sponsor with regard to scientific papers submitted to journals in London and Edinburgh. For many years, Dawson continued as Lyell's protege and disciple, a different relationship from that with Logan, who was always more a colleague and friend, especially when the two men came to be located together in Montreal. In 1855 Dawson's developing powers as a geologist resulted in the publication of An Acadian Geology, which applied the principles of the new science to the eastern areas of British North America and gained him international recognition. He had been elected a fellow of the Geological Society of London the previous year. NOVA SCOTIA A N D N E W B R U N S W I C K

The two most important events following his return from Edinburgh were, however, in a field in which he had hitherto taken only an observer's interest. Drawn into the company of William Young and Joseph Howe, Dawson had discussed with them the highly topical subject of public education, and he had expressed his ideas to such effect that in 1850 Howe offered Dawson, then twenty-nine years old, the newly created post of superintendent of education. After an initial reluctance he threw himself into this work with an almost apostolic zeal. He himself suggested the comparison when in his first annual report he wrote: 'The nature of the duties of my office and its limited powers, as well as the state of the schools, have required me to act rather as an educational missionary than in a merely official capacity. . . . I have been obliged . . . to prepare the public mind for a new and improved educational system.'10 The last word was particularly important, for Dawson had soon drawn up what he called his 'grand plan' for the organization of all the educational facilities of the province into one mutually supportive system. Central to the plan was his proposal for a normal school for the training of teachers and the government cautiously proposed that item first. When the proposal ran into opposition in the assembly, the government somewhat supinely, as William thought, allowed the bill to lapse, and since his great exertions had brought on a debilitating fever, he

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decided to resign his position. Even so, the three years in which he served as superintendent were of such a character that the history of education in Nova Scotia has to be divided, it has been said, into the eras before and after Dawson, for his ideas persisted and continued to be implemented by those whom he had influenced.11 The normal school was established in Truro, as he had advocated, in 1855, and his reforms of the school curriculum were sustained and carried further. In a world where schooling was limited to reading, writing, and a little arithmetic, he had introduced many new subjects which he believed should be taught in the public schools—history, especially that of Nova Scotia and British North America, vocal music, human physiology in its relation to health, and, as we should expect, natural history. But perhaps the one on which he placed most emphasis was agricultural chemistry. In his preliminary report of November 1850 he wrote: 'The introduction of the study of Agricultural Chemistry, contemplated in the new law, is an improvement of great importance to the growth of the agriculture of this country, which is now suffering from a deficiency of scientific knowledge more than any other cause. To obviate the difficulties which attend the introduction of this useful department, I have imported 28 sets of apparatus, as taught in the Scottish Parish Schools, and have placed one of these at the disposal of each Board of Commissioners, with the view of commencing the study in at least one School in each District.' In 1851 he secured copies of Norton's Scientific Agriculture for those who attended the Pictou Teachers Institute, so that they might be better equipped to teach the subject; and in the same year he contracted with the American publishers for a special printing of a thousand copies of Johnston's Catechism on Agricultural Chemistry 'with four pages of useful additional material compiled by myself. Eight years earlier his first venture into educational journalism had consisted of articles on this subject, so that his advocacy of it in the school curriculum was by no means the result of a new enthusiasm.12 The other important event in these years arose out of an incident in which Lyell advanced Dawson's career quite fortuitously. Dawson had arranged to meet Lyell at Halifax at the beginning of the latter's third visit to North America in 1852 and one of LyelFs fellow travellers on the Atlantic crossing had been Sir Edmund Head, the lieutenant governor of New Brunswick. Lyell introduced Dawson to Sir Edmund, who was sufficiently impressed with the young Nova Scotian superintendent of education (as he then was) to invite him in 1854 to join the commission set up in New Brunswick to consider the future of King's College Fredericton. In this task, Dawson worked closely with Egerton Ryerson, by whom he had already been much influenced during his

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visit to study the school system and normal school establishment in Upper Canada in 1850. When the commission presented its report, Dawson had been unavoidably absent from its final meetings and he therefore attached a long letter, fully endorsing the report, and commenting upon what he considered its main features.13 We thus have an extensive account of his educational opinions on the eve of his appointment to McGill. The program recommended was an educational system even more closely coordinated than had been advocated for Nova Scotia. There were to be the parish schools, grammar schools, normal school, and college, and the whole was to be embraced in the University of New Brunswick. The rector of the university would also be the chief superintendent of the school system. The college would give collegiate courses and diploma courses. The former, leading to the B.A. degree, offered the classics, modern languages, philosophy, and the sciences—natural philosophy (physics), chemistry, and civil policy (economics and political science). The entry into the diploma courses was at the same level as into the collegiate courses, but required only two years of study for one of three specializations: civil engineering and land surveying, agriculture, and commerce and navigation. These concepts of education are consistent with those expressed in the 1848 Visitation Report of the Royal Institution and correspond even more closely to those underlying the prospectus of 1853 and the 1854 revision of the McGill Statutes. Even the desire of the McGill Governors to be Protestant but undenominational was represented. The New Brunswick report had called for schools 'not violating the principles of civil and religious liberty by compelling any child in matters of religious exercises and instruction against the wishes of his parents and guardians, but securing to every Protestant child in the land the right of perusing the Bible' and Dawson in commending this passage wrote: 'the Report shows convincingly that a national and non-denominational institution is not necessarily godless'. On the subject of student accommodations his views were again in accord with those expressed in the 1853 prospectus: 'I attach much importance to the opinion expressed in the Report, that the residence of pupils within the College buildings is not of such utility as has hitherto been supposed. From my own observation of its effects I cannot doubt that College residence, is, even under the most favourable circumstances, more dangerous to the health, manners and morals of the Students than to reside in respectable private houses.'14 The English collegiate ideal after which Bethune had striven so earnestly is here not merely found to be unattainable but is abandoned as undesirable. On the other hand, a curriculum including languages, science, political economy, and career-

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adapted diplomas was representative of the most progressive educational thinking in North America.15 Dawson and the Governors of McGill College shared these views in a way in which no principal imported from Britain was likely to have done. When Mr. Justice Day corresponded with Mr. Dawson of Pictou in the summer of 1855, ^ cannot have taken him and his colleagues long to realize that they had found their man. THE INAUGURAL

ADDRESS

Dawson attended his first meeting of the board of governors on 25 October 1855 and said that he had asked for this early meeting in order that he might communicate to its members 'the views he had formed as to the alterations and additions which it might be expedient to make in [the College's] Educational Establishment'. He had already discussed his proposals with the Faculty of Arts and would propose them formally at the forthcoming meeting of Corporation, which by the 1854 Statutes had been given control of the academic affairs of the college. The board responded by inviting him to deliver an inaugural address, on which occasion a wider public might hear his educational philosophy. Viewed from the vantage point of more than a century's educational development, the inaugural address does not make for stimulating reading.16 It is only when its comments and proposals are compared with the advocacy of 'the inestimable advantages of a sound classical education' by Francis Lundy at the opening of McGill College twelve years earlier, and with the severely limited curriculum which had prevailed only four years previously, that we can realize how exciting the new prospects must have sounded. Dawson began modestly by decrying his youth (he was in fact thirtyfive ) and inexperience (he had Nova Scotia and New Brunswick behind him) and gave as his reason for accepting his new responsibilities his desire to pursue to best advantage 'in the chief city of British North America' his chosen roles of 'naturalist and educationist'. In the circumstances of young and growing countries, it was not necessary for him, he said, to dwell upon the truth that 'we should be content with nothing less than the best possible education o£ the greatest possible number'. Thus the beginning of the address clearly stated that any last lingering predilections for the English tradition of reserving the best in education for the best of the people was being set firmly aside in favour of the Scottish and American tradition of making whatever education could be provided available to all. From this introduction, Dawson went on to discuss in turn the major elements in the curriculum, each having its own relevance, he claimed, to the contemporary scene. He made first a

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respectful gesture towards the ancient languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and a rather more particular acknowledgement of the importance of the study of English, 'which bids fair, like the Greek of old, to be the principal vehicle for the world-wide diffusion of the highest ideas in science, in politics and religion'. Modern languages were obviously appropriate, and such subjects as logic and mental and moral philosophy were called invaluable means of intellectual discipline. The teaching of law was also to be extended and strengthened by the addition of new teachers. But then he turned to the sciences, and discussed their possibilities in turn. These studies, he said, 'independently of their intrinsic charms and value, have in our day established a connection so intimate with every department of mechanical, manufacturing and agricultural art, that without them the material welfare of nations cannot be sustained, much less advanced. I fear that the practical, busy world scarcely yet recognizes the dependence of art on abstract science.' Dawson used the word 'art' here to mean as Shakespeare did 'the mechanick arts'; in modern terms, he was arguing the case for pure science as against any tendency to value applied science only. For Dawson the sciences had a beauty, a sense of mystery and awe, that others have found more readily in what the humanist calls 'the arts'; but what undoubtedly came across to his audience in November 1855 was ms intention to provide a curriculum which would range from the classics to modern languages and the professions, and from physics to engineering. The educational program of McGill College was going to be closely related to the practical needs of life in British North America. The Governors of McGill College obviously liked what they heard, for they ordered that 'the Inaugural Address of the Principal be printed in pamphlet shape and widely circulated'. THE PROGRAM INITIATED

Having thus announced his program, Dawson plunged into the work. He himself was appointed professor of natural history and chemistry and taught natural history as an obligatory course for fourth-year students, though it could also be taken as an option in the earlier years. It embraced physical geology (with excursions in the Montreal area); zoology, including comparative physiology; botany, including the anatomy and physiology of plants; and mineralogy and geology, including palaeontology. The 1856 prospectus remarked that 'though this course is very comprehensive, the length of the Session will enable the subject to be treated with considerable detail', so the students may be thought to have been duly warned. Given Dawson's early interest in farming and rural education it may

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not be surprising that he asked to be appointed, along with his other duties and without salary, the professor of agriculture. He was careful to consult with the Board of Agriculture for Lower Canada to make sure that his courses could receive official recognition. He thereafter taught agriculture and agricultural chemistry as an optional subject in the third or fourth years. There was also a special two-year diploma course in this subject, and students could, if they wished, attend the agriculture lectures only, in which case ('to meet the convenience of persons engaged in farming') they had only to arrive in November when the agriculture classes started. For colleagues in the sciences, Dawson had William Sutherland teaching chemistry ('imperative' in the third year, optional in other years) and Henry Aspinwall Howe teaching mathematics and natural philosophy (physics). Sutherland was borrowed from the Medical Faculty and Howe was rector of the high school. Howe's load must have been a particularly heavy one, since in addition to his duties in the high school, he taught mathematics to students in all four years, and the natural philosophy experimental course to the third- or fourth-year students. But this could be only a temporary measure, and in October 1857 Dawson reported to the board that he had received 'the most satisfactory testimonials' relating to Alexander Johnson of Trinity College, Dublin, and he proposed Johnson's appointment as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. Johnson arrived shortly thereafter and was to remain a professor of the university for the next forty-six years; he proved to be, if not the most docile, probably the most able of all Dawson's early colleagues. In addition, Davies was teaching classics, a young man called Gould was teaching history, and W. T. Leach continued as professor of English literature, with responsibility also for logic and mental and moral philosophy. He was the only remaining link with the Bethune days, and was dean of arts as well as vice-principal. The prospectus informed parents and prospective students alike that 'The Professors in the Faculty combine the tutorial method with the ordinary manner of collegiate instruction by lecture—an advantage which deserves to be noted, inasmuch as the difficulties of the Student are in this manner much more readily removed, and, since the progress and deficiency of each Student is accurately marked, cannot, as is usually the case when great numbers are in attendance, escape the observation of the Professors.' In 1856-57 there were only thirty-eight students in the Faculty of Arts, so the opportunities to escape the observation of the professors must have been few indeed. The examination papers of the i86os show that there was considerable emphasis on the acquisition of factual information, but nevertheless it is fair to say that from 1856

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onwards, McGill was offering instruction in a wide range of subjects in the Faculty of Arts at a thoroughly respectable level. By 1860 the faculty's enrolment had climbed to around fifty. The college had obviously come a long way from the time when it could be stigmatized as 'not better than a third-rate grammar school', and this began to reflect itself in slow but steadily increasing enrolments. A NEW T E C H N O L O G Y

The most important event in the life of Montreal in the middle decade of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the coming of the railways. What it meant by way of release from winter's imprisonment is well illustrated by reference to Dawson's celebrated journey to Toronto in the Christmas holidays of 1855-56. The circumstances were that in the ever necessary search for funds it was decided that Dawson should visit the government, at that time in Toronto, and solicit the interest of Sir Edmund Head and the members influential in the assembly. The first bridge across the St. Lawrence was as yet only in the planning stage, and the steam ferry was, of course, laid up for the winter. But the Indians of Caughnawaga were still running a canoe ferry, and this Dawson used even though the river was already dangerous with floating ice. From Caughnawaga he could get one of James Ferrier's trains to Rouses Point where a makeshift bridge over Lake Champlain gave rather uncertain access to the Vermont and Canada Railway, which would take him by way of Burlington and Rutland to Albany. Two years earlier, ten local lines had been brought together to form the New York Central Railway and by this means he could get across the state to Buffalo, though no doubt there were a number of wearisome carriage-changes along the way. From Buffalo the Great Western Railway had only the previous March begun to run trains across the new Niagara bridge to Hamilton, but the line from Hamilton to Toronto had been completed less than a month, and for lack of a terminal in the city the passengers were set down on the outskirts and had to complete their journey by coach. Dawson's comment on this protracted journey in the depth of winter was characterized by remarkable understatement: 'The weather was stormy and the roads blocked with snow, so that the journey to Toronto occupied five days, giving me a shorter time there than I had anticipated.'17 Yet only a few months later, it was possible to walk down to the Bonaventure Station and take a train direct to Toronto and expect to arrive in the heart of the city in a mere ten hours. The coming of the railways had an exhilarating effect on Montreal,

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and there was enormous popular interest in the subject. Dawson himself had hoped before coming to McGill to have a share in the surveys which were planned for the Intercolonial line to connect Montreal and Halifax, so it was fitting that he should arrange that, among the thirty popular lectures to be given during the winter of 1856—57 by the principal and his colleagues, some were devoted to the highly fashionable subject of railroad engineering. They were given by an outstanding authority on the subject, Thomas Coltrin Keefer,18 and this initiative was followed up the next year by the appointment of Mark Hamilton to be both professor of civil engineering and also professor of road and railroad engineering. The appointments were held jointly and presumably the intention was to separate them later, as the demand for the course grew. The Civil Engineering Diploma was advertised for the first time as an option in arts in the 1857 prospectus, and the courses were described more fully in the issue of the following year. The number of registrations began in 1857 with two, increased to six the following year, and soon grew to a group of about fifteen students registered in the different years of this specialty. Everything seemed to indicate a modest but steady development. The India Office in London agreed to approve the McGill Civil Engineering Diploma as a qualification acceptable by the India Civil Service, and this was welcomed as a mark of international recognition. But then the initial enthusiasm for railways faltered; the general economy went into a decline, and the number of registrations in the specialty instead of growing began to decrease. In 1862 only three students elected for engineering, in 1863 only one. The board was facing at that time one of its more severe financial crises, and it reluctantly decided that Montreal was not yet ready for the bold advance which McGill had made. Hamilton's appointments were terminated as of the end of the 1862—63 session. Sixteen students graduated from the program. Ten years were to pass before the courses could be restarted, and then the program was in general engineering. Railway engineering as a specialty was not to be attempted again until after the turn of the century. But the story of this premature effort illustrates the readiness of Dawson and his board of governors to meet the developing needs of their age. T H E M G G I L L NORMAL SCHOOL

Dawson was unsuccessful in the object of his visit to Toronto, which was to get a grant from public funds in support of McGill College, but he did not come away empty-handed. Rather, he returned to Montreal laden with new responsibilities.

McGill Normal School, 1875

William Hicks

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Sir Edmund Head had a particular concern for public education. In his previous appointment he had taken great interest in the work of the New Brunswick Commission, attending its meetings and sometimes joining in the discussion. By reason of the Durham Report and those of Jean-Baptiste Meilleur, the first superintendent of education, he was well aware of the difficulties and problems which had plagued the institution of public education in Canada East, particularly since the time of the Lower Canada Rebellion. The urgent need, as it had been in Nova Scotia and again in New Brunswick, was to take steps to train teachers by the provision of one or more normal schools. The necessary legislation had been passed; it now needed implementation. The new superintendent was Pierre-Joseph Chauveau, the former provincial secretary and the future premier of the Province of Quebec. But Chauveau could do little on his own, and Sir Edmund urged Dawson to take the matter up with his governors and to enter into discussions with Chauveau. Dawson had gained from his Nova Scotia days an understanding of the many disadvantages under which the local schoolmasters, and even more the local schoolmistresses, had to continue their work. When he organized for them conferences at which they could receive a little training, exchange confidences and ideas, and above all gain a sense of the importance of their task, the ready response was in large measure due to the sense that someone had a concern for their many problems. One teacher who attended such a conference in Pictou in 1851 wrote: 'I have returned with a feeling of delight that those who have minds to appreciate an enlightened enterprise, have thought highly of the profession of teaching, and have given their talents to it.'19 Dawson did indeed think highly of the profession of teaching, and he had the gift of helping others to think highly of it also. He had little difficulty in persuading his board of governors of the importance of the subject. Charles Dewey Day had introduced in the House of Assembly the Education Act of 1841; Ferrier, Dunkin, and Ramsay had been involved with the High School of Montreal for years and were well familiar with the plight of English language schools both in the city and in the other anglophone districts of the province. Dawson received every encouragement to hold his discussions with Chauveau, and the two men quickly reached an agreement. The legislation had empowered the superintendent to draw up the regulations governing the establishment of normal schools. He decided there should be three, two French and Catholic, one English and Protestant, and that McGill College should be charged with the superintendence of the anglophone school. There had been a commendable attempt to meet the need for Englishlanguage teacher training by the Colonial Church and School Society,

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which had brought William Hicks from England to be principal of a normal school and oversee the complementary model school. In December 1856 negotiations between McGill College and the society were satisfactorily concluded. The new McGill Normal School would take over the current enrolment in the society's institution on Bonaventure Street, and William Hicks would become one of the professors. Dawson appealed to his mentor, Egerton Ryerson, for help in choosing a principal for the new institution; Ryerson responded by recommending a good man on his own staff, Sampson Paul Robins, to be a professor but strongly urged Dawson to take on the principalship himself.20 With considerable reluctance he agreed to do so, but he regretted that this new responsibility would eat into his summer vacations, when he hoped to continue his own scientific research. He was also to lecture in the normal school on the subject, as one might expect, of natural history. The school opened on 3 March 1857, just eighteen months after Dawson had arrived in Montreal. At the opening session he gave an address in which he drew attention to the fact that the school was a Protestant institution, drawing its support and depending for its effectiveness on all the denominations. While instruction was to be in the English language, nevertheless the French language would be taught also, just as in the Jacques Cartier and the Laval schools the instruction was to be in French but the English language would be taught in addition. He also remarked that of the forty students enrolled, thirty-five were women and that this was the first provision of professional training for women in the English-speaking community of Montreal and he expressed satisfaction that those who had entered the school were candidates of such excellent quality. Finally he drew attention to McGill's interest in this venture: 'The University has sought this connection, not that it might derive any material advantages from it, but because it desired to extend its influence for good throughout the country, and to make it felt in the Common Schools; and because it wished to diffuse among all ranks of the people, a desire for university education, and to give them the means of its attainment.'21 The educational missionary was still strong in John William Dawson, and in speaking of the schools' graduates he used that same term: its students, he said, made it possible for 'a good and uniform system to be introduced at a moderate cost into the city schools . . . and its trained teachers have gone out as educational missionaries into the country districts'.22 The McGill Normal School proved to be the beginning of a major contribution to public education in the old Province of Lower Canada. First as the McGill Normal School, later as the Macdonald School for

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Teachers, then the Institute of Education, and finally the Faculty of Education, the effort has been continuous and of high intent, and has provided leadership not only for the community out of which it grew but also for the wider provincial and Canadian constituencies which have experienced its influence. There is one further point which should be made with regard to the normal school. It has been pointed out that the board of governors and William Dawson were very much of one mind from the beginning, but it should also be remembered that he gained a notable degree of support from his academic staff. There was one strong disagreement in his later years, which will be discussed in its proper place, but for the rest Dawson and his colleagues were remarkably of one mind. It would have been easy for him, as a strong-minded and able person, to have swept along regardless of opinions around him, but there is good evidence that from the beginning he consulted with his colleagues as regards major developments. In the matter of the normal school, for example, it was proposed at first to make the board of governors the governing body of the school, but Dawson preferred to have Corporation named to that responsibility. Corporation included the board but it also included the representatives of the faculties and the graduates elected to be fellows of the university. It is therefore significant that Dawson chose to have the administration of the normal school remitted to the care of the body with the wider membership. This attitude accords with many other instances where he chose to work closely with faculties and Corporation. SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

The provisions of the 1854 Statutes relating to Corporation provided two further opportunities. When Dawson adumbrated the changes he thought desirable at his first board meeting, he remarked that he would not discuss them with the board at length, since he noted from the statutes that the overseeing of matters academic was reserved to Corporation. This provision determined the bicameral character of McGill's governance, and thereby it provided for the direct participation of the academic staff in the administration of the university, a circumstance which was to have considerable influence on its subsequent development, particularly in the later periods. The 1854 Statutes were largely the work of Christopher Dunkin and he was familiar with the pattern of university governance at Harvard and in the United States generally, where all the legal powers are retained by a small controlling corporation

Sampson Paul Robins

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and all other authority is exercised by delegation only. Whatever may have been the history and experience elsewhere, at McGill the institution of the Corporation, or Senate, began as a liberalizing measure and has continued to be of that character ever since.23 The other matter concerns a subject which becomes relevant at this point, though its outworking carries the story far beyond Dawson's early years. The statute in question provides that the membership of Corporation should include the principal of any college affiliated to McGill. Seeing that in 1854 the college was moribund and that its own future was still in much doubt, it was an act of remarkable faith on anyone's part to envisage a time when other institutions would be prepared to accept its leadership and would seek to strengthen their academic enterprise by entering into a form of affiliation. For Dawson, however, it meant another situation where a good deal of his thinking had been anticipated and provided for. The references to affiliations opened up the possibility of what he had long believed to be the ideal—a comprehensive educational system such as had been conceived in his grand plan for Nova Scotia and elaborated in the New Brunswick Commission Report. In Canada East, where the control of education was in the hands of a Catholic and francophone majority, obviously such a system could not be achieved in any official structure, but the possibility of a voluntary association, made possible by the provisions of the 1854 Statutes, appealed all the more strongly.24 The college was stronger and beginning to be confident; the normal school had recently been added, and through it, if not organically nevertheless educationally, the Protestant school system was closely attached to McGill. The High School of Montreal was already a department of McGill College. If then other grammar schools and academies could be brought within the same unity of purpose, the system would have been in large measure achieved. Dawson believed strongly in its benefits. In his letter attached to the New Brunswick Commission Report, he had commented: 'The unity of plan and operation which will be secured by adopting the system proposed will remedy many of the most serious evils affecting the Schools and the College. . . . The Schools will be provided with better instructed teachers, and the course of instruction in them will be rendered more thorough, while the pupils will have a greater tendency than at present to press forward into higher institutions and will be better prepared for entering them. The sphere of each institution from the Parish School to the College, will be better defined, and the work of all therefore better done.525 It was these same benefits which Dawson saw might accrue to a voluntary anglophone association, and he was ready to encourage any

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institution which might apply. In this way, even in his early years, McGill College took a position of educational leadership for the whole anglophone community of Canada East, and in his later years, for communities far beyond the boundaries of McGilFs own province. The origins of Bishop's College as a definitely Anglican foundation alternative to McGill ruled out the possibility that this institution might be drawn into the association, but in the instance of a number of local academies and of any theological colleges which might be established in Montreal, the prospects were considerably more promising. Academies were colleges created by local associations, often with a religious denominational support, to make good the lack of anglophone secondary schools, of which there were very few outside the island of Montreal. Once brought into being, however, these institutions often went further than the normal high school by offering a broader curriculum and by providing a social and often religious education as well. In two or three instances, they also surpassed the high school level academically, and were able to offer some of the McGill arts curriculum at a level satisfactory to the faculty. The students in these institutions, if they had been granted affiliate status by McGill, were able to take the university-level courses offered in their own college, and then enrol for the remaining courses in the faculty on payment of course tuition fees only. They then sat the McGill examination and received the McGill degree. Since the university inspected the institution and reviewed its teaching strength before conferring affiliation, and since that status could be used to good effect in institutional advertising, the scheme had considerable influence in raising educational standards. In 1864 a further provision was introduced whereby a college academy of the second class was affiliated to the Faculty of Arts only, whereas an institution of the first class could be affiliated to the other faculties also. St. Francis College at Richmond, Quebec, was the first such institution to seek affiliation, which after lengthy investigation was accorded in September i858.26 The college continued to offer subjects in the first two years of the arts courses until 1900, when changing social conditions led to its becoming a high school. Morrin College, a Presbyterian institution, was founded in Quebec City in 1861 and immediately applied for affiliation, a request which was granted in 1864 at the level of 'a college of the first class'.27 The institution continued in this association for thirty-seven years, and produced forty-six graduates at the B. A. level, one M.A. graduate, and one B.C.L. In 1888 Morrin was further recognized as an Affiliated Theological College. When, however, the Presbyterian denomination decided it could not support a fourth college (it already had one in Toronto and one in Montreal in addition to Queen's University in Kingston), the institution had to change the pattern of its

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operation, and the affiliation was surrendered with mutual regret in 1899. Stanstead Wesleyan College traced its origins to a schoolhouse erected in 1817, and blossomed into a seminary in i83i. 28 It featured at different times a teachers' preparatory course, a school of fine arts and music, and a business college, as well as its regular academic course. It was accepted for affiliation with the Arts Faculty at McGill in 1889, but as the educational needs of the surrounding district were met in other ways, it too adapted to the times and became a private boys' school. A parallel development was that four major Protestant denominations were strongly represented in Montreal and decided to build theological colleges for the training of their respective ministers in close proximity to the university's campus. Each then sought affiliation. The Congregationalists arrived first, in 1864, and built their college on McTavish Street, where Peterson Hall was later built. The Presbyterians followed a year later and raised their building in 1873 ori tne east s^e °f McTavish Street; a part of their college survives as Morrice Hall. The Methodists began teaching in 1873, w^re incorporated in 1879, anc^ erected their first building in 1883. Their second, erected in 1913, later became Wilson Hall. The Anglicans also began theological teaching in 1873, and their college was likewise incorporated in 1879. The home they occupied in 1881 was on Dorchester Street, but they later moved to University Street. All four colleges gained affiliation with McGill, the Congregational in 1865, the Presbyterian in 1867, the Methodist in 1879, and the Anglican in 1880. The theological students took their arts courses in McGill and until the First World War constituted a sizeable proportion of the student body of the Arts Faculty.29 Affiliation with the university safeguarded academic standards in the colleges and denominational ministries, and the colleges in return gave McGill additional vitality as well as the immense benefit of the goodwill of the major elements in the Protestant community. Further afield, McGill was accorded increased recognition in the other provinces because it was a strong centre of theological education. The growing academic stature of McGill continued to gain recognition in lands far beyond the borders of Quebec. This was well illustrated in 1899 when Vancouver College in Vancouver, British Columbia, applied for affiliation with McGill for the first year in arts, and in 1906 when Victoria College in Victoria, British Columbia, sought affiliation for the first and second years of arts and the first year of applied science. In the latter year, Alberta College in Edmonton was affiliated for the first and second years of arts. From these extraterritorial affiliations major developments were to take their course, culminating in the emergence of major universities.30 There was another very important expression of the associative edu-

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cational system. In January 1858 Dawson reported to Corporation that Oxford University in England had decided to establish school examinations whereby successful candidates would receive the title of Associate in Arts, and he proposed that McGill do the same thing for Canadian schools. Corporation assented and the first McGill school examinations were held that same year. Schools which prepared their pupils for these examinations were known as affiliated schools and by the mid-eighties the distinction had become known and valued all across the continent, since the Prince of Wales College, Prince Edward Island, and the High School, Westminster, British Columbia, were both included in the lists, as well as many schools located in the Maritimes and in Ontario. The majority of the schools were, however, in Quebec and academies at Lachute, Knowlton, Cowansville, and Hatley are typical examples. The provision of the school examinations contributed greatly to the establishment of acceptable academic standards in all of Canada and particularly in newly established institutions in far-away places. Dawson's vision of a voluntary associative system of English-language educational institutions accomplished a large part of what he had in mind when he served as superintendent of education in Nova Scotia and as commissioner in New Brunswick, but it was realized on a much larger scale in the new Dominion of Canada. PROGRESS REPORT

In 1865, just ten years after Dawson had come to McGill, the 'Governors, Principal and Fellows of McGill College and University' presented a petition to Viscount Monck, the governor general. By way of introduction they said, 'In an educational point of view, the growth of the University under its new Charter has surpassed the most sanguine expectations of its friends.' That was a claim which could be made with some justice. As has been seen, the college was reformed and reoriented by the board of governors in the years 1852-55, but although the planning was excellent, by the time Dawson arrived there had been little achieved. His account of his first impression of McGill reveals how little progress had been made: 'I first saw [the college] in October 1855. Materially it was represented by two blocks of unfurnished and partly ruinous buildings, standing amidst a wilderness of excavators' and masons' rubbish, overgrown with weeds and bushes. The grounds were unfenced, and pastured at will by herds of cattle, which not only cropped the grass, but browsed on the shrubs, leaving unhurt only one great elm, which still stands as "the founder's tree". . . . The only access from town was by a circuitous and ungraded cart-track, almost impassible at night. The buildings had

McGill College, c. 1860

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been abandoned by the new Board [of governors] and the classes of the Faculty of Arts were held in the upper storey of a brick building, the lower part of which was occupied by the High School.'31 Ten years later, things were very different. A great deal of attention, and small but timely amounts of money, had been devoted by Dawson and by various friends to the improvement of the grounds. Shrubs and trees had been planted (some of them taken from James McGill's garden around the Burnside house), a neat fence had been erected, and a labourer engaged to assist in keeping 'the park', as it was called, in good order.32 Even more striking was the change in the appearance of the college buildings. The city of Montreal had been persuaded to pay compensation for the damages its blasting had caused to the roofs, and these had been put in good order, and a handsome wooden portico had been added to complete the fagade of the Arts Building.33 In 1860 the Arts Faculty had moved back from Burnside Hall, and had reoccupied the college buildings. Shortly thereafter even more encouraging developments had taken place. Corporation had sadly recorded earlier in the year that the college had been unable to extend an invitation to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales during his recent visit to Montreal because of 'the want of any room proper for the purpose, and we would remark that the present occasion has very plainly shown the disadvantage under which the University labors from the scattered condition of its buildings and the want of an adequate Convocation Hall'.34 The implied plea was not to go unanswered. Within six months William Molson came forward with a generous offer to build a West Wing to match the East Wing and to contain a convocation hall, library, and museum. While the work was in progress he further agreed at his wife's suggestion to complete the original intention and to supply the corridor buildings which would connect the wings to the central building. Thus by 1865 the college possessed a harmonious suite of arts buildings on its own campus of which it could be modestly proud. The educational developments which had taken place during that decade were also a matter of encouragement. The gift of Molson Hall had not been the first of that family's donations. Three years earlier, John Molson and his brothers, William and Thomas, had subscribed a handsome $20,000 in support of the chair of English literature. (They were later to increase the amount to $40,000.) This was the first major benefaction to the university, since the original bequest of James McGill. Later princely sums from others may have exceeded in amount the donations of the Molson family, but in terms of priority, of timeliness, and of continuity of support stretching as the donations do over more than a century and continuing into the present time, the generosity of

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the Molson family to McGill College and University has been of a particular quality. The Molson support of the first named chair in the university and the long series of smaller donations quietly given to library and other funds made an invaluable contribution to the quality of education in the Arts Faculty during Dawson's early years. Molson Hall provided more adequate room for the library, which had grown steadily during the intervening years and was becoming quite respectable. Dawson had assembled new geological and natural history collections to take the place of those partially destroyed by a fire at Burnside Hall in 1856. These collections were housed in one of the corridor buildings together with a remarkable collection of shells, gathered by the Reverend Philip Carpenter, a noted Montreal naturalist, and presented to the university by Mr. and Mrs. George Frothingham. These collections and the opportunity to house them more adequately had given further opportunities for improvements in teaching. Alexander Johnson, the professor of natural philosophy, was steadily acquiring a respectable range of scientific apparatus,35 and Thomas Sterry Hunt, a member of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, and a name of some renown in chemistry, had been engaged as a part-time professor in that subject. Hunt's appointment was to continue until his departure to become professor of geology at the Massachussets Institute of Technology in 1868. Another notable appointment was that of Dr. Charles Smallwood as professor of meteorology. Smallwood had been observing the weather and related phenomena since 1833, and his contribution to the scientific activity taking place on the campus during Dawson's first decade was valuable support for the growing reputation of the college. The number of bursaries and exhibitions available at this time was still not very great, though donors who contributed $600 were permitted to award free places up to a value of $300 for one year. Larger sums, however, entitled the donor to award a specified number of free places in perpetuity. In a few years, as the number of past donations grew, and the student body remained relatively small, this system was going to prove embarrassing, since it threatened to deprive the college of any income from student fees; but at this stage the desire was to increase the number of these free places, and so encourage the matriculation of more students. An encouraging development, despite the relatively small sums of money involved, was that several gold medals with which to honour students who had achieved highly had been donated to provide the stimulus of academic competition. In 1857 the principal reported that Mr. Henry Chapman wished to provide each year a gold medal for the outstanding student in the graduating class of the Arts Faculty. In 1864 he reported on three further gold medals. The Shakespeare Gold Medal

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had been endowed by a group of Montreal citizens, who wished, as they said, to show their approval of the foundation and the work of the college, to encourage students 'not to neglect the study of the language and literature of England', and to commemorate the tercentenary of the birth of Shakespeare. The presentation of the endowment was made very appropriately at a special meeting of the board on 23 April 1864. That same year Mrs. John Molson established the Anne Molson Gold Medal in physical science and in mathematics, and Sir William Logan endowed the Logan Gold Medal in geology and the natural sciences. In the Faculty of Law Judge Torrance announced his intention of endowing a gold medal in Roman law in memory of his deceased wife Elizabeth, and the members of the Medical Faculty subscribed to endow a gold medal in memory of Andrew Fernando Holmes, their first dean, to be given to the outstanding member of the graduating class. The endowment of these medals indicated (as the Shakespeare Committee had made a point of saying) the appreciation of the English-speaking community for the work of the college and its staff, and in this sense they represented, as it were, an accolade earned by 'the Governors, Principal and Fellows' of the university cooperatively. They set a seal of approval on the effort of the preceding decade.36 The two professional faculties had in one important respect made even greater progress than the Faculty of Arts. Whereas the numbers of students in arts rose in the ten years from 38 to 68, in law the numbers had tripled from 15 to 48, and in medicine they had grown from 57 to 177. Both faculties had improved the quality of their operation. Law had removed from rented space in Molsons Bank to the rooms vacated by arts on the second floor of Burnside Hall, and this had enabled more money to be spent on salaries and in the library. The Medical School had persuaded the governors to buy the Cote Street property from the colleagues who rented it to the faculty, and to undertake extensive repairs and enlarge the rear premises. The board would have preferred to move the faculty on to the college campus, but the faculty was not yet ready for that development. Nevertheless both the Medical School and the Law Faculty had benefited greatly from the general progress of McGill College. Important as the personal contributions of Dawson had been, the board of governors had been by no means regulated to a merely titular position. Rather, the governors were highly appreciative of Dawson because he was implementing most effectively the ideas which they shared in common. This was well illustrated by their minute of 13 March 1861. A committee of the board had recommended a number of modest salary increases, including a proportionate augmentation in Dawson's salary to $2,500, 'not as considering even that sum adequate, but by

William Molson, 1864

Molson Hall and the Arts Building facade, c. 1875

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way of acknowledgement on the part of the Board, of their sense of the extreme value of his services'. Dawson demurred, not because he thought the proposed salary inappropriate for his position, but because he thought the additional funds could be better used to provide for the appointment of a professor of practical chemistry and botany, or (if that were not yet possible) to provide 'such appliances and aids to my work as I have now to dispense with or procure for myself. But the committee held to their recommendation, saying that their judgement 'as to what was due from the Board to Dr. Dawson is in no way shaken, indeed, is on the contrary rather confirmed by this new proof of his disinterested zeal for the welfare of the University'. It was true to say that not only with regard to the college but also with regard to the man the governors had chosen as principal, the results of the first decade had indeed 'surpassed the most sanguine expectations'.

NOTES 1. See his account of the family's material circumstances and social standing in a letter to his future wife, 22 October 1847, MUA 1377/156/16. 2. 'Incidents of a Life', MUA 2211/13; in part published in an article by Marjorie Whitelaw, Dalhousie Review 53 (Autumn 1973) : 50119; 'Memorials of God's Mercies', MUA 1421, transcribed by Liana Vardi, 1976. 3. Fifty Years, pp. 20-21. 4. Psalm 104:24. Dawson varied the King James Version to accord more closely with the original Hebrew. 5. 'That boys should in Halifax or elsewhere spend six or seven years upon Latin and Greek, and then four more in College partly occupied with the same languages, is a waste of human life adapted neither to the circumstances or the prosperity of Nova Scotia. . . . If Dalhousie College acquires usefulness and eminence it will be not by an imitation of Oxford, but as an institution of science and practical intelligence.' Cited by Robin S. Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada (Toronto, 1976), p. 33. Alexander Skakel of the Royal Grammar School, Montreal, was also including 'natural philosophy' in his curriculum by the first decade of the nineteenth century. 6. George Patterson, The History of Pictou County (1877, reprint ed. 1916), p. 207. 7. Fifty Years, p. 39. 8. The Principles of Geology was published in 1830-33. The work was revolutionary in that it enlarged the time-scale of western thought beyond all recognition. The Elements followed in 1838 and the combined volume in 1839. 9. S.B. Frost, 'A Transatlantic Wooing', Dalhousie Review 58, no. 3 (Autumn 1978) : 458—70. 10. Writing in October 1850, Dawson reported: 'Between the 27th June and the 5th of August I held meetings and visited Schools in the

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Counties of Sydney, Guysborough, Richmond, Cape Breton and Inverness. On the 2Oth of August I began a second circuit. . . . In these two cities I have visited 178 Schools, held twenty-one Public Meetings, and delivered thirty-five Evening Lectures. The counties of Pictou, Colchester and Cumberland, still remain to be visited, and I have advertised the meetings for these to be held in the month of November.' 11. John P. Vaillancourt, 'John William Dawson, Education Missionary in Nova Scotia' (M.Ed, thesis, Dalhousie University, 1973). 12. MUA 1377/156/45, letter to Margaret Mercer, 30 August 1843. 13. 'Report of the Commission appointed under the Act of Assembly relating to King's College Fredericton', New Brunswick House of Assembly Journal, 1854, Appendix A, pp. 183-202. 14. It was a subject on which he was later to change his opinion. See p. 288. 15. The commissioners took the precaution of submitting this scheme to Dr. Wayland, president of Brown University, Rhode Island, 'confessedly among the ripest scholars and most distinguished educationists of the age' and one who had 'written and done more on the subject of Collegiate and University reform than any other man in America', and gained his full approbation. 16. Addresses, item i. 17. Fifty Years, p. 102. 18. Keefer had published The Philosophy of Railways in 1849, and he became a highly regarded consultant on the subject and also an outstanding hydrological engineer. Unfortunately nothing more is known of Mark Hamilton. 19. Nova Scotia House of Assembly Journal and Proceedings, 1852, Appendix 2, p. 80. 20. Hicks succeeded Dawson as principal in 1870 and when he retired in 1884 Robins became principal and continued until 1907, thus giving fifty years of service to the one institution. 21. Journal of Education, March 1857, p. 47. 22. Fifty Years, p. 119. 23. J.H. S. Reid's essay 'Origins and Portents' in A Place of Liberty, ed. George Whalley (Toronto, 1964), is highly critical of this system of university government, but fails to give sufficient recognition to the fact that, given the historical circumstance, there was no other way in which institutions of higher learning could have developed—which is why, starting from many different situations, they have all tended to arrive at the same general pattern and have continued their evolution from that point along remarkably similar paths. 24. The statutes included chapter 11 which gave regulations for the control of such affiliations; it refers to 'any regularly constituted School of Theology, or other Collegiate institution in this Province'. 25. Report of the commission as in note 13, pp. 201-2. 26. See Edith S. Nicholson, 'St. Francis College', McGill News, Autumn 1937, PP- 31-3327. Laura Isobel Bancroft, 'Morrin College: An Historical and Sociological Study', a Bachelor Degree memoir (Universite Laval, 1950).

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28. Joan Macdonald, The Stanstead College Story, privately published (Stanstead, 1977). 29. The approximate figures cited by Dawson in 1887 were 150 theological students compared with 600 university students in all faculties; but some of the theological students are included in both lists. 'The University in Relation to Professional Education', annual university lecture, 1887, p. 2; Addresses, item 13. 30. For the story of McGill's role in the founding of the Universities of British Columbia, Victoria, Vancouver, and Alberta, see references to H. M. Tory in volume two of this work. 31. Fifty Years, p. 98. 32. J. W. Dawson, 'Notes on Trees on the Grounds of McGill University', The Canadian Record of Science, December 1891, pp. 407-38 (Addresses, item 18). 33. The design was not according to OstelPs original plans but was a new concept, the work of J.W. Hopkins, an architect prominent in the mid-century. Some expert opinion preferred its elegance to the nowfamiliar heavy stone one, erected in 1925. See the illustration, p. 204. 34. M-Corp. 24 October 1860. 35. Johnson had inherited an extensive set of apparatus from Alexander Skakel, but he was incorrigibly importunate for its improvement. While in London in 1861 he saw some bargains in books and apparatus which he could not resist and he expended £10.6.0; the governors reimbursed him with a warning that they would not do so again. But two years later he bought unauthorized 'lunar photographs' for his astronomy class, and again the governors paid but repeated their warning. In 1867 Johnson was back saying that he needed $4,400 to equip his laboratory as it should be done. By 1883 Dawson could describe the Natural Philosophy Department's collection of apparatus, as 'probably the best of the kind in the country'. Annual university lecture, 1882-83, p. 6; Addresses, item 8. 36. The Prince of Wales left a donation for the college and it was determined to use that money also for a gold medal in the Faculty of Arts: thus this medal was somewhat different from the others in origin, but it too was in a sense recognition of the standing of the college by officialdom.

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CHAPTER

IX MATTERS FINANCIAL

he progress of McGill College during the Dawson years was no more smooth and uniform than that of any other similar institution. While there were remarkably few personal or organizational tensions, there was a constant sense of financial constraint. Consequently, the old Puritan ideal of plain living and high thinking was much in vogue and contributed largely to the character of the college. From time to time, however, the situation became critical, and then other expedients had to be employed. R E C U R R E N T CRISES

The business policies of the board of governors had proved their general soundness during the years following the amendment of the charter. A tight control of expenditures and the prudent exploitation of the estate below Sherbrooke Street had brought the college from near bankruptcy to a modest condition of solvency, but these practices unless supplemented by other resources could not hope to achieve anything more, and indeed could not prevent the periodic occurrence of great financial stringency. Any funds for growth or for new ventures could only be obtained from private donations, and generous as the friends of McGill College were, reliance upon this source of income was inevitably to prove

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from time to time embarrassing. The surprising thing is that those occasions were not more frequent, and that for the most part they were faced and overcome with remarkable equanimity. In 1862, for example, there were a number of signs that a period of particular difficulty was approaching. W.T. Leach had at last decided to resign his parish incumbency and to devote all his energies to McGill. He was at this time filling two chairs, English and moral philosophy, and was also dean of arts and vice-principal. The board had earlier wanted him to accept a full-time appointment, but in agreeing to do so he asked that his salary be raised to £500 a year. He was told that while his request was recognized as reasonable, his salary could for the present be only £400, but 'with an understanding that as soon as the University funds enabled the Board to raise the amount to £500 per annum it shall be done'. At that same time, an estimate of $1,200 was received for introducing gas lighting into the college, but it was decided that the state of the finances permitted the service to be provided for Sterry Hunt's chemistry laboratory only: the rest of the college was to await more affluent times.1 Similarly, in February 1863 the Medical School was told it must pay for its own property repairs, and that there would be no grant that year for prizes. The Law Faculty was given the same message about prizes, and the Arts Faculty was also told that there would be no money to print the usual examination papers, and that no more books were to be bought for the library without specific permission from the governors. Even more distressing was the termination of Professor Hamilton's appointment in civil engineering. In these severe circumstances, it was decided that building lots on the west side of University Street above Sherbrooke were to be sold, and to increase the possibility of sales, the deeds were not to bear the clauses prohibiting manufacturing premises. Fortunately, the lots sold quickly at good prices to occupiers desiring high-class residential properties, and so the threat to the McGill amenities passed, but the incident is a measure of the severity of the crisis. Gas was finally introduced into all the college buildings in October 1864 (on the strength of the income from the new capital and that of further projected sales) and a new scale of salaries for professors was promulgated, but only as targets to be attempted rather than as amounts promised. Dawson, who was to receive an increase in his several capacities of $1,100, asked that a rider be added that all other salaries be brought up to the desired level before that of the chair of chemistry, which he himself occupied. (Hunt's professorship was an associate or supplementary one.) The board also resolved to create no additional professorial chairs unless they were accompanied with sufficient endowment to sustain them.

Burnside Hall

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HIGH SCHOOL R E L I N Q U I S H E D

About the same time the High School Department began to be recognized as constituting an increasing burden upon the rest of the McGill enterprise. The High School Board was therefore separated from the McGill Board and operated for several years as a separate venture, but it continued to accumulate deficits. In 1869 it was agreed that, since a Board of Protestant School Commissioners had been instituted, and since this body was prepared to take over the high school and operate it with public funds, the school should be relinquished and Burnside Hall should be sold to the Protestant commissioners for $36,000. The commissioners, while agreeing to take the school, were not prepared to go beyond $24,000 for the building and its site, and the board had to settle for the lower amount. It was regrettable to have to surrender such a significant part of McGill history, but it relieved the board of a persistent drain upon its own funds and provided capital, as we shall see, for much needed developments elsewhere. ACADEMIC SALARIES

For a while the accounts balanced but by 1873 new problems had arisen. In January of that year the college professors, excluding the principal, drew attention to the distressing loss of the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar since the salaries had been last reconsidered, ten years earlier, and they asked for a cost-of-living adjustment. They estimated they had suffered a one-third decline in the worth of their income. In March the board replied that it was sympathetic, but it did not have the resources to respond. In April the professors (remembering how well the board had done with sales on upper University Street) came back with the suggestion that the strip of land fronting on Sherbrooke Street should be sold, and the sum realized should be added to the general endowment to enable the salaries to be increased. For once the academic peace was gravely disturbed. The board took great exception to the professors' proposal. The governors thought the professors' letter 'unseemly, indecorous and an unwarrantable interference with the functions of the Governors' and said that another such communication would be read as the equivalent of a letter of resignation. But the board's indignation was more expressive than long-lasting. In June the professors received some alleviation from a grant recently assigned to McGill by the provincial government from the newly established Marriage Licence Fund, and the board also agreed to set up a salaries committee.2 On the first day of November, it was announced that various salary increases

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would be granted, but the professors were to understand that these must be the last; no further increases could be contemplated. Of course, they were not the last. Eight years later, in June 1881, another financial storm hit McGill College, and it was estimated that in the following year the university would suffer a deficit of $6,400. Again prizes were not to be given, the payment of special examination fees to professors was discontinued, library book-funds were severely cut, the gymnastic classes were discontinued, and most drastic of all, the salaries over $1,000 were to be cut by 12^2 per cent. The only recourse open to the board was a public appeal for funds and a reconsideration of all its disposable resources. Once more the proposal to sell building lots on the Sherbrooke frontage was raised. In response to the appeal Mr. R. Campbell gave $1,000, Mr. G.A. Drummond gave $4,000, and Mr. Hugh McLennan gave $5,000, all on the understanding that the frontage would not be built upon, in perpetuity, except for university purposes. If ever the governors did decide to sell that land for building purposes, the university would be under obligation to refund the donations. Thus a distinct gain resulted from this particular crisis, and the funds were sufficiently replenished by the appeal that the proposed salary cuts were never implemented. It would be possible to quote many more instances of financial stringency. When Alexander Johnson, for example, inquired very circumspectly in 1870 about the possibility of a pension fund, Chancellor Day told him that while the board would always seek to make ex gratia payments fitting to the situation, 'nothing which can be construed into the beginning of grants of pension' could be contemplated.3 Whenever the graduates sought to have the library opened during the summer vacation, or the cataloguing brought up to date, one of the governors had to find the necessary few hundred dollars;4 when the university received the valuable Carpenter collection of shells, Dawson had to advance $2,000 of his own money as a loan at 7 per cent interest to have the collection catalogued and arranged; when Sterry Hunt was first engaged as associate professor of chemistry in the Faculty of Arts to take some of the burden off Dawson, Christopher Dunkin had to guarantee $800 a year for three years to make the arrangement possible; at a later stage Hunt was being paid out of Dawson's salary;5 when Alexander Johnson similarly wanted the help of an assistant professor, the cost had to be met by using one-third of Johnson's salary, together with some additional funds from the university;6 and when appointments were first proposed in the Department of Practical Science, assent could only be given after Peter Redpath, J.H.R. Molson, and G.H. Frothingham had each pledged $400 for three years.7

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NEW F U N D S , NEW V E N T U R E S

The fact is that each time a new source of funds was discovered, it was immediately used in some new venture or in making possible some longsought development, and this left the general situation as precarious as ever. When it was proposed, in April 1871, to revive the Department of Applied Science, the professors were plainly told that no salary increases could be made to them, because all available funds must be devoted to the development of the science department. Even so, the program was only made possible by the governors personally subscribing $7,450 for this specific purpose. Since it was often the same small group of governors who subscribed the funds and since it was often the principal who set the example by foregoing part of his own salary, it was very difficult for the other professors to complain too loudly,8 but it must not be thought that they always acquiesced without murmurings in their genteel penury. Both Alexander Johnson and J. Clark Murray (who joined the staff from Queen's in 1872 as professor of moral philosophy) had their sharp disagreements with the board on the matter of salaries ;9 but then Johnson himself offered a student exhibition, later increased to a scholarship, out of his own funds.10 The fact is that in a quite remarkable way, governors, principal, and professors made a constant contribution to the well-being of the college, and perhaps, if regard be had to the principle of the widow's mite, it was the professors who gave most. The constant preoccupation with finding funds for normal operations, and especially with searching for the resources for the new ventures which were demanding to be undertaken, brought the governors back time and again to an appeal to the government for some form of permanent endowment. They did so all the more earnestly because they believed that historically and morally they had an irrefutable case. THE M C G I L L CASE

A need for money is aggravated by an abundance of ideas for using it. Dawson had many proposals which he would have liked to put forward, but they could not be implemented for lack of funds. He felt both frustrated and righteously indignant that the government refused to live up to what he believed to be its obligation and indeed to its solemn undertakings. It remained a matter of grievance all through his principalship. He often referred to the subject in the university's annual reports, which though signed by the chancellor were prepared by himself, and he included longer presentations of the McGill arguments in such papers as 'James McGill and the Origin of His University', pub-

Professor and Mrs. Alexander Johnson, 1863

John Clark Murray, 1894

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lished first in Barnard's American Journal of Education in 1859 and in 'The History and Prospects of Protestant Education in Lower Canada' delivered as an address to the Association of Teachers in i864.n In addition, he assembled a file of relevant material, going back to 1801 and earlier, which included such things as quotations from the Board of Governors' minutes, government documents of historic significance, and newspaper clippings.12 Though it also continued long thereafter, the argument reached a critical point in 1865. The movement towards Confederation was at that time in full flood, but the prospect of a dissolution of the union of the two Canadas and their separate participation in the proposed new federation was viewed by many of the McGill interests with strong misgivings. The college had not, they believed, received justice from the old Province of Lower Canada, or from the government of the United Canadas, where the legislature had possessed an English-speaking majority; how could it expect any just settlement of its claims once it was handed over to the tender mercies of a francophone majority in the legislature of the proposed new Province of Quebec? It was urgent that McGill should receive a generous endowment before the new arrangements came into force. A new petition, therefore, rehearsing the old arguments and adding some new ones, was presented to the governor general and to the legislature of the United Province of Canada in February 1865. The Montreal Herald on 4 January 1865 devoted an editorial to the subject and gave a shortened version of the petition, which provided a good summary .of the McGill claims. The 'McGill Case' can be reduced to eight main arguments: 1. That in 1801 the original intention was to endow public education in general and a seminary or college for higher education in particular, through the agency of the Royal Institution; and a public undertaking was given to that effect. 2. That the Legislative Council in 1803 recommended implementation of the 1801 undertaking with respect to a college at Montreal by a grant of crown lands to the extent of 20,000 acres. 3. That James McGill made his bequest in 1811, in reasonable expectation of and only as supplementary to such an endowment. 4. That on at least two occasions, in 1816 and in 1819, instructions from the Colonial Office in London to the governor general in Quebec had ordered the allocation of funds for the building of McGill College, thus conceding the existence of this obligation. In 1831 Lord Goderich, after admitting that grants of land had been promised, added 'that, of course, such promises are binding and must be carried into effect'. 5. That in 1839 promises had been made of assistance with the college

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building costs, and those expectations induced the college authorities to build far more grandly and expensively than they would otherwise have done; but the promises had not been kept. 6. That the kind of endowment contemplated for McGill had been given, on a truly generous scale, in Upper Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Of the four colleges of royal foundation only McGill College had been left without any endowment from public funds. 7. That the francophone Catholic colleges, which had been amply provided for by action of the French crown before the Accession, had (with the sole exception of the Jesuits for other and unrelated reasons) been specifically confirmed in possession of those endowments by action of the British crown and were still in enjoyment of them. (Dawson's file contained a great deal of information on college seigneuries and their incomes.) 8. That McGill College was the only English-speaking, Protestant, and undenominational college in Lower Canada and had amply demonstrated, since the granting of the Amended Charter of 1852, its worthiness to receive and its ability to use to great profit the endowment which historically and morally was due to it. On paper it was a cogent argument, but the political fact was that Dawson and his colleagues were hammering on a closed door. In 1835 the members of the Royal Institution had advanced very much the same arguments when Gosford, Gray, and Gipps had been appointed commissioners to review once more the state of education in Canada. The reply given on that occasion was to prove the determinate one. It was recorded in a little book assembled in 1838, probably by William Badgley, and published in London, presumably for the information of the committee preparing the education section of Lord Durham's Report.13 This book set out the history of endowments for education in Lower Canada, and recorded the views of the 1835 commissioners: 'Your Lordship will observe .. . that the Trustees of the Royal Institution brought before us claims that that Crown should not deprive itself of the means of granting them an endowment of land. . . . but we apprehend that such a grant would be viewed with great jealousy by the Provincial Government: we cannot help thinking that the Royal Institution should be left to be assisted by the Assembly, which we believe has always shown itself liberal in encouraging the promotion of Education.' The reason why the crown would never fulfil its original intention had been openly stated: such action would be 'viewed with great jealousy by the Provincial Government'. As the commissioners, the successive governors general, and the public well knew, the Legislative Assembly (however generous it had been to elementary education) had not been generous

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towards McGill College. As the Petition of 1865 put it, 'all the moneys received by [the college] from public sources (of which the first was in 1854) do not amount to one-fourth of the annual revenues of the University of Toronto, or one-tenth of the value of Mr. McGilPs bequest'.14 It was this hypocrisy, as they saw it, on the part of successive inquiries and administrations, in pretending to think that the assembly ever would give McGill College its just dues, which aroused the indignation of Dawson and his colleagues whenever the subject arose. They believed themselves cheated by the imperial authorities and deserted by their fellow English-speaking colonists in British North America, and to understand the mood and outlook of those engaged in the McGill enterprise one must allow for that sense of injustice and indignation. If McGill College turned to the wealthy anglophone community for the funds it had to have to survive, it did not do so from first choice; it was in despair of other means of support, and in defiance of those who, they believed, acquiesced in, if they did not positively hope for, the restrictions of its legitimate growth and development. McGill College stood in its own eyes contra mundum. Much of the immense benefaction which was to be made in its favour was prompted, at least in part, by that feeling, namely, that the English-speaking population of the Province of Quebec, having been left to its own resources, would demonstrate to the rest of English Canada, even more than to French Canada, that it would not merely survive but it would keep pace with the best of development elsewhere. As the Herald said in closing its editorial on the subject: 'Whatever the result of this application the higher Protestant education as represented by McGill University must be sustained.' I M P E R I A L PETITION

As the preparatory talks proceeded and Confederation became more certain, the board of governors reviewed their position and decided in 1866 to go one step further and to petition the imperial government on three points.15 In the second they were allying themselves with other educational interests, led for the most part by Alexander Gait, asking that Protestant rights in education in Lower Canada be secured by inclusion of the necessary clauses in the forthcoming British North America Act. The petition reads: 'It appears necessary that provisions should be introduced into the Imperial Act of Confederation to afford adequate protection to Protestant educational interests, by the amendment of the existing School Law, and also by empowering the General Government and Legislature to interfere effectively on behalf of the

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university.' The third point was yet another restatement of the McGill case, asking for an adequate endowment in fulfilment of governmental promises. The first point, however, was a proposal of a different kind. It was to the effect that since there was a need to standardize degree diplomas throughout all of the proposed new Dominion of Canada and an equal need to prevent the undesirable multiplication of universities of varying kinds and qualities, such as had occurred in the United States, the petition asked that all institutions of degree-granting status be placed under the control, not of the provincial legislatures, but of the federal government. It may be said that this request was in 1867 politically unrealistic; it may also be said that if the federal government had been made, by this provision, a direct partner in the task of preserving FrenchCanadian culture at its highest educational level, the subsequent history of the Canadian Confederation might have been quite different from what it was. In the event, however, while the second point of the 1865 Petition was gained, at least in part, the first and third were not, and McGill College was left to enter the new Province of Quebec and the Confederated Realm of Canada with the feeling that it had again been left to look after its own interests, and must learn to rely upon its own resources and those of its friends. ANOTHER VIEWPOINT

There was, however, another possible interpretation of the facts. From the point of view of a francophone member of the Quebec Assembly, the salient considerations must have appeared to be of a demonstrably different character. The assembly, as such a member might see it, had succeeded in 1829 m gating control of public education and had put a great deal of money into the provision of schools at the parish level, where they were most needed. The experiment of having the assembly act as its own education department had, however, not worked very well; school funds became too easily accessible for diversion to other purposes by local politicians. In any case, in 1836 the system disappeared in the general collapse of parliamentary procedures. After 1841, when the system was restored, the further experiment of interposing the municipalities between the schools and the assembly had been tried, but this had not proved a great improvement. Finally the idea of school commissions had emerged and under two able and informed superintendents, Jean-Baptiste Meilleur (who served 1842-55) and PierreJoseph-Olivier Chauveau (who served 1855-67), considerable developments had taken place. In 1869 the Protestants had succeeded in getting the Catholic and Protestant school systems separated. Grants

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had been given to the two organizations in proportion to the numerical strength of their constituencies. In higher education the anglophones had done even better. Three normal schools had been established, two for francophones and one at McGill College, and despite their numerical minority situation, the Protestant normal school had received one-third of the available resources for the training of teachers. There was one medical faculty in Quebec City and two in Montreal, and again the available resources had been divided, with one-third going to the anglophone institution. All this was in the public sector of education. There was also the private sector with twelve francophone classical colleges and five anglophone ones, namely the Quebec High School, the Montreal High School, Lennoxville School, Morrin College, and St. Francis College.16 There were also three universities, one for francophones, Laval in Quebec City, but two for anglophones, Bishop's at Lennoxville and McGill College in Montreal. Each of these institutions in the private sector had its own history, its own endowments, and its own needs. As far as McGill College was concerned, if it was in any way exceptional, it was only because it appeared to have least cause for dissatisfaction: it possessed two public-sector facilities, each receiving more than its mathematically determined share of the funds available, and it had a host of wealthy merchants and industrialists who were ready to assist it with far more support than was available to other similar institutions. The more McGill College attracted rich benefactions, the less claim it had, any reasonable person would think, for an allocation of public funds. It is easy to see from the vantage point of history that the Governors of McGill College and the francophone members of the Quebec Legislative Assembly were far apart in their understanding of the situation, and they were to remain so for many years to come.17

NOTES 1. The dollar and the pound were used indiscriminately during this period. The official rate was $4.86 to the pound, but the exchange was often calculated at four dollars to the pound. 2. The amount McGill, and therefore its professors, would receive depended, of course, upon the number of persons getting married each year, so the increase was neither very great nor very certain. 3. M-Gov. 2 April 1870. In 1894 J.H.R. Molson, D. A. Smith, and W.C. Macdonald gave $50,000 each to set up a Superannuation Fund, the interest of which could be used to make these ex gratia payments. 4. For example, M-Gov. i November 1869. It was generally but not always Peter Redpath who came to the rescue of the library. 5. M-Gov. 26 March 1862, 28 January 1867.

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6. M-Gov. 2 April 1870. 7. M-Gov. 23 May 1871. 8. M-Gov. 25 June 1881. Dawson could do this partly because for him money was only a means to an end—the advancement of science—but also because the Dawson patrimony inherited in Pictou, once relieved of its burden of debt, was modestly substantial; also he received a second salary from the normal school, and he had a growing income from the very wide sale of his many books. 9. Johnson was told that the board recognized that he was a fine teacher, but his continued demands for money were inconsiderate and in particular the board had made no promise to him that he should succeed Leach as dean of arts (M-Gov. 2 December 1871; see also 24 February 1883). Murray conducted a long campaign in an attempt to force the board to pay him money he believed owing to him because they had promised an increase to him 'when funds shall permit', but when they did have more money they had spent it on other developments; a governors' committee report on the matter runs to thirteen closely written pages (M-Gov. 27 February 1886). It ruled against him and he was left very dissatisfied. This proved to be the prelude to a larger disagreement on the matter of women's education. 10. M-Gov. 4 June 1884; 27 June 1885. 11. Addresses, items 2 and 4. 12. MUA 2211/91. 13. An Account of the Endowments for Education in Lower Canada, and of the Legislative and other Public Acts for the Advancement Thereof, from the Cession of the Country in 1763 to the Present Time (London, 1838), no author but in pencil 'by W. Badgley' (the same Badgley who later became first professor and dean of law). The MUL copy was presented by Mr. Justice Robert Mackay. 14. MUA 2211/91/21, p. 5. 15. A copy of the printed petition is included in M-Gov. 28 January 1867. 16. The Montreal High School became part of the public sector when it was transferred to the Protestant commissioners in 1869. 17. It should be remembered, however, that Dawson and Chauveau had quickly reached agreement on the subject of normal schools in 1856, and that Dawson remained personally friendly with Chauveau after he became the first premier of Quebec in 1867—and the first minister of public instruction. In Fifty Years, p. 160, Dawson refers to him as 'my friend Dr. Chauveau'.

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s a young man, Dawson had gone from the small-town concerns of a colonial backwater to the intellectual brilliance of the liveliest university in Europe. After only a few months he had to leave again, and when he returned six years later it was in order to court Margaret Mercer. While he was waiting for her to make up her mind, he had the opportunity to attend more lectures and to experience a second time the stimulation of listening to the men who were making science happen. Ever after he called Edinburgh his Alma Mater, and all his life it remained his intellectual Mecca. EDINBURGH AND PRINCETON

Consequently when he had resigned in 1853 from the Nova Scotian Superintendency of Education and had resumed his old occupation of bookselling, there could only be one answer when his mentor and friend Charles Lyell wrote suggesting that Dawson should be a candidate for the vacant chair of natural history at Edinburgh and offering his support and that of influential colleagues. Dawson at once entered his name and wrote to friends in Edinburgh and London seeking their help. But there were countervailing forces at work. The medical men in the university wanted the chair to be filled by a biologist rather than a geologist, and

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to Dawson's great disappointment he heard, just as he was leaving for Scotland to prosecute his candidature, that a Dr. Allman from Dublin had already been appointed.1 It was at this point that the McGill principalship was offered to him, and he accepted it on the rebound, sight unseen. How Dawson, with the help of Day, Dunkin, and Ferrier set to work to make out of McGill something of what he had envisioned in Edinburgh we have already seen. But the Edinburgh dream remained and in 1868 it revived. The principal of Edinburgh University had died in office and Dawson, this time unprompted, immediately became a candidate for the appointment. He was able to present a factual but truly impressive statement of his achievements and to enlist the help of friends and colleagues, from whom he gathered testimonials which, in accordance with contemporary practice, he had printed and sent to the electors, the Curators of the University.2 Testimonials are generally flattering documents (it was the word used in the governors' minutes regarding those of the Reverend Dr. Burgess in 1854) but the men who wrote on Dawson's behalf were in themselves his strongest endorsement. For scientists there were Logan and Lyell; for government, there were the governor general Viscount Monck, P.-J.-O. Chauveau, the prime minister of Quebec, and Joseph Howe, formerly prime minister of Nova Scotia; for the churches, Dr. John Cook, first moderator of the Presbyterian assembly, and Archbishop Fulford, metropolitan of the Anglican communion; for university administrators, Mr. Justice Charles Dewey Day of McGill and Professor Daniel Wilson of Toronto; for colleagues there were Vice-Principal Leach, Dean George Campbell of the Faculty of Medicine, and all the professors of McGill. As we said, testimonials are usually intended to reveal only the candidate's good qualities, especially if they are to be read by him as well as those to whom they are addressed, but two comments recur in the different statements so often as to give us the impression of being honest and sincere judgements: Dawson had inspired the re-creation of the Faculty of Arts of McGill College beyond the best hope of its friends, and the impact he had made on those who worked with him was one of integrity, courtesy, and his own complete commitment to his task. Those were the qualities which gave him his powers of leadership. It has to be said that in applying for the principalship of Edinburgh, Dawson was in fact flying his kite very high. To have gone from Pictou to McGill to Edinburgh would have been (especially in that socially sensitive age) an astonishing achievement. But there was in William Dawson in 1868 more than enough solid worth to justify a man like Sir Charles Lyell writing confidentially to the Duke of Argyle: 'He is now in the prime of

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life, and I feel sure that he would justify the choice of the electors if they made him Principal.' In the event, the curators appointed Sir James Simpson and Dawson was left to continue his work at McGill, which he did with unflagging zeal. One thing to be said for a providential view of human affairs is that if a new opportunity occurs, the believer will go forward to meet its challenge; but if the door closes, he will accept the present task as allsufficient for his endeavours. Without regrets and with unabated zeal, Dawson continued his work of building up McGill College and pursuing his own scientific researches. Indeed, when a similar opportunity to the one he had sought in 1868 offered itself unbidden in 1878, he considered it carefully and declined. The offer came from Princeton. The salary, though handsome, was not a major inducement (Dawson's emoluments for his various duties cannot have amounted to much less than the $4,000 Princeton was offering) , but he would have been freed from the heavy burden of administration and it was specifically stated that travel funds would be available to take him to the great fossil beds of Wyoming and Colorado. Princeton was at this time a stronghold of anti-Darwinian sentiment, but its own anti-Darwinians, Charles Hodge and Arnold Guyot, were retired or retiring. Louis Agassiz at Harvard was also beginning to fail. The position at Princeton was put before him as a call to take a more prominent position from which he could offer leadership to the anti-Darwinian forces in all North America. But Princeton was not Edinburgh and Dawson was already committed to a course which for him had precedence. As he wrote to Charles Hodge on 15 April 1878: 'I fear that the claims of duty tie me to this place, where an important handful of protestant people are holding an advanced front in the midst of Ultramontanism, and where but for the utmost effort of all willing to help, the cause of liberal education and science is likely to be overwhelmed, and with it all reasonable chance of the permanent success of our Canadian Dominion, for unless the gospel and the light of Modern Civilisation can overcome popery in French Canada our whole system will break up.'3 That then was where Dawson stood. In 1875 the Scientific American wrote: 'The mantle of Agassiz has fallen upon Principal Dawson of Montreal; with Agassiz dead, Dawson remains the great American opponent of Darwinism.' That may have been how others saw him. It was not, however, how he saw himself and it is significant that he was not prepared to be cast in that role, either in Princeton or in Montreal. He saw himself not as an opponent but as a proponent—one who put forward the liberalizing truths of the Protestant form of Christianity and

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the illuminating truths of the created world. The liturgy of the psalmist still expressed for him the most meaningful idea to be comprehended by the mind of man: 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! All of them in wisdom hast Thou made!' For Dawson, science and religion were the two facets of the one truth and his mission in life was to teach them both; the task certainly involved the refutation of error but its main thrust was the proclamation of truth. SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Dawson was a scientist whose own lifespan embraced the golden age of science. While Dawson was still a schoolboy Lyell freed the mind of Western man from the chronology of the Bible; he was hardly middleaged when Darwin proposed natural selection as the mode of biological existence; chemistry had put its house in order while he was still in his vigour, and at his death, physics was on the verge of recasting the Newtonian universe. It was inevitable that his own story should be one of increasing specialization. At first Dawson was the young naturalist, indiscriminately collecting plants, moths, birds, rocks, and fossils. Later he became the practical scientist, much concerned with agricultural chemistry and soils and coal-bearing deposits; later again, he became specifically a geologist and more particularly a palaeontologist, specializing in palaeobotany. When he first came to McGill his primary academic appointment was to the chair of natural history, and outside the college his first affinity was with the Montreal Natural History Society. But he also fulfilled the duties of a chair of chemistry and a chair of agriculture; these additions he later relinquished, particularly as Sterry Hunt and Bernard James Harrington came along to relieve him of the responsibility for chemistry and mineralogy. Then his chair of natural history was divided and he surrendered the biological aspects to become the first Logan Professor of Geology. In assessing Dawson as a scientist, then, we have to remember that he began his work on an extraordinarily broad front and at a time when natural history was (apart from the disciplines equally loosely grouped under the term natural philosophy) encyclopaedic in its scope. He lived to see the different specialties emerge and become distinct sciences and the one he chose for his own was palaeontology. But the fact that he grew up in the period when all nature was every scientist's province, and each one was free to comment on the whole scene before him, left its mark upon him permanently. His was the age of the popular lecture in entertainment and the popular account in literature and Dawson extended himself to meet the needs of both these markets. In so doing, he was fulfilling his own view of himself from

The Montreal Natural History Society's Museum

A page from Dawson's The Story of the Earth and Man

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the beginning—an educational missionary. He wanted his university to provide education suited to the realities of his countrymen—hence the early attempts to establish the Department of Applied Science. He wanted its teaching to reach as many minds as possible—hence the popular lectures, the affiliated schools, and the affiliated colleges. He wanted its science to reach the intelligent men and women who were beginning to make up the new reading public, and hence his many articles in magazines and periodicals and his books, which sold very well. The Story of the Earth and Man, for example, went into at least eleven British editions, as well as one legitimate and two or three pirated American editions. But for these publications he should be judged as an educationist; as a scientist his reputation must rest on his geological papers and particularly his contribution to palaeobotany. The best summarized comment on Dawson as an author comes from a successor as curator of the Redpath Museum, Professor T.H. Clark, who wrote: Before his retirement rarely did a year pass without a dozen papers, and in some years more than a score. No complete bibliography has ever been published. In all, Dawson probably has three hundred titles to his credit on geological subjects, and perhaps a like number in other scientific fields, including agriculture, botany, zoology, anthropology, and allied subjects. A steady output of papers on educational matters was maintained throughout most of this period, and though never assembled, possibly as many as two hundred articles on religious and philosophical subjects were produced. His bibliography includes about twenty-five books, some of which were purely scientific treatises, such as Acadian Geology, Canadian Ice Age, Geological History of Plants, and Handbooks on geology, zoology, and scientific agriculture. Others were intended to popularize geology and were remarkably successful in doing so: Relics of Primeval Life, Story of the Earth and Man, Some Salient Points in the History of the Earth. Still others can be classed as apologetics, motivated by the wish to reconcile science and religion: Archaia, Origin of the World According to Religion and Science, Eden Lost and Won* Had Dawson been a scientist only it would have been a formidable record. For a busy administrator of a successful college it is phenomenal. In strictly religious matters, Dawson was singularly uninnovative. He had inherited the classic Calvinist piety, and he stayed loyal to it. He had a profound sense of God the Creator, but this concept of the omni-

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potent Deity was humanized—if one may appropriately use that term in this context—by a confiding trust in the Fatherhood of God. In his many addresses, the Creator is constantly referred to as 'our Heavenly Father', and the stress is always upon the goodness and the loving kindness and the providential care of God for his creatures, and above all for the children of his own nature. The problems of pain, of death, of 'nature red in tooth and claw', are met and disarmed by a childlike trust in the wise goodness of the Father, who if he sends trials (as he did in the death of Dawson's first son, James Como, at fourteen months and in the crippling by poliomyelitis of his second son, George Mercer), does so because 'whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth' and 'through much tribulation we enter the Kingdom of God'. The speculative doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Atonement were not William Dawson's concern. For him the creative power of God and his providential care for those who are obedient children in his family were creed enough. It provided fully the ground of his worship, the motivation of his endeavours, and the ethic of his morality. It is, of course, possible—and indeed it has been done—to take a number of major controversies in the nineteenth century and show that in each one of them Dawson chose the wrong side.5 He said of Lyell: 'He seemed wholly free from that common failing of men of science which causes them to cling with tenacity to opinions once formed, even in the face of the strongest evidence.'6 But Dawson could not emulate the virtue he respected so readily in his friend. Dawson clung to the opinion that the Eozoon canadense was an organism long after majority opinion had become convinced of its inorganic character. With regard to the occurrence of glaciation in what are now temperate latitudes, and with regard to the antiquity of man, Dawson chose the wrong side of the debate and stayed with it long after others had conceded the contrary opinion. But there was much more to Dawson's science than those three or four controversies on which he was wrong. He was generally right, for example, in his disentanglement of the confused lines of the geology of northeastern North America; he was generally right with regard to the taxonomy and chronology of the Devonian plants; he was generally right about the great mass of detailed information which he personally had gathered, assessed, and stored away in the expanding museum of the human mind. His timely and positive contributions to science were far more visible to his contemporaries than they are to us because the frontiers through which he laboriously worked his way have become the beaten paths now so obvious that we find it hard to believe that perplexity once existed. It was the sheer volume, the accuracy of description, and the appositeness of assignment in his many contributions to a whole

Graduating class, Arts 1866

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range of sciences which attracted the attention and called for the respect of his contemporaries, whether they always agreed with his conclusions or not. The major debate was of course on evolution. Dawson could not come to the subject with a free mind. His understanding of himself as the child of the Heavenly Father precluded him from accepting blind chance as the motivating force in the universe and natural selection as its mindless mechanism. Moreover, as one who believed the Bible to be the inspired (though not necessarily infallible) Word of God, he had to seek accommodations between his scientific ideas and his understanding of the biblical text. When scientific theory and biblical text could not be brought into agreement, he had to doubt acceptability of the theory. Since this was the case with the theory of evolution, he inevitably began to search for the weak points in the hypothesis, and to reveal them in closely detailed discussions. His probably unconscious reason for staying obstinately with the losing side in those other debates was that they were for him the outposts of the central citadel he had been called to defend: the spiritual nature of man as the child of a divine Creator. His main argument was that the hypotheses of evolution and natural selection involved more assumptions than there were data to support. In particular, no one had demonstrated the variability of genera. Dawson conceded that variation occurred within species, but argued that there were even within species limits to such variations, imposed in the form of sterility. In the later years of his career he was feeling his way to an alternative to the theory of evolution which he called 'the law of creation'. By this he meant that a number of acts of creation provided the starting points of evolutionary processes operating within the limits imposed upon the new species by its given nature. This, he believed, accounted more rationally for the persistent gaps in the tree of descent than the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection alone, and permitted the teleological character of the universe, to which as a theist he was irrevocably committed.7 Certainly there was more to Dawson than a mere obscurantist clinging to verbal inspiration.8 Human nature being what it is, and the nineteenth century being what it was, a certain amount of personal feeling and popular rhetoric was bound to enter into the war of words, and sometimes the criticisms were pungent and both sides in the debate were at times not above employing ridicule. However, for the most part, the tone and character of Dawson's contributions were serious and courteous. Consequently he remained on good terms with Darwin, Huxley, and the other evolutionists, and there is no story of personal feuds or animosities in the many years of his long struggle. It was for his immense contributions to the

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expansion of scientific knowledge, and for his ability to work cooperatively with those with whom he disagreed, that his contemporaries awarded him their highest honours. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in London in 1862, first president of the Royal Society of Canada in 1882, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the same year, and president of the British Association in 1886. In 1893, the year he retired from McGill, he was elected president of the Geological Society of America. If his reputation has suffered in the twentieth century it is because it has been easier to categorize his errors than to continue to distinguish his contributions. But that those contributions in quantity and in quality were very great and have proved of lasting importance is beyond doubt. Queen Victoria gave him her accolade as Knight Bachelor in 1884. TEACHER AND STUDENTS

When Dawson was a candidate for the post of principal of Edinburgh University, he asked his minister, the Reverend William Taylor, to contribute a testimonial in support of his candidature. It is a comment on the Victorian period that the minister, seeking to present the most favourable circumstances wrote: ' [Dr. Dawson] has been and still continues at this date the Superintendent of our Sabbath School.'9 When the principal of McGill College and Normal School relaxed on the day of rest, he did so by teaching in his Bible class, and any Sunday morning, Dawson and his family could be seen, Bibles in hand, crossing McGill campus on their way to church and Sunday School. It must have been quite an experience to be a small scholar in Dr. Dawson's school. He was once invited to take part in a symposium of college heads on the subject Discipline in American Colleges. His contribution could be summed up in his own words: 'The control of young men and women is to be exercised rather in the way of inducing them to like their work and duty than by any influence of the nature of coercion or restraint. . . . The instructor or administrator must bear in mind that he also serves a Master, and is in some sense the servant of all. . . . If by God's grace he can serve in this manner, the question of control is not likely to arise in any acute form.' And in his autobiography he wrote: 'There have been no serious breaches of discipline, no college emeutes or rebellions, and none of that cruel treatment of junior students, unfortunately common in some similar institutions . . . a generous and friendly rivalry, in honourable and kindly conduct . . . has in the main characterised the students of McGill.'10 It is fair to say that Dawson's character set the tone for the whole institution.

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In the classroom he was known for his use of illustrative material: large sheets bearing charts, ingeniously stratified geological maps with the different layers hinged so that they could be lifted to reveal the earlier deposits, 'magic lantern' slides, and of course the examination of specimens in the classroom itself. He liked to teach in his museum because the illustrative material was there so close to hand. The instruction itself was of high quality. Francis Shepherd, who later became dean of medicine, wrote in his Reminiscences: I entered the Medical Faculty . . . in the first week of October, 1869. . . . Botany and Zoology were primary subjects. . . . Principal William Dawson undertook both courses and taught them in his well-known lucid manner. He was the cleverest lecturer I ever heard. One felt that his soul was in his work and there was no excuse for not understanding him; he not only lectured clearly and well, but he was most interesting. After the lecture he always invited questions and expressed a desire to elucidate any obscure point. These were short courses, and we were all sorry when they were over. Sir William Dawson always impressed me as a big man; he had much dignity yet was not difficult of access—was always ready to help the student with advice and was very suggestive. . . . Sir William entertained students every Saturday evening, and most enjoyable the evenings were. His wife and daughters assisted him, and he was always showing us some interesting specimen or curiosity and discoursing on it delightfully. All the members of his class were invited in turn, and many of us received much inspiration from intimate contact with him, for he was a great man.11 That assessment of Dawson was made when Francis Shepherd had himself retired, and was looking back on his old teacher from the vantage point of fifty years. It is a judgement with which those who knew him most closely—including his own family—were the most ready to concur.

THE FOUNDER'S TOMB During Dawson's middle years one incident occurred which must not be overlooked—James McGill's tomb was brought to the campus to be erected in a place of honour. In 1797 McGill had taken the initiative in establishing a Protestant burial ground in the outskirts of the city, on what later became Dorchester Boulevard. He had the remains of his old friend John Porteous, who had died fifteen years earlier, transferred to the new

Graduating class, Applied Science 1873 Back row Clement H. McLeod, Donald A. Stewart, Robert J. Brodie Front row Henry K. Wicksteed, George T. Kennedy, John F. Torrance

McGill College University, 1875

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cemetery. When James died in 1813, he was buried in the same plot and a handsome stone monument was erected over the grave, bearing on one face an inscription for McGill and on another an inscription for Porteous, probably copied from an earlier marker. But by 1875 tms burial ground had long been filled and it was proposed to turn it into a public park, later called Dufferin Square. Heirs of those who were buried in the area were invited, if they so wished, to make provision for reinterment in the new cemetery on Mount Royal. On the initiative of R.A. Ramsay, a McGill graduate who was later to become a notable governor and to take over a number of Ferrier's responsibilities, the board asked the Desrivieres family for permission to transfer the founder's remains to the college campus. Bishop Oxenden was invited to consecrate the plot of ground directly in front of the Arts Building, and the original monument was re-erected over the grave. The remains of John Porteous were not transferred, so the tomb wall bearing the inscription relating to him was reversed as being no longer applicable. The McGill inscription was hardly legible, so that tablet was also reversed and the original wording recut. Time and weather are not kind to sandstone, and in 1971 it was necessary to erect a granite replica of the tomb, and the original inscription was recut once more. It reads: To the Memory of the Honourable James McGill a native of Glasgow North Britain and during several years a representative of the City of Montreal in the Legislative Assembly, and Colonel of the ist Battalion of Montreal Militia, who departed this life on the i gth day of December 1813 in his 6gth year. In his loyalty to his Sovereign and in ability, integrity, industry and zeal as a Magistrate and in other relations of public and private life he was conspicuous. His loss is accordingly sincerely felt and greatly regretted. So James McGill returned after long absence to the Burnside he loved, and lies in front of the college for which he had planned and for which he had handsomely provided.12 By 1875 he could rest there with considerable satisfaction.

NOTES i. Margaret Dawson's disappointment could not have been less than his. Her parents had opposed her marriage, and to return as the wife of a professor to the city where the academic ranked so highly would have been triumph indeed.

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2. The curriculum vitae he assembled and the printed testimonials are MUA 909A/18/18. 3. Letter to Charles Hodge, 15 April 1878, MUA 2211/60/83. 4. G.F.G. Stanley, ed., Pioneers of Canadian Science, Royal Society of Canada (Toronto, 1966), pp. 105-6. 5. Charles F. O'Brien, Sir William Dawson: A Life in Science and Religion (Philadelphia, 1971). 6. Fifty Years, p. 55. 7. Teleology has gone out of fashion, but it may be remarked that in some biologists' opinion it has had to be replaced by 'end-directedness'; S.B. Frost, Standing and Understanding: A Re-Appraisal of the Christian Faith (Montreal, 1969), pp. 75—81 and references there. 8. J. W. Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution (1890; reissued New York, 1 977)) Introduction by W.R. Shea and John Cornell. Also John Cornell, 'Sir William Dawson and the Theory of Evolution' (M.A. thesis, McGill, 1977). 9. MUA 909A/18/18. It is a further comment on the times that Ferrier was similarly superintendent of the St. James Methodist Sunday School for fifty years. 10. Fifty Years, pp. 113-14. 11. Francis J. Shepherd, Reminiscences of Student Days and Dissecting Room (Montreal, 1918), pp. 1-2. 12. Doubt has been cast on the identity of the remains transferred in 1875, but Porteous was buried over thirty years before McGill, and there was little chance of confusion arising. For details of the transactions involved and also information concerning the famous ginkgo tree, see E.H. Bensley's articles: 'Is James McGill Buried Under the Ginkgo Tree?' and 'Peacefully He Slumbers There', McGill News, Spring 1957, pp. 18-19, 45; Winter 1963, pp. io and 51; and MUA Fact Sheet 'McGill Tomb', August 1970. The ginkgo tree died in 1966, before the restoration of the tomb.

CHAPTER

XI

DAWSON: THE YEARS OF ACHIEVEMENT n the year 1892, twelve months before Dawson's resignation, a column appeared in the Montreal Witness headed 'An Interesting Ceremony'. It recorded the presentation to McGill College of a portrait of Sir William, executed by Wyatt Eaton.1 The presentation speech took the opportunity to compare the past and present: The McGill of 1855 when Sir Ed[mund] Head invited Sir William to become its Principal, and the McGill of 1892, present contrasts suggestive and magnificent. In 1855 there were only 70 students in all departments. In 1892, 900 throng its halls—then there were twenty professors, only one of whom was exclusively devoted to the work of his professoriate. Now there are sixty-five. Then McGill stood alone. Now she is compassed about with four Theological and three Arts affiliated colleges. Then her constituency of graduates were numbered only by hundreds, now by thousands who have won distinction in every land. Then the unfinished halls required the classes to be held amid the limitations of the old High School. Now a stately array of unrivalled buildings adorn the campus of the University.... The William Molson Hall, the Peter Redpath Museum and the prospective library, the Thomas Workman Technical Build-

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ing, the W.C. McDonald Engineering and Physics Buildings, with the Donald Annex [sic], are the materialized expression of confidence in their administration. It is the story of a splendid achievement, but it certainly was not the work of one man alone. In great measure, the development had been made possible by the cooperation of a committed group of colleagues and by the constant concern of the members of the board of governors and not least by a series of major benefactions. Some we have already mentioned, but they need to be viewed not only in isolation but also as items in an astonishing catalogue of gifts. THE TALE OF BENEFACTIONS

Dawson had been at McGill five years before he could secure the return of the Arts Faculty to the college campus, but the tide had in fact begun to run in McGilPs favour three years earlier when the brothers Molson, John, Thomas, and William, joined together to subscribe $20,000 to endow a chair of English literature. This was the pioneer benefaction which led to so much else. Later, the brothers raised their donation to $40,000 but it was William in that generation who proved the consistent benefactor, for two years after the return to campus he completed the original arts buildings and if 'a stately array of unrivalled buildings' is a rather extravagant expression, certainly the improvement was immediately visible. There followed shortly thereafter a flow of smaller but significant gifts: Dunkin's $800 a year for three years was given to secure the services in chemistry of Sterry Hunt; the Carpenter shell collection from the Frothinghams (they were soon to be allied by marriage with the Molsons) enhanced Dawson's little museum; the Shakespeare, Molson, Logan, and Torrance Gold Medals; Peter Redpath's $400 a year for three years, again for chemistry, and then a year later $200 per annum to allow the library to be open in the summer months; a solid $4,000 from William Molson for books; William Molson again with Thomas Workman subscribing $5,000 each for bursaries, and then in the years 1870-73 three splendid benefactions, $20,000 each from Peter Redpath to support the chair of natural philosophy, from William Logan to support the chair of geology, and from the Frothingham family for a chair in moral philosophy. As a need arose, it had to wait until the funds could be found, but in remarkably short order the money was forthcoming, time after time. More significant than the size of the donations was the way in which during the sixties and seventies, giving

William Dawson

John Henry Robinson Molson

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to McGill was being firmly established as a tradition of beneficence. At the same time, however, another tradition was being established, not always to everybody's liking: new money went to new ventures. As we have seen, when it was a question of recommencing the Department of Applied Engineering or of raising professors' salaries and improving their conditions of work, the professors were bluntly told that the science needs must come first. So the ambivalent tradition of a college, constantly receiving princely benefactions and yet always remaining frustrated by poverty in its normal operations, came into being. It was to be the pattern for the next century of McGill's existence. In the eighties and nineties, during Dawson's last decade and a half, the magnitude of the donations began to take on a wholly new dimension. The new-style benefaction began with Peter Redpath's donation in 1880 of the Redpath Museum. When Dawson was under inducement by Princeton, Redpath let him know that if he remained at McGill, the kind of natural history museum of which he had long dreamed could be his: Redpath contemplated the gift of a museum, with regard to which, as he delicately put it, he had counted on Dawson's advice and cooperation. In 1882 Dawson was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting in Montreal for the second time, on which happy occasion his new museum was opened for the scrutiny and envy of all his scientific colleagues. 'Thus originated the Peter Redpath Museum, the greatest gift ever made by a Canadian to the cause of natural science, and up to this time, the noblest building dedicated to that end in the Dominion.'2 It remains the most architecturally satisfying of all the McGill buildings. For Dawson, however, a museum was not a cultural amenity so much as a pedagogical facility, 'In the session opening immediately after the meeting of the Association, the museum and its class rooms were fully in use for the teaching of geology, mineralogy, botany and zoology.'3 The following years saw further major benefactions from one who was increasingly to play a major role in McGill affairs, the turbulent, controversial Donald A. Smith, later to be known as Lord Strathcona. More must be said of these gifts and of the giver in later contexts, but here we note that the challenge-donation of $50,000 for medicine in 1883, resulting in a $100,000 Endowment Fund for the faculty, was followed only a year later by another $50,000 for the education of women. This second benefaction was increased by a further $70,000 in 1886. In 1887 the early signs of a later prodigality of giving came from another equally, perhaps even more remarkable personality, William Macdonald. He had already given a modest $1,250 for student bursaries; now he gave the funds for the construction of a chemistry

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laboratory, in one of the arts 'corridor' buildings. Two years later, Thomas Workman's bequest put $125,000 at the service of the Faculty of Applied Science for a new technical building and a chair of mechanical engineering. At the same time the Frothingham family and Mrs. J.H.R. Molson (nee Louise Frothingham) endowed the principalship with $40,000. The next year, 1890, Macdonald gave $150,000 for the rehabilitation of the Faculty of Law, and at the same time offered a building for mechanical engineering, a building for a Department of Physics and an endowment for a chair of experimental physics, at a total cost exceeding $800,000. This was indeed a princely scale of benefaction. Meanwhile, just north of the campus Donald Smith and his cousin George Stephen were completing at a cost of one million dollars the Royal Victoria Hospital. This hospital was established as a separate foundation from McGill, but the principal and the dean of medicine were and are ex officio governors, and its wards and more particularly its research laboratories have been from the beginning available to the members of the faculty as it is one of the teaching hospitals of the university. The following year, William Macdonald came forward with yet another $40,000, this time to endow a chair of electrical engineering, and in 1893, the year of Dawson's retirement, the tale of benefactions during his principalship came to a climax with $60,000 from J.H.R. Molson for a further extension to the medical building, another $ 100,000 from Donald Smith for chairs in pathology and hygiene, and lastly, but by no means least, with the donation to the university of the Redpath Library, in all its beauty of hammer-beam roof and carved stone. It was a fitting companion piece for the Redpath Museum and it was opened for use at the beginning of the 1893-94 session. William Dawson who had encouraged, prompted, and in no small measure inspired these many benefactions could be pardoned for thinking that his later years had crowned his principalship with magnificence. It was physically a very different university which he handed on to his successor from the one he had received into his keeping when he arrived from Nova Scotia thirty-eight years earlier. THE MCGILL U N I V E R S I T Y LIBRARIES

Dawson remarked in a number of places that there was no college library when he first arrived in 1855, but even Homer nods, and the claim is not true. The collection may not have been much to speak of, but it certainly existed. In 1835 tne board of governors was gratified to learn that the imperial government had approved McGill College as a depository 'for the

Grace Redpath

Peter Redpath

The Redpath Museum, c. 1884

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British Records' but as at that time the college existed only on paper, Dr. Holmes proposed that the books be temporarily placed in the Montreal Library.4 In 1842, when the college was about to open, the governors petitioned the government for a grant of $5,000 'for Philosophical Apparatus, the rudiments of a library and Furniture for the College'.5 The grant was not made, but starting in 1843 students were assessed 6s. 8d. per term for library costs. Caput decreed in October 1845 that 'the small room at the end of the North-east passage on the flat in the Main Building be appropriated to the College Library' and there is a tradition that the library of the Montreal Normal School, started by the Abbe Holmes in 1837 and discontinued in 1842, was handed over to the college.6 In January 1855, before Dawson was appointed, the governors voted £200 for books in classics, ancient and modern history, mental and moral philosophy, and science, and further ordered that glassfronted shelving be provided in the room in Burnside Hall 'ordinarily used for meetings of the Corporation'. There is also mention of Hew Ramsay donating seventeen reference books and of Mr. Justice Day ordering Agassiz' Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. So there was something in being before Dawson arrived, and in the fire of 1856 his first thought, he said, was to save the books in the library. Joseph Abbott was appointed the first librarian in 1845 and W.T. Leach followed him until Dawson arrived. He took over the care of the library until Markgraf was appointed in 1857. Markgraf remained as librarian twenty-five years. He received some additional salary for his services but the office could not have been very demanding until 1862 when the then holdings of 3,000 volumes were placed in the spacious shelves of the new library provided in William Molson Hall. From that time, however, the library began to grow steadily, and there are records of constant small donations both of books and of money for library purposes. Occasionally there were larger gifts. In 1876, as we have noticed, William Molson gave $4,000 for the book fund; the same year, the Graduates' Society gave $2,335, to be divided between the college and the professional libraries; in 1881 Jane Redpath gave $1,000 for books, and so the tale goes on. By the mid-seventies the library had reached 12,000 volumes, by 1878 an extension to the Molson Library was required, by 1881 the number of volumes had grown to 19,000— but unfortunately (how familiar this story was to become) a backlog of 3,000 books had developed which remained uncatalogued. The McGill University Library was well on the way to becoming the major collection in eastern Canada. An interesting development in this period is that of the professional

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libraries. The Medical Library, as we would expect, has its own history.7 In the early days of the Montreal Medical Institution, the members recognized the need for a library and drew up rules for its operation: 1. The Library is exclusively the property of the members of the Institution collectively. 2. No member can transfer his share of the Library. 3. The Library cannot be dissolved without the unanimous consent of the members. 4. Any member of the Institution dying or resigning his situation, loses all right as proprietor of the Library. 5. Any person becoming a member of the Institution, becomes likewise a proprietor of the Library with rights equal to those of an original proprietor provided he pays to the Treasurer one half of the amount of subscriptions paid by the original proprietors. 6. Should the Medical Institution be dissolved, the Library shall still remain unless dissolved by unanimous consent. In case of the dissolution of the Institution it may be lawful for the proprietors to admit a greater number of proprietors and new model [sic] the Library. Andrew Holmes was appointed librarian and members were to pay £2.ios. annually; physicians could become subscribers by paying £i.is. and students IDS. Later, graduation fees of £3.155. were payable to the library book fund. At one time, the books seem to have been kept in Holmes' private residence and at another time in professors' offices. In 1845 the first printed catalogue was issued, listing 884 volumes. When the faculty removed to Cote Street, a room there was set aside for the library, which then comprised 'upwards of 1,800 volumes'. In 1860, just prior to his death, Holmes declared, probably as the last of the original proprietors, that the library was not the property of the professors, but of the university. At this time there were 3,000 volumes. Dr. Wright became librarian in 1865 and described the provision made for the library in the 1872 building as a room 'which, when fitted up, cannot fail to command the admiration of every intelligent observer'. By 1885 the one room had become two, and William Osier writing in later years of his return to Canada to lecture on the institutes of medicine in 1874 told of his need for 'an immediate course of predatory reading' and commented: The McGill [Medical] Library, founded by Dr. Holmes, the first Dean, had many old books, and a pretty complete file of the British

Redpath Library, 1893

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journals, with a few French, such as the Archives generates de Medecine, but no recent German periodicals. A Book and Journal Club, started about 1876, lasted for a few years and helped with new books and foreign journals. Palmer Howard was the only free buyer in Montreal, and from him one could always get the French monographs and journals. It was under Osier's stimulus that the collection grew in the years 187890 from 5,000 to 13,000 volumes. He seems to have acted as a volunteer librarian during his years at McGill, and one of his characteristic sayings was: 'To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.' With such an attitude we can well believe that he left his mark permanently on the McGill medical collection. The Law Library probably had its origins in a request made by W.T. Leach to the Legislative Assembly librarian in 1846 that if the assembly library had any duplicates, the unneeded volumes might be given to the college. Whereas the Medical Library seems to have depended wholly on its own professors, the law collection did receive from time to time a little consideration from the board. In the same year that Holmes made his report on the Medical Library, the Board voted £50 for books in law, and apparently there was a special law alcove established in the Molson Library. A major acquisition was the bequest in 1877 of the library of Mr. Frederick Griffin, Q.C., the former counsel to the Board of the Royal Institution in Bethune's time, and this was followed in 1882 by the bequest of the library of Mr. Justice Mackay, a member of the board of governors. The Law Library was established as a separate collection when the faculty moved to new quarters in the Fraser Institute in September 1890, when the holdings were reported as 1,100 volumes insured for $1,500. As for the Science Library, it was not until January 1884 that the University Library Committee reported that the maps, plans, and reference books of the Department of Mathematics and Applied Science could not be adequately displayed in the Molson Library. The committee added, however, that they could be accommodated in a reading room of their own, attached to but separate from the major collection. This development was duly undertaken and the collection formed the nucleus of what was to become in later years the Engineering and Science Libraries. Another indication of the increasing usefulness of the McGill collections is found in the references to the library staff and the hours of opening. In 1857, when Charles Markgraf became the librarian, the

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library was opened only on Tuesday and Friday mornings.8 From 1862 his emolument was increased and the library was open every morning; from 1869, after Peter Redpath had once more come to the rescue with additional salary funds, Markgraf and a summer substitute were expected to keep the library open all the year, apart from a period at Christmas, for the hours 10 A.M. till 4 P.M. After 1880 the library remained open on Saturdays from i P.M. until 4 P.M. and in 1887 the means were found to keep it open on Thursday evenings also. Often it was the Graduates' Society which took the initiative in getting these changes effected. In 1879 the appointment of a permanent assistant librarian was requested, and in 1881 for the first time the desirability of the appointment of a professional librarian was mentioned. But when Markgraf retired the next year, an honorary librarian, Mr. William McLennan, came forward, and Mr. William Taylor was engaged as his full-time assistant; two years later Professor Cornish took over as honorary librarian at a stipend of $100 a year, and this arrangement continued until 1892 when Charles Henry Gould was appointed full-time professional librarian. He spent a year travelling in order to study libraries and their management, and took up his duties in 1893. By that time Peter Redpath had crowned his many benefactions by the gift of the Redpath Library. The reading room later became Redpath Hall, and serves the university as its ceremonial hall, the Redpath Undergraduate Library having been moved into new quarters to the south of the original building. The library built by Peter Redpath had a separate stack-wing, designed with glass floors to be fireproof, and these stacks are still in use. The Redpath remained the sole university library for sixty years and made possible the great developments which were to take place under Charles Gould in both collection-building and in the services offered. It should be added that Peter Redpath was interested in much more than college buildings; he endowed the operation both of the museum and of the library so that they could play their proper role in the life of the university, and to the latter he gave the immensely valuable collection of Redpath Tracts, printed documents relating to the history of England in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. This collection was personally assembled by Peter Redpath over many years and he was probably the best read of all the great benefactors. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

The movement for the higher education of women which developed in the Western world in the latter half of the nineteenth century was representative of a profound and far-reaching revolution. McGill be-

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came conscious of the new influences at a comparatively late stage in their development. The first tentative beginnings in the United States have been traced to Oberlin College in 1837, and coeducation became the pattern in the Middle West, with Iowa (1847) and Kansas (1866) leading the way. The first women's college at university level was probably Elmira, founded in 1855, but a major development was the opening of Vassar College in 1865 with a full complement of teachers and an enrolment of 350 students. Other women's colleges soon followed so that in the United States there were both separate and coeducational facilities available. In the United Kingdom developments were markedly slower. Bristol was coeducational from its founding in 1876 and London, at that time an examining university only, opened its degrees to women in 1878. Oxford and Cambridge both acquired women's colleges but did not open university privileges to their students. In Canada, Mount Allison University followed Oberlin's early lead and declared its programs open to women from its commencement in 1862, but even so it took thirteen years to produce the first woman graduate, a Bachelor of Science, and another seven years to graduate its first woman Bachelor of Arts. These were the first degrees awarded to women in any Canadian university. Queen's opened its doors to women in 1872, Victoria College (then at Cobourg, later at Toronto) in 1877, Acadia in 1880, followed by Dalhousie in 1881. Thus there were plenty of examples to follow, but McGill remained conservatively unresponsive. For this there were probably two major reasons. First, the general conservatism of French Roman Catholic Canada permeated the English Protestant community of Quebec more than perhaps its leaders were aware. Montreal was not a good breeding ground for progressive movements, as the history of the Institut Canadien had clearly shown. Particularly, there were the personal views of two of the principal personalities involved. Secondly, the established McGill tradition that new ventures could only be undertaken when and as new sources of funds became available operated in this matter as in all others. Costs were involved and nothing could be done until money was forthcoming. Dawson was, of course, concerned with this matter. His own views were complex. His early interest in elementary education and his long experience of normal school teaching had given him a respect for the intellectual capacity of women students and for their capability in the one profession to which they had been admitted, and indeed in which they had made themselves indispensable.9 Moreover, he recognized that their education had in no way detracted from their womanliness. On the other hand, his religious conservatism overflowed into his social attitudes and especially into his own version of the Victorian attitude to

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women. He was strongly imbued with the idealistic view of womankind as emotionally and spiritually refined, possessing a precious quality which must not be coarsened by too much contact with male society. But he was not dogmatic on the subject and it was on pragmatic grounds, rather than theoretical, that he decided that 'equal but separate' was the wiser course to pursue. On the main issue, he was very anxious that something should be attempted. Another personality who projected himself into the matter was Donald A. Smith. One of the giants of Canadian history, Smith made sporadic appearances on the McGill scene, but because of his immense wealth and princely benefactions, he became an overshadowing presence throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. By sheer ability and force of character he had emerged from the wastes of Labrador to a position of domination in the northwestern United States, in Canada, and in Britain. A man of no antecedents, he had made his way into the most privileged circles of Canadian society and of the imperial establishment. Inevitably, in that Victorian age, his respectability had to be above reproach, but there were intriguing stories as to how he had acquired the charming lady who was his wife.10 It was undoubtedly wise for him therefore to be seen in any debate as supporting the stricter moralities, but this stance may also have sincerely reflected his own thoughts.11 Again, he may simply have wanted to ensure that his money was used to benefit the end in view and not the college finances in general. Whatever the motivation (he was in general a taciturn if not secretive man), the fact is that when he made his outstanding benefactions in support of women's education at McGill he accompanied them with the strictest injunctions that they were to be used only in support of separate education for women, and this became a major factor in the situation. Since Dawson already favoured what the donor stipulated, it is understandable that for him Smith's unsolicited and timely intervention had all the quality of 'providential'. But there was a third personality who was to play a major role in the matter. John Clark Murray came to McGill from Queen's in 1872 to occupy the chair of moral philosophy. We have already noted that Murray expressed himself as dissatisfied with the financial treatment he received from the board of governors and had pursued the matter tenaciously, far beyond those bounds of deference which the board believed was their due. He was probably the most stimulating lecturer in the humanities, and certainly one of the professors most popular with the students. Moreover, because of his writings and addresses he was a notable public figure. As a philosopher he was the heir of the Scottish Enlightenment, but his concerns broadened far beyond the classic

Donald Alexander Smith

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boundaries.12 For him, moral philosophy became social philosophy, and his interests became encyclopaedic, including everything from 'the Problem of Alcohol' to 'Industrial Legislation' and on to 'University Reform in Canada'. In 1870, just prior to leaving Queen's, he gave a lecture on 'the Higher Education of Women' and repeated it with some embellishments for a Montreal audience in 1872 soon after his arrival at McGill. It must have perturbed many minds and intoxicated others. There were, he said, two major issues facing the society of his times, the relation of capital and labour, and the relation of women to a maledominated social environment. Woman, he declared, was immorally subjected to man because she was deliberately deprived by lack of education of the means to support herself economically: 'It was,' he said, 'but a cruel jest to preserve social usages by which vast numbers of women must either marry or starve, and then jeer [at] them for the eagerness with which they choose the more tolerable of these fates.'13 Murray believed women should be admitted without any more ado into Canada's universities, and he said so very plainly. He was an able debater and a persistent controversialist. Thus there were early signs that Dawson would be faced for the first time with a challenge to his authority. The course of events, however, moved very slowly. In 1870, before Murray was appointed, the governors, facing one of their periodic financial crises, appealed to the Montreal anglophone community and raised a very satisfactory $52,000. During the campaign, John Dougall, a McGill graduate and editor of The Witness newspaper, proposed at a public meeting that the admission of women to the college program should be one of the uses to which the money should be devoted. The assembled company agreed enthusiastically, and in response Chancellor Day welcomed the idea of women's education in general, but in true McGill fashion the proceeds of the campaign had been fully assigned long before they were collected, and no funds remained available to follow up the proposal. But the idea had been put in circulation. Dawson, who was genuinely concerned, but who thought that progress in such a matter should be cautious, encouraged Mrs. John Molson to establish at a meeting in her home on i o May 1871 the Montreal Ladies' Educational Association, modelled on a similar Edinburgh organization.14 Its aim was described as 'the provision of lectures on the Literary, Scientific and Historical subjects for the higher education of women and eventually if possible the establishment of a College for Ladies in connection with the university.'15 Thus the preference for a separate college rather than coeducation had been expressed before Murray arrived in Montreal. Professors, including Dawson himself, were engaged to give lectures on an agreed syllabus in the rooms of the Montreal Natural

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History Society. McGill gave those who passed the examination the certificate that the college had established for boys' high schools, the Associate in Arts. In his inaugural lecture, Dawson referred to the many developments in women's education in Canada, the United States, Britain, and Europe and concluded that these phenomena were 'evidently the dawn of a new educational era, which, in my judgment, will see as great an advance in the education of our race as that which was inaugurated by the revival of learning and the establishment of universities for men in the previous age'. He regretted that McGill did not 'as yet' possess its own ladies' college, for he believed such institutions would have a salutary effect on men's colleges also, but nevertheless a good beginning had been made. It was in the following year that Murray arrived and gave his stimulating, provocative lecture, favouring women's education but not arguing specifically for or against coeducation. However, the developments which took place continued to do so outside rather than within the college. Dawson had tried in 1870, following John Dougall's proposal, to interest his colleagues in the subject of women's education, but had received little encouragement. Once, however, the association had been established the professors were very willing to lecture in its classes. It may not be irrelevant that Dawson once remarked that it was 'in the habit of paying its lecturers handsomely'. David Penhallow even organized successful summer classes in botany for the women. Two minor developments were of some importance. The governors accepted in 1871 an endowment provided by her former pupils in memory of Hannah Willard Lyman. Miss Lyman had been the head of a private girls' school in Montreal and had been chosen first 'lady principal' of Vassar College. The income from the endowment was to provide a bursary for a woman attending 'a college for ladies in Montreal, affiliated to the McGill University or approved by it as of sufficient educational standing'. Until such time as a ladies' college had been established, the income might be used for prizes in the Ladies' Educational Association. Again the preference had been expressed for a separate woman's facility. The other development was that Dawson took the initiative in persuading the Protestant Board of School Commissioners to consider setting up a Montreal High School for Girls.16 This was accomplished in 1874, and a lady principal and four teachers were appointed, all having been trained in the McGill Normal School. Dawson knew that the provision of a sound preparatory education was the prerequisite for any advance in women's higher education. As a consequence, the Associate in Arts examination was opened to girls' schools as well as boys' and in 1877 a verY promising class of ten girls from the

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high school gained the certificate. Further demands for women's education at college level were obviously soon to be made. Meanwhile, Murray had been intermittently advancing his own view that women should be admitted forthwith to the college classes and, in April 1882, moved in Corporation 'that in the opinion of this Corporation the time has come when the educational advantages of the Faculty of Arts should be thrown open to all persons without distinction of sex'. The debate was deferred until the October meeting, when a committee was appointed to consider the matter. In June 1883 the committee reported that most universities were now doing something with regard to women's higher education, either by setting up separate facilities or by admitting women to present courses. Further, the committee went so far as to say that those who had chosen the latter alternative had not become aware of any ill effects, either for the institution or for the students. Murray seized on this as an endorsement of his position and again proposed that women should henceforth be admitted on the same terms as men; Alexander Johnson moved an amendment that the university 'would hail with pleasure' the establishment of a separate women's college. In the ensuing clash of opinion, one of the governors proposed that the principal should further investigate the practices current in Britain—he was about to depart on a sabbatic year—and report on his return. There the matter rested until Dawson's return in 1884. He reported briefly to the June meeting of Corporation, promising a full written report in October. In July he received a deputation of young women who had all gained the Associate in Arts certificate and now wanted to go on to a Bachelor of Arts degree. Dawson temporized, saying that further studies for them could undoubtedly be arranged and went so far as to seek financial support by means of a circular to his old allies, the Ladies' Educational Association. But during a session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was meeting in Montreal in August, he was called out for a brief conference with Donald Smith, who asked if he was seeking the means to establish collegiate classes for women. If so, Smith was prepared to make immediately available a sum of $50,000, on condition that the classes be entirely separate from those for men. Here was the classic McGill situation—a pressing need, the money 'providentially' forthcoming. Dawson was later candid enough to write: 'I was not a co-educationalist, but, had I been so, I am sure I should have acted in the same way: and had the endowment been offered for co-education, I should have accepted it as a providential indication in the case, at whatever sacrifice to myself.'17 He came to the board of governors in September with the donor's offer and cheque,

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which the board accepted without hesitation and remitted to Corporation the responsibility of making the desirable arrangements. A program was quickly devised, to begin operation in October. So the thing was done. Women were at last admitted to McGill. The income from the donation would supply the expenditures necessary to teach separate classes for the first two years of the arts course, and after that either more money would have to be found or the women would have to go in with the men. But at least a start had been made. The first women's classes were taught in the Redpath Museum by McGill professors on 6 October 1884, James McGilPs one hundred and fortieth birthday. Later the women had further accommodation in the East Wing corridor. Miss Helen Gairdner, the lady superintendent engaged for their welfare, was present with her knitting in the classroom by way of chaperone. A S U B J E C T OF C O N T R O V E R S Y

But Dawson had overlooked John Clark Murray. He had been waiting for Dawson's report on women's education in Britain and for the final report of the committee of Corporation and for the decision of the matter by vote of that body and recommendation to the board. All this procedure had been swept aside in deference, as Murray saw it, to the opinion of a wealthy donor, and because the proposed arrangements agreed with what Dawson had intended all along. Murray was not the man to let such things go unprotested. The dispute reached the local newspapers and the principal was put to the indignity of explaining, and even defending, his conduct in a series of letters to the Montreal Gazette.™ Murray found little active support among his colleagues, but he let his opinions be known to his students, who supported him wholeheartedly. Recounting her experiences in the first years of women's courses, one member of the class of 1890 recalled in later years that coeducation long remained a burning question on campus.19 The male editors of the college paper openly questioned the wisdom of the 'equal but separate' arrangements, and the women students were said to be unanimous in desiring non-segregation. When Delta Sigma, the women's student society, debated the subject, in defiance of its having been deleted by the college authorities from the list of proposed subjects, the officers were called in by the principal to explain their conduct and were lectured very severely. Their rebelliousness might endanger, he said, further generous gifts from the wealthy donor. The new arrangements if not regarded as perfect were nevertheless highly prized; another member of the same class wrote 'an Arts education for a girl was at that time

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considered an unnecessary luxury. . . . I had just begun Greek and the University life seemed to me to have opened the gates of Paradise.'20 Not all the women students expressed themselves so ecstatically but all were aware of a great sense of privilege. Donald Smith gave a further $70,000 in 1885 to pay for the third and fourth years, and the student numbers grew steadily. It was understood and accepted by all that any woman wanting to take an honours program, as a number of them did, must be prepared to do so in mixed classes, which sufficiently indicated the pragmatic rather than doctrinaire nature of the separation policy. But in the year 1888, the dispute again surfaced. There was a university dinner, at which the first women graduates were feted. It became a lively occasion, and in the speeches there were a number of references to coeducation which the many students present supported with boisterous cheers. A few days later Murray gave another talk to the Delta Sigma Society and Dawson heard that he had included disparaging references to arrangements for separate classes. The principal made the mistake of writing to Murray and asking him for an account of his remarks, which he understood to be 'subversive of the morals and discipline of the university'. He added that he believed it was his duty to lay the matter before the board of governors. Murray naturally refused to incriminate himself and asked for the charges against him to be formulated so that he might reply to them personally before the full board. This procedure the board declined to permit (they no doubt recalled their previous wearisome dealings with him), but two members of the board, J.H.R. Molson and George Hague, were named a committee to confer with Murray and to inform him that no charges had been made and that therefore no judgement had been rendered. But they added that he must in future conduct himself in conformity with university policy. This was not sufficient to placate Murray and in his next letter he threatened 'to seek vindication before another tribunal', whereupon in September the board responded by saying that if he could not conform to the decisions of the university, the board would with very great reluctance be forced to accept his resignation. In November Murray withdrew his threat to take the issues to court, and appeared to be content to let the matter rest. Meanwhile, however, the dispute had found its way into the Montreal press and into the columns of a Toronto periodical called The Week, which after correspondence and editorials in several issues published a letter that said in part: 'A despotism which ignores all voices but its own, must for its very existence, choke public discussion. It may proceed to maintain the hobby [sic] it has introduced, and to remove the man who represents the sentiments of the undergraduates, the graduates, and the community. But it cannot avoid its own doom. Just as soon as the

First women's graduating class, 1888 Back row Eliza Cross, Martha Murphy, Blanche Evans Middle row Gracie Ritchie, Jane Palmer Front row Alice Murray, Georgina Hunter, Donalda McFee

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Principal shall retire from McGill—and we presume that he cannot fail to see that in his own interest, as in that of the University, he can hardly remain—the scheme will collapse.'21 This was rough talk and not the kind of deference to which Sir William, now in his sixty-eighth year, was accustomed. Moreover, though Murray remained circumspect in public, he began a persistent private correspondence, pestering Dawson to reopen the matter on his behalf with the board. This campaign was still going on five years later when Dawson finally retired in 1893. But the public discussion died down, and the separate education of women in the Smith program continued with steadily increasing numbers. The years have, of course, proved Murray to have been right on the major issue. The strongest argument on his side of the debate was that a completely separate college like Vassar was one thing and coeducation was another, but segregated classes as in the McGill arrangement had the weaknesses of both systems and the virtues of neither. Yet given the practicalities of his situation, Dawson probably made the best of the choices open to him.22 Had it not been for his early initiatives, women's education at McGill would have been delayed much longer than it was. A university deprived of public funding finds itself under the necessity from time to time of accommodating its policies to the enthusiasms of its benefactors. McGill had so far been extraordinarily fortunate in the good sense of its supporters, but the problem has always been present. In this instance it meant that McGill was committed for some years to a policy increasingly anachronistic. On the other hand, Donald Smith's benefactions certainly made women's college-level education practicable at McGill for the first time and later they were to provide the collegial home which enabled the university to offer the best of both worlds— coeducation in the classroom and separate residential accommodation with the communal life of a women's college for those who desired it.23 A NEW E L E M E N T ON C A M P U S

The response to these new opportunities was very large, and within a short time the women's classes had grown to a considerable size. In 1889 Dean Johnson published a curve showing the growth of student enrolment in the Faculty of Arts over the past thirty-three years. The dramatic increase began in 1884 when women were first admitted and five years later the Donaldas, as they were called, constituted one-third of the total enrolment.24 As part of the same sociological developments, three other items deserve notice. In September 1891 Carrie M. Derick (B.A. 1890) was appointed 'to give assistance' to Professor Penhallow and so was the first

Carrie Derick, 1890

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woman to receive an academic appointment at McGill.25 She was later to become a full professor in the Botany Department. In that same month, Miss Mackay was engaged as library assistant to help with the preparation of the catalogue, and so became the first woman member of that profession on campus; and in the Faculty of Applied Science, Miss Margaret Ward was appointed 'shorthand and typewriter' to that increasingly busy faculty. She too deserves to be remembered as the first of the great army of women secretaries and non-academic administrative officers upon whom the modern university depends. Women were beginning to find their way into the employment as well as the studies of the university.26 McGill, it was undoubtedly remarked, has never been the same since.

NOTES

1. The portrait now hangs in the Redpath Hall. The artist's wife presented a sonnet which evidenced the extraordinary esteem accorded to Sir William. The last line reads: 'Oh noble master of a noble school!' 2. Fifty Years, p. 174. 3. Ibid., p. 175. 4. This cooperative venture founded in 1796 is now part of the FraserHickson Library, still vigorously in operation. E.G. Moodey, The Fraser-Hickson Library (London, 1977), pp. 15, 49, 62. 5. M-Gov. 8 August 1842. 6. Peter McNally, 'McGill University Libraries', Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (New York, 1897), 17: 311—22. 7. For the early days of the Medical Library see Martha Benjamin, 'The McGill Medical Library' (M.L.S. thesis, McGill 1960), and the references given there, including those to the Osier citations. 8. Markgraf gave a valuable account of his stewardship in a letter to Dawson written in 1879, MUA 927/29/33. 9. Nursing was only beginning to develop. St. Thomas' Hospital in London established its school of nursing in 1860; Miss Machin came from that school to the Montreal General Hospital in 1875 and Miss Livingston established its school of nursing in 1890. 10. They were said to have been married 'according to the rites of Labrador', that is by attestation without benefit of clergy. But Isabella Hardisty had already contracted a previous such marriage and James Hardisty Smith was the child of that liaison. The Strathconas were remarried by Anglican rites in the British Embassy in Paris fifty years later. 11. His brother is said to have asked him if he had in mind their sister Margaret (who had died a young woman) when he made this benefaction and he accepted the suggestion—but it came from his brother, not himself. In any case, that would not explain why he was so insistent on the separation. 12. D.F. Norton, 'The Scottish Enlightenment: John Clark Murray, 18361917', a paper read to the Canadian Historical Association, 1977.

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13. MUA 611/81. 14. This is the Anne of the gold medal, a member of the third Molson generation; she and her husband were both cousins of J. H. R. Molson, who was the McGill Governor. 15. Report of the Montreal Ladies' Educational Association, first session, 1871-72 (Montreal Printing House, 1872)^.3 (MUA go9A/36/2). 16. He was also much involved with the Trafalgar Institute which began operation as a private residential school for young women in 1887 and supplemented the work of the high school in preparing girls for advanced education; but the institute came too late to be part of the drive towards that education. 17. The Higher Education of Women in Connection with McGill University, reprinted from letters to the Montreal Gazette and issued 6 December 1884; Addresses, item 10, p. 10. 18. Ibid. 19. Carrie M. Derick, B.A. 1890; her reminiscences 'In the 80's' are in Old McGill 1927, pp. 200, 350, 356. 20. Maude Abbott, 'Autobiographical Sketch', McGill Medical Journal 28, no. 3 (October 1959) : 128. 21. The Week, i November 1888; the letter was signed 'Medicus'. 22. See the principal's 'Memorandum to the Board', 22 February 1888, MUA go9A/2. The professors were each given the choice of extra lectures for additional remuneration, or the help of an assistant, or the appointment of another person to undertake the women's classes in their subject. The majority chose additional remuneration. 23. As the number of women students grew, those who were not resident in the college took more and more of their work in the normal university classes, but separate classes for Royal Victoria College residents were maintained, mostly in first year subjects, until 1946, when postwar conditions ended the practice. Thereafter the Strathcona endowment income has been devoted solely to the college as a women's residence. 24. Smith liked to be called 'Donald A' by his associates and the classes for women at McGill were called the 'Donalda' program. 25. Hilda Oakeley, the first warden of the Royal Victoria College, quoted Dean Johnson as protesting after she had begun to lecture in the Philosophy Department: 'Ladies could not lecture at the University and he had no official knowledge of their existence.' But officially or unofficially, another barrier had been broken. 26. Miss Mackay received $40 a month, Miss Ward $400 a year, but nothing is said about the hours involved. Miss Derick's services in the first year were not to involve remuneration beyond a cost of $200. It had been agreed as early as June 1876 that the principal should have secretarial assistance, but what arrangements were made is not known ; in 1887 Helen Gairdner the 'Lady Superintendent' served Dawson part-time in that capacity, but Margaret Ward seems to have been the first woman trained and engaged specifically for secretarial duties. The telephone was first introduced into the college in the same year, 1891, at an annual cost of $25.

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he flow of benefactions and the invasion of Donaldas took place in a college which was fast maturing into a university in fact as well as in name. By modern standards, the numbers were still small for every parameter, but the intellectual disciplines were coming of age. THE HUMANITIES

In the 18gos the general arts course was still firmly based in the classical culture and the matriculant was expected to be prepared in both Latin and Greek. The other required subjects were mathematics and English, the latter including a paper on 'the leading events in English history'. The first year of the B.A. general course continued Latin and Greek, allowed a choice between French or German, but required English literature, mathematics, and chemistry. Psychology and botany were options available in the second year. The third year, while permitting one of the two classical languages to be relinquished, offered mathematical physics and experimental physics as optional subjects. Rather surprisingly, geology and natural history did not appear as an option until the fourth year, when history also was offered as an elective subject. In the annual university lecture of 1880-81 Dawson spoke at some

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length on the particular problems of providing for the teaching of history and had to confess: 'Our present methods of dealing with it is to exact a certain amount of reading in ancient history from junior students and to render accessible to senior students a short course in some portion of modern history, as an aid and inducement to further study after graduation.'1 At the honours level, history appears to have been treated as an aspect of language. Dawson recognized the inadequacy of this provision and pondered aloud on the need for an adequate endowment in this area, but none of the donors within earshot was moved to respond.2 It is also noticeable that despite comments made by the board as early as 1848, political economy was still not included in the syllabus. On the other hand, an honours program was available in six disciplines: classical languages; mathematics and physics; mental and moral philosophy; English language, literature, and history; geology and natural sciences; and modern languages and history. Course descriptions and examination papers give evidence of the rigorous nature of these programs. Honours English, for example, required a knowledge of Old English and Anglo-Saxon; and Oriental languages, while not strictly an honours course, offered Aramaic and Syriac as supplements to classical and post-biblical Hebrew. While some of these options were only rarely undertaken, others maintained a steady enrolment. From 1875 to 1888 there were in all 105 honours candidates, of whom only 4 attempted the modern languages program, but 22 the natural science program, and 31 the philosophy program. The many stimulations received by medicine and science during Dawson's last decade spilled over at least to some degree into the humanities programs also. Some earlier developments had been made necessary by increasing numbers. Leach was at first responsible both for English literature and for mental and moral philosophy. The responsibility for philosophy was detached in 1870 by a junior appointment and then John Clark Murray was appointed to a full chair in that subject in 1872. Four years later Leach was further relieved by the appointment of Charles E. Moyse as his associate professor in history and English language and in 1881 Moyse succeeded to the Molson chair. The introduction of women's classes in 1884 allowed, as we have seen, some rearrangements of duties and the provision of some assistance, but the need to provide more adequately for the humanities had long been recognized when the principal brought the matter to a head by submitting in 1891 a memorandum on the subject to the board. In it he detailed the needs and proposed at least partial solutions. He presented a subject-by-subject comparison of McGill and Toronto, showing that while McGill had only one less professor, eleven as compared with

Bernard James Harrington, 1885

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twelve, Toronto had sixteen junior positions in comparison with McGill's scanty three and a half. The annual academic salary bill at Toronto was nearly twice that of McGill, $53,000 as compared with $28,000. The response came in September when four additional lecturers were appointed: John Day in classics, H.M. Tory in mathematics, C. W. Colby in English literature, and J. L. Morin in French. Tory was to lead McGill into adventures in British Columbia and to become one of Canada's outstanding educational figures, while Colby (who had been engaged more for history than English) went on to become in 1894 the first lecturer and in 1895 the first professor of history and the pioneer of that important department. These four appointments were undoubtedly a step in the right direction, even if they did not give all that the principal had hoped for. He once remarked that McGill was often accused of doing more for science than for the humanities, and there is no doubt that he was aware of the dangers, but once again it was a question of being able to do those things for which money was forthcoming. One small but promising development, from which indeed in later years a whole faculty would grow, was that Donald Smith provided additional funding so that from 1889 the study of music could become an option in the Donalda program. The humanities had benefited from the provision of Molson Hall, its library, and the donations for books and operating funds. The provision of the Redpath Library just at the time of Dawson's retirement continued that important development still further. THE SCIENCES

The developments in the science departments were, however, much more noticeable, and were all the more remarkable because they had begun from nothing. As we have seen, apart from the work in chemistry and botany in the Faculty of Medicine, which naturally was of limited scope, there had been practically no science at McGill before Dawson arrived. There was, however, one institution outside the formal boundaries of the college which was of particular importance, and that was the Montreal Natural History Society. This society had been founded in May 1827 'by a few gentlemen casually met together'. Prominent among them were such familiar names as Stephen Sewell, Andrew Fernando Holmes, John Bethune, William Robertson, and Alexander Skakel. As the first generation passed away their places were taken by other familiar figures, such as W. T. Leach, Charles Smallwood, T. Sterry Hunt, and William Logan. Here then was a group of men with whom Dawson had an immediate affinity. He arrived in 1855 and was elected president in

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1856 and remained in office for four years. He returned to the chair intermittently over the next thirty years until he was finally named honorary president for life. As president of the society and principal of McGill College, Dawson was able in 1856 to join Logan and a few other Montreal residents in inviting the American Association for the Advancement of Science to meet in Montreal the following year. This was only the fourteenth meeting of the association, which had not before met outside the United States. It was a very successful meeting and gave Dawson and McGill College immediate status in scientific circles in North America. The association returned to Montreal in 1882 and at this meeting Dawson was president. Similarly, the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at McGill in 1884 was the first time that that body had met outside the British Isles and the success of this conference enhanced the international reputation of the college. In between the last two events, Dawson had been invited by the governor general, the Marquis of Lome, to take the initiative in organizing the Royal Society of Canada, and to serve as its first president. In his efforts to build up in McGill College scientific departments which would be comparable to the best in other institutions, Dawson had the help of his acknowledged position in these scientific associations, as well as the international reputation established by his many papers and scientific writings. The first accession of scientific strength came the year after Dawson had been appointed. Charles Smallwood, an M.D. of London University, had established himself in 1833 in St. Martin (later part of the city of Laval) and had begun to keep records of weather and other natural phenomena and by 1846 had built himself a well-equipped observatory. In 1856 he became honorary professor of meteorology at McGill and in 1863 his weather-reporting instruments were transferred to a small stone tower built on the bluff behind and a little to the west of Molson Hall. Here he conducted the McGill Observatory until his death in 1873. In his later years he had the help of a student, C.H. McLeod, who was engaged to take observations and telegraph them to Toronto for the newly established Canadian Meteorological Service. Soon after McLeod's graduation, Smallwood died and McLeod was asked to continue the service. The next year the McGill Observatory was raised to the status of a 'chief station' whereby the McGill readings were reported to Toronto every three hours. Professor McLeod's first great achievement at the Observatory was to establish its exact longitude. To do this, the transits of the stars must be observed from two stations far apart and timed by a single

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clock. In the i88os McLeod borrowed telegraph lines to determine longitude in this way relative to Harvard College. In the 18903 he borrowed the Atlantic cable to determine it relative to Greenwich. Putting the two together, he was able to improve slightly the figures for Harvard College, and so for the whole North American continent.... With McLeod as Superintendent, McGill Observatory became the outstanding time-keeping Observatory in Canada, providing time signals to the railways and to government services in Ottawa, including the signal that fired the noon gun on Nepean point. This supremacy continued on for ten years after Professor McLeod's death in 1917; in the late igaos the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa appropriately took over the task of being the country's timekeeper, but for another forty years McGill's time signals continued to go out to the railways.3 Another major triumph was participation in 1883 with the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in the observation of the transit of Venus; it cost McGill £500, but £353 had been raised in donations, and for the amount the university was out of pocket it acquired a good reputation in astronomical circles in Britain and a sidereal clock worth well over £250. In 1879 the observatory received a welcome gift of astronomical instruments from Charles Blackman. With some irregularity it also received payments from the harbour commissioners and from the railways for its services in time determination, and thus augmented the funds, mostly derived from the Meteorological Service, which were available to support its activities. Meanwhile the older science departments of natural philosophy, geology, and natural history had their own major developments. Harrington's work in the Faculty of Applied Science relieved geology of the mining and assaying elements of the subject which left Dawson as Logan Professor of Geology free to concentrate on the theoretical and descriptive aspects, and to follow his own researches in palaeozoology and palaeobotany. Botany itself was detached first as a lectureship and then later as a full professorship for David Penhallow, who may be said to have founded the Department of Botany. The advent of the Redpath Museum in 1882 gave all these related disciplines splendid facilities, and great prestige both on the campus and in scientific circles beyond. It must have seemed in the i88os that natural philosophy was the science discipline receiving the least recognition. Alexander Johnson continued to lecture and to persevere in wringing from the governors relatively small amounts of money to provide and to update the apparatus he required. In 1876 while on a second visit to London he saw

William Christopher Macdonald, 1870

Thomas Workman, 1864

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the range of new apparatus available and was permitted to spend £500, which was equivalent to a professor's salary for a year. In 1883 he received another $150 and the following April $300 as two years' allowance paid in advance so that he might make a good show at the British Association meeting scheduled for August 1884. In recompense, the local organizing committee of the association devoted its $1,500 surplus funds to McGill and the board allowed this money to be capitalized for the upkeep of 'philosophical apparatus'. In 1888 the 'Physical Classroom and Convocation Hall' received the gift of a dynamo and twenty-five incandescent lamps—electric lighting had arrived somewhat uncertainly in college buildings. All these items, welcome as they were, must have seemed to the Department of Natural Philosophy small in comparison with the large sums flowing towards other departments and other faculties. But the turn of natural philosophy came at last. The new developments were recognized by the use of the terms physical science or physics, and in 1890 W.C. Macdonald offered the funds required for the erection of a handsome new Physics Building, together with a $50,000 endowment necessary for a chair in experimental physics. In June of that year, John Cox was appointed to this chair and he and Carus-Wilson of electrical engineering toured institutions in the United States in order to assist in the planning of what were to be in their time the best-designed and bestequipped physics laboratories in Canada, if not North America. Care was taken to erect a building without metal structures so that experiments in magnetism would be facilitated, and its handsome stone portico made it at once one of the finest of the new buildings. John Cox was a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had been trained in the Cavendish Laboratories. He came with a reputation which his years at McGill would enhance; Alexander Johnson relinquished lecturing duties in the subject soon after Cox arrived, but he retained responsibility for pure mathematics. The department was poised on the edge of scientific developments to be associated with the names of Cox, Rutherford, and Soddy, developments which were to change the history of mankind. THE APPLIED SCIENCES

The other major development in science was the reestablishment of the Department of Applied Science. Dawson had greatly regretted the necessity to terminate Mark Hamilton's appointment in 1863 and in 1870 he made a study of science education abroad the subject of his annual university lecture. When he heard of plans to begin engineering

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studies in Toronto, he presented the board in February 1871 with a request for a fresh beginning at McGill. He represented it as a matter of urgency, since, he said, he feared that students from eastern Canada would be lost to Toronto if nothing was available at McGill. The board assented to the proposal providing that Dawson could raise the $7,500 which he had estimated to be the initial cost. Daniel Torrance gave $5,000, George Moffatt $ i ,000, and other familiar names recur in the general subscription list.4 In addition, J, H. R. Molson, Peter Redpath, and G.H. Frothingham promised $400 each for five years to guarantee the salary of a professor. Consequently, Bernard James Harrington, a McGill graduate who had proceeded to Yale and acquired the new American research degree, the Ph.D., was appointed lecturer in assaying and mining in a new Department of Practical Science;5 and in August G.F. Armstrong, a graduate of Cambridge and fellow of the Geological Society, was appointed professor of civil engineering. The name was soon changed to the Department of Applied Science and the new degrees were established as Bachelor and Master of Applied Science. In 1875 the department was raised to the dignity of a faculty, which offered the subjects of civil and mechanical engineering, assaying and mining, and practical chemistry, this last being taught by G. P. Girdwood, the medical professor in that subject. Archibald Duff was lecturer in mathematics. When Armstrong resigned, he was replaced in 1877 by Henry T. Bovey, another Cambridge graduate, who had been serving as assistant engineer at the Mersey docks. The faculty was equipped with various mining models and other pieces of apparatus, and soon became an uncomfortable neighbour in the Faculty of Arts because of its evident need for a building of its own. In 1879 an endowment of $30,000 from Miss Barbara Scott enabled the chair of civil engineering to be placed upon a secure basis, and Bovey and Harrington quickly began to make their mark as the leaders of a new generation of scientists, both in the college and beyond. The new faculty gathered strength as student enrolments increased. The thirty-three students in 1874 grew to seventy-two by 1878, mostly in the civil and mechanical engineering programs. The increasing strain on accommodation could not be relieved until the Thomas Workman bequest of 1889. This provided for a new building at a cost of $60,000 and the endowment for a second chair, the Workman Professor of Mechanical Engineering. But this was not enough to meet the needs of the faculty, and William Macdonald, who was emerging as a major benefactor, supplemented the Workman bequest with the funds for a Macdonald Engineering Building. Already there was developing a demand for an electrical engineering program and in 1891 Macdonald

The Macdonald-Workman Engineering Building, 1893

The Macdonald Physics Building

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came forward again, this time with $40,000 for a chair of electrical engineering. Thus by the time Dawson retired his earlier abortive attempt to provide for the needs of practical science had been splendidly retrieved and the new faculty was well established and already gaining an enviable reputation.6 THE F A C U L T Y OF LAW

The Faculty of Law could trace its history back to the earliest days of the college, with the appointment of William Badgley as lecturer in 1844, and professor and dean in 1853. During the long years of John Abbott's deanship, from 1855 to 1876, the faculty acquired a respectable reputation. Abbott and his colleagues, Judge Frederick Torrance and Maitres LaFlamme and Lafrenaye, were able men of great repute in legal circles, but they were busy with their professional responsibilities and as the years passed it became increasingly clear that a wholly parttime staff could not provide adequately for the university's needs. These difficulties were much aggravated by the chaotic state of the law in Lower Canada prior to the promulgation of the revised Civil Code in 1867. The same problems were encountered at the other Montreal law school, one which had been established in 1851 in connection with the College Ste. Marie by Maximilien Bibaud.7 In 1861 a young French Canadian, Gonzalve Doutre, graduated B.C.L. from the McGill Faculty of Law at the early age of nineteen, and while still waiting to attain his majority so that he might be admitted to the Bar, gave a lecture to the Institut des Lois, an association of law students, on some aspects of their legal education. In 1863 at his instigation the Institut presented a petition to the Bar relating to 'the present type of examinations for those aspiring to the study and practice of the profession of lawyer'. Three years later, Doutre was appointed secretary of a committee of the Bar to consider the Institut's proposals and present them in the form of a parliamentary bill, which became law in that same year. The faculty seems to have made no representation, and presumably acquiesced in the changes, something it was not prepared to do twenty years later. But Doutre, by then twenty-five, was not satisfied with these achievements. Critical of the teaching at the College Ste. Marie, and presumably no happier with the McGill situation, he and his associates organized in 1867 a new law school in connection with the Institut Canadien, in which Doutre himself taught civil procedure. The regulations in force in 1867 after the establishment of the Legislature of Quebec required that all law schools must be affiliated to a university and this provision

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brought the career of the College Ste. Marie school to an end. But the Institut Canadien teachers knew that the Ecole de Medecine et de Chirurgie de Montreal had met the same obligation the previous year by becoming the Faculty of Medicine of the Methodist College at Coburg, and so the school at the Institut Canadien also turned to this accommodating sponsor. But the arrangement seems to have proved less satisfactory in the case of law than in that of medicine and the alliance did not last as long. By 1871 Doutre had become president of the Institut, and its situation had become more embattled. The Annuaire for 1868 was placed upon the index of banned books by the Roman Catholic Church, and Doutre himself was becoming more deeply involved in the Institut's controversy with the ultra-conservative Bishop Bourget. In this situation it was arranged that Gonzalve Doutre and his colleague William Kerr should join the McGill faculty and bring with them the students already enrolled in the Institut's law school which thereafter ceased to operate. McGill took the opportunity to reorganize its own staff and to add six more professors. The courage of the McGill Governors in giving recognition to Doutre and to his law school at this time should not be underestimated, for the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to the Institut was very strong. The university gave Doutre further support in 1873 by conferring upon him the degree of D.C.L., an honour which his efforts on behalf of legal education and his professional writings fully justified. He remained a professor in the faculty for two years only, but he was then elected fellow and so a member of Corporation for the years i874~77.8 But none of the new arrangements, helpful as they were, touched on the heart of the problem, which was the lack of full-time appointments in the faculty. The difficulty was that a good lawyer downtown in Montreal could secure for himself a handsome income, considerably beyond the emoluments of a McGill professor. The university made the faculty a modest allowance and this was divided by the professors among themselves, according to the number of the lectures they gave. The students' course fees were also given to the lecturer, who naturally arranged his schedule to fit in with the obligations of his practice. The lectures were given in a suite rented by the university from Molsons Bank for $250 a year and later in rooms in the Burnside Hall building.9 The necessity for the faculty's location to be near the courts and to the principal lawyers' offices, in which both students and staff were employed, was constantly stressed. But this proximity did not prevent complaints by the students in 1877 of the irregular nature of their classes and the matter was taken up again the next year by the Graduates' Society, asking for an improvement in the quality of legal education required for the B.C.L. degree. The donations of Griffin's books in 1877

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and those of Judge Mackay five years later supplemented the meagre provision of legal works in the university library, but the first signs of real progress came in 1884 when Mrs. Stewart left $35,000 for the endowment of the Samuel Gale chair in memory of her father, a distinguished jurist and judge. The faculty proposed that the dean should occupy the Gale chair and that the income should be added to the university subvention for proportional distribution, but the board insisted that the occupant of the chair should receive the income, intending no doubt to secure something nearer to a full-time appointment. In 1887 in a lecture on professional education, Dawson admitted, 'It has been the fashion with some men to decry and disparage our faculty of law.... It has been said that the Lectures are not actually delivered, but this is quite incorrect. The session is divided into two terms, each professor delivering a daily lecture in one of these terms, so four of the professors lecture in the first term and three in the second.'10 He then went on to point to the number of B.C.L. graduates who were now occupying responsible positions in Canada and in the United States, both in the legal and judicial systems and in the spheres of politics and commerce. But this careful defence of the Law Faculty suggests that there was room for considerable improvement. It js interesting that Dawson added: 'The large numbers of French names on our list of graduates reminds me that we have been working in this department for both sections of our people, and that no distinctions of creed are known in our professional classes.' He might have mentioned by name two graduates who were outstanding examples of this catholicity, Thomas D'Arcy McGee of the class of 1861 and Wilfrid Laurier of the class of 1864. The latter had just been chosen as leader of the Liberal party in succession to Edward Blake. The difficulties with regard to the operation of the faculty persisted, however, and it was not until 1890 that a solution to the major problem presented itself. Again it came from a wealthy benefactor. In the same letter in which he offered the Applied Science and Physics buildings and the endowment of chairs in those areas, W.C. Macdonald offered $150,000 for the rehabilitation of the Faculty of Law. This capital sum would produce, he calculated, a sufficient sum to provide for the appointment of two law professors, one to be dean of the faculty with a salary not less than $3,000 a year, and the other to be secretary of the faculty with a salary of not less than $2,500. Each would be required to 'devote himself zealously to the management and continuous advancement of the Faculty and instruction therein'. These words were underlined ; the letter does not say that the professors were to be full-time, but the implication was that they would give their major concern to the affairs of the faculty. The rest of the income was to be used as the board saw fit to maintain and to improve the teaching program. For the first

Medical graduating class, c. 1890

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time, legal studies at McGill had been placed upon a footing, if not wholly satisfactory, at least much much nearer to that achieved in the other areas of the university. FACULTIES AND PROFESSIONAL COUNCILS

Towards the end of the i88os, a matter which greatly concerned the college, particularly with regard to the Faculty of Law, was the intention of the Legislature in Quebec to set up regulative councils for the different professions, which would determine the standard of general education required of candidates for the profession and control the character of their training. This proposal threatened to encroach upon the rights of the university to determine the content of its professional degrees and would give the councils the right to require further examination before the grant of full entry into the profession—a battle already fought and won in the field of medicine in the instance of the Logic case of 1835. A particular point of concern with regard to law was that the new regulations would tend to discourage young men from taking the B.A. degree as preparatory to professional education. The college petitioned in March 1877 that the clause in the British North America Act protecting all educational rights enjoyed by Protestants in Quebec before Confederation, also protected the right of their graduates in medicine and law to practise their profession within the province without further examination.11 In September 1889 it was reported that the Bar Council had amended its regulations to recognize the B.A. degree as fulfilling pre-legal educational requirements, but neither in law nor in medicine did the university win its point with regard to control of curriculum, or indeed with regard to the right of the professional council to set further examinations for entry into the profession and the award of the licence to practise. In these respects, the university lost the autonomy it had hitherto enjoyed. A somewhat similar concern had developed a decade earlier when the Board of Notaries asked that the Faculty of Law appoint a professor of notarial science, but on that occasion the faculty had maintained its view that each professor should deal with the notarial aspects of his subject, and that all law students whether intending to be notaries or advocates should receive the same legal training.12 THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE

The Medical Faculty had moved to Cote Street in 1851 and stayed there twenty-one years. It was a location convenient for the Montreal General Hospital but in other respects unsuitable, particularly because it allowed

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no room for expansion. The student body which numbered 64 in 185152 had risen by 1871-72 to 139. The question of a return to the campus was discussed, but since there was no building suitable, obviously a new one would have to be provided. The governors had purchased the Cote Street building from the original proprietors, and if this site were sold the proceeds could be put towards the cost of a new building, but since there would undoubtedly be an amount outstanding, the faculty declared itself ready to pay the interest on the capital sum the board would have to advance. It was an offer characteristic of the self-help attitude which the faculty had always maintained in its relationship to the rest of the university. However, the board was just engaged in the sale of the Burnside Hall building to the Protestant School Commissioners and offered to devote the proceeds of that transaction to the costs of the new Medical Building if the faculty would make themselves responsible for its furniture and equipment. So in this cooperative fashion, the Medical School returned in 1872 to the campus, the location chosen being to the east and north of the Arts Building, approximately where the F. Cyril James Administration Building now stands. Soon after the faculty settled into its new quarters, there returned from Europe a McGill graduate who had spent the last two years in further studies in London, Berlin, and Vienna, the medical capitals of the world. William Osier was appointed lecturer in the institutes of medicine in 1874 and promoted to the full chair in 1875. The term 'institutes of medicine' then denoted physiology and pathology, and to these Osier added histology. Eight years later, to the great regret of all in Montreal, he removed to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During his teaching years at McGill, Osier left an indelible mark upon the faculty and the professors. Fully equipped by his training for medical investigation of the most searching nature, he made clinical practice both a field of research and a pedagogical tool. Students were guided in seminars to search for new answers to old problems in their day-to-day encounter with the patients assigned to them. Osier's book The Principles and Practice of Medicine: Designed for the Use of Practitioners and Students of Medicine was first published in 1892, but it embodied the ideas he had worked out and exemplified in his McGill days. It went through successive editions, the last being printed as lately as I947-13 Although he went on to Johns Hopkins University and in 1905 to Oxford, where he became Regius Professor, William Osier never forgot his medical alma mater and the rich treasure of his personal library was left to McGill, where it is maintained not as a museum piece but as a growing collection devoted to the history of medicine. By means of his library, Osier continues to serve the faculty and profession he so highly esteemed and so splendidly adorned.

The Medical Building, 1895

William Osier, 1877

Maude Abbott, 1890

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Another outstanding personality of those years was Robert Palmer Howard. He had been one of the 'young Turks' who had founded in 1851 the St. Lawrence School of Medicine in rivalry to the McGill School and Dean Craik forty years later attributed the 1851 move from the campus to Cote Street as much to the threat of the new school as to the rivalry with the Ecole de Medecine. But the St. Lawrence School soon collapsed and Howard was appointed to the McGill staff in 1854. He won the regard of his colleagues to such effect that when Campbell died in 1882 Howard was chosen to follow him in the deanship. He was a man of warm humanity and untiring energy, and both as a physician and as a personality he was widely popular. When Howard became dean he immediately made known the need of the faculty for developmental funds, and Donald Smith responded with the first of his benefactions in the field of medicine by offering $50,000 if the faculty could raise a corresponding amount to form an endowment fund. The money was soon forthcoming, but only two years later the faculty was faced with an enrolment of 234 students and the necessity of having to borrow from its endowment in order to enlarge the 1872 building. It was not only student enrolment which called for more extensive premises. The addition of departments of ophthalmology and otology in 1873 and of laryngology in 1882, the reorganization of gynaecology into a full chair in 1883, and the appointment of the first professor of pathology, Dr. J.G. Adami from Cambridge University in 1892, all increased the pressure on the available space. Then in 1893 Donald Smith came forward with two more princely endowments, one of $50,000 for a new chair in hygiene and the other of an equal amount to sustain the chair in pathology. A further extension of the buildings, involving this time the purchase of land in the northeastern area of the campus, was the only answer and the faculty proposed to borrow for this purpose from its endowment fund a second time. But that staunch friend of the university over so many years J. H.R. Molson had by no means lost his interest and he offered to provide the $60,000 needed for the whole project. The new extension was opened in 1895, two years after the formal retirement of Principal Dawson but before his successor's arrival, so that he was able to be present and to contrast the splendid new developments with the modest provisions he had first seen on Cote Street forty years before.14 WOMEN IN MEDICINE

The Faculty of Medicine did not escape all controversies. The women students had hardly established themselves in the Faculty of Arts before they were knocking on the doors of the Faculty of Medicine. Octavia

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Grace Ritchie, the Valedictorian of the first class of women graduates in 1888, proposed to refer in her speech to the desirability of providing medical education for women, but the principal censored it out. Miss Ritchie, however, in the spoken version reinserted it, which indicated considerable strength of character. She had to go off to Queen's to receive her medical training, but in 1890 Maude Abbott, the grandniece of Joseph Abbott and the cousin of John Abbott, applied to the McGill school. The faculty was adamant and declined to admit her. There was by this time in Montreal yet another rival medical school and this one provided for its survival, at least for a number of years, by becoming the Medical Faculty of Bishop's University. Here Miss Abbott was accepted, and the irony of the situation was provided by the fact that most of the theoretical teaching and practically all of the clinical teaching in the wards of the Montreal General Hospital was done by McGill professors. When Maude Abbott as a Bishop's student applied for her ticket of entry to the hospital clinical courses, the Hospital Management Committee (which was of course the McGill faculty under another hat) was very loath to admit her, and it took a newspaper campaign and the threat of a number of hospital supporters to withdraw their subscriptions before she was at last reluctantly admitted. In 1905 the Bishop's faculty merged with McGill and its graduates were acknowledged as alumni of McGill, so the Faculty of Medicine acquired its first women graduates by inheritance.15 It took the First World War to open McGill's own medical courses to women, and the first class did not graduate until 1922. THE FACULTY OF VETERINARY SCIENCE

A development which closely concerned the faculty but was not strictly an instance of its own growth and expansion was a proposal in the late i88os to adopt the Montreal Veterinary College as a fifth faculty of McGill. The college had begun in 1866 when Dean Campbell and Principal Dawson encouraged Duncan McNab McEachran, a fellow of the Royal Veterinary Society in England, to offer lectures to prospective veterinarians, and they agreed at the same time to allow his students to attend the classes given by the Medical Faculty in the subjects appropriate to them. These were the courses in botany, chemistry, and institutes of medicine. In this way the college commenced and by 1889 there was a student body of fifty, and six McGill professors were engaged in teaching them, together with McEachran and two veterinarian colleagues. The Medical Faculty recommended that the college become the Faculty of Comparative Medicine and Veterinary Science. The statutes were accordingly amended and the new faculty came into

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operation in the academic year 1889-90. In 1890 there were nineteen graduates for the degree of D.V.S. and the figures varied between fifteen and twenty for the next five years. But in 1896 the figure fell to eleven and continued to decline until 1903, when there were three candidates only, and the faculty was terminated. Had it persisted a year or two longer it could have been absorbed into the activities of Macdonald College and the Faculty of Agriculture. As it was, McGill having ventured into the teaching of veterinary science and retreated, never found the occasion, despite its notable achievements in the field of animal science, to return. Thomas Cameron noted in 1938 that McGill had required three years of training whereas at other schools, only two years were required and he commented: 'McEachran's School was unique.... It had a French-speaking section as well as an English-speaking one, and it worked in the closest association with human medicine. While it is true that much of the work of the veterinary surgeon must be carried out in conjunction with agriculture, it is generally agreed that his training should have the closest association with human medicine. . . . The demise of the McGill College [Faculty] is probably due to the fact that it set too high a standard for the times; and as McGill is a privately endowed university, unlike the [other Veterinary Scheols] it had no provincial backing.'16 STUDENT AFFAIRS

Apart from the development of the different disciplines, and the expansion of knowledge into new areas of study, there was also a maturation of institutional life. This is very noticeable with regard to student affairs, for example. The student body had become much more self-confident and better organized. The young men produced from 1873 onward, at first once every two weeks but later weekly, a publication which they called the University Gazette. It included weighty contributions on 'Comments on Shakespeare's Tempest' or 'The Later Matthew Arnold', and at one point in true Victorian fashion it ran a serialized full-length novel,, A Country Boy, by Nihil V. Erius, 'written for the University Gazette'. There was a good deal of verse, some serious and some jocular, together with news of the University Literary Society, the Glee Club, the McGill Medical Society, and the Young Men's Christian Association. Other regular items were accounts of various sporting events, such as the Annual Athletics Day and the yearly football game against Toronto.17 After 1884 there was a regular Donalda column called 'Feathers from the East Wing'. An unfailing section was called 'Between the Lectures' which offered humorous anecdotes, riddles, and verses. Con-

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vocations, class dinners embellished with spirited renderings from the McGill College Song Book, meetings of Corporation heavy with annual reports of faculties, the library committee, and the museum committee were regularly chronicled in considerable detail.18 While there were numerous societies, there was as yet no McGill Students' Society. It says a great deal for the homogeneity of the student body that its place could be supplied for many years by the YMCA, which was organized in 1883. The women had two societies, the Delta Sigma (which was open to all women students and was not an exclusive 'Hellenic' Society after the American fashion) and its missionary offshoot which they named Theo Dora. The majority of the students, men and women, lived at home, in the modest affluence afforded them by their fathers, who were mostly professional men, successful merchants, or 'superior' tradesmen. But those from out of town lived in boarding houses of which the university published annually approved lists for men and women separately.19 This was one of the subjects on which Dawson changed his opinion completely. As a young man he had rejected the idea of college residences, but the difficulties of some of these boarders became well known to him, and it was not unknown for him to visit them in their lodgings when they were ill. In November 1882 the Faculty of Applied Science drew the attention of the board of governors to 'the fact that many cases of illness and even a few deaths have occurred among the undergraduates, apparently in consequence of the unhealthy conditions of their lodging houses and of the places at which they take their meals', and asked that 'some arrangements might be made which would lessen the risk of such sacrifices for the future'.20 In his annual university lecture for that year Dawson referred to the subject of residences and continued: 'No better example could be set by any of our wealthy citizens than the provision of such college residences in our grounds, and I hope the matter will commend itself to the minds of some of those whom I address.'21 But no one was moved to supply the deficiency. Twelve years later, in 1894, in his paper to the Delta Sigma Society on the subject of 'The Ideal College for Women', he stressed the advantages of the residential college and hoped that such a college 'giving to students all that can be desired in home and social life' might soon be erected at McGill. But the women had to be patient for another five years before they could see their college opened,22 while the men had to wait over forty years before Douglas Hall was presented to the university. But the students had not been left altogether without provision for some social life. As early as 1876, the students asked for a room of their own, and the principal requested and was given 'permission to order for the new students' room some plain strong chairs and matting for the floors'. It was obviously not a room to encourage self-indulgence.

Their Excellencies' visit to McGill College. The reception by the Arts students

The international football match, Harvard vs. McGill

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The provision of a gymnasium first arose in connection with the high school, and 'a drilling and gymnastic master' to serve both schoolboys and college students, Mr. Frederick Barnjum, was appointed in 1862 at a salary of $600. In 1877 the complaint was registered, to be re-echoed often in later years, that while the attendance of students at the gymnasium classes was optional, the payment of the athletics fee was not. The building erected in 1861 seems to have been little more than temporary, but it was continued with various patched-up repairs until 1884 when the same Mr. Barnjum, still operating within it, produced a sister, Miss Helen Barnjum, who conducted exercises for the women. From 1890 to 1891 James Naismith was instructor of gymnastics, and had as his assistant a medical student named R. Tait McKenzie. When Naismith left McGill to go to Springfield College, Massachusetts, where he invented the game of basketball, McKenzie succeeded to his position and retained the appointment after graduation until 1904. He thus made a particular contribution to the development of athletics at McGill.23 Other sporting activities were of a more social nature. In winter there were snowshoeing expeditions, skating parties, and sleigh rides, and for the summer, the University Tennis Club was organized in 1881. At that date, tennis was an all-male activity, and it remained so after 1884. Consequently, the Women's Tennis Club had to be formed in 1889 as a separate organization. There is also mention in 1884 of a bicycle track being laid out in the college grounds, but this again was presumably a male preserve. One of the editorials in the University Gazette complained that the young men and women could sit together in church and listen to a sermon without any apparent harmful effects, but they were segregated in the classroom. The fact is, however, that the young men and women of the i88os and 18903 do not seem to have moved too quickly of their own volition into many joint activities. College life was still very much a young man's world. A NEW

C H A N C E L L O R , A NEW G E N E R A T I O N

With the Redpath Library, the new Physics and Engineering Buildings, the new Medical Extension, and the Royal Victoria Hospital all waiting to be opened with due ceremony and fanfare in the fall of 1893, Dawson's term as principal certainly ended in the August of that year on a high note. The parallel of Moses standing on Mount Pisgah to view the Promised Land and sending his people forward where he himself could not go did not fail to occur to one so biblically minded as John William Dawson.24 It had been a long forty years since the granting of the amended charter and on the way near miracles had been accomplished.

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The future was beckoning bright with promise, but it was beckoning to others than himself. Charles Dewey Day had been president of the Royal Institution for thirty-two of those forty years, and chancellor for twenty. When he announced his retirement in 1883 (he remained nominally in office until his death the following year), he wrote his colleagues a letter in which he said: 'One member of the Board originally appointed [in 1852] still remains upon it (The Honourable Mr. Ferrier) and with you all, some for a long and others for a shorter period, I have worked with great satisfaction and in perfect harmony and have received uniform kindness and consideration, for which I have ever felt grateful and now desire to return for it my unaffected thanks.' The members of the board throughout those years had indeed constituted a remarkable fellowship of harmonious and singleminded intent, and Day might well look back on this association with deep satisfaction, recalling men like Hew Ramsay in the early days, and R. A. Ramsay in the later years, and the apparently Indestructible James Ferrier through them all. Ferrier had survived not merely from 1852 but from the even darker days of 1845, and he had been the chairman of the Estate and Finance Committee ever since he relinquished the presidency of the Royal Institution in Day's favour. In 1884 he was the obvious and unanimous choice to succeed as chancellor, in which office he continued until 1888, fortythree years after his first appointment to the Royal Institution. When Ferrier died in office, J.H.R. Molson should have succeeded him. He was then the senior governor, having served for twenty-three years, and both his interest in the college and his donations had been constantly maintained. He and Peter Redpath had often sustained day-today operations in addition to making major benefactions, and neither man had courted publicity; but J.H.R. Molson had both given and served with a particular self-effacement. It is said that the chancellorship was in fact offered to him and that he himself advocated a different appointment. William Macdonald was appointed a committee of one to sound out all the governors and he reported that there was unanimity in the choice of Donald A. Smith. J.H.R. Molson was a major and highly respected figure on the Montreal scene as had been both Day and Ferrier before him. But now that McGill College was becoming truly McGill University, a chancellor of international repute was needed, and by his wealth, by his munificent benefactions, and above all by his imperial stature, Sir Donald A. Smith, soon to be Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, was an obvious choice. It proved a crucial one. It gave Smith the determining voice in choosing a successor to Dawson, and thereby it put McGill firmly under those imperial influences which were

James Ferrier, c. 1885

The University of McGill College, 1882

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to characterize it so profoundly in the early decades of the new century which was fast approaching. In his letter of resignation Day had also written that his great sense of regret was tempered by 'the confidence that the work in which I have borne a humble part rests in safe hands, and in the confidence, and in the hope, that when time shall have dealt with you as it deals with all, new generations of earnest men will take up the trust, and fulfil it not less faithfully and well than their predecessors have done'. That hope was to be fulfilled as remarkably in the future as it had been in the past. By the time Dawson came to retirement, one of those belonging to a new generation was already beginning to make major contributions to the life of the university, and they were to prove only the first instances of immense and unrivalled benefactions to follow. William Macdonald will always remain an enigmatic figure. Apart from his interest in and generosity towards McGill he was almost a recluse and something of a miser, a man estranged from his family and from his religion, pouring the huge fortune he was amassing by the most stringent economies into education and particularly into McGill.25 But while his story began in Dawson's days, it belonged principally to the years that followed. END AND BEGINNING

The official records of the institution—the minutes of the board of governors, of Corporation, and of the faculties—supply the continuity of the narrative, but the rich content is provided by the teachers and the students for whom the institution exists. Ferrier, Day, Molson, and Redpath were important, but even more important were William Turnbull Leach, George Cornish, Alexander Johnson, and John Clark Murray. And even more important again were the students, registering year by year for their courses in arts or medicine, in law or applied science, steadily growing in numbers, starting their own college magazine, inventing new forms of football, or organizing college societies and other social occasions. They enjoyed alike their battles over coeducation and the safe, comfortable world of the closing years of Queen Victoria's reign, and in the process they became a growing host of graduates, 'prepared for the manifold tasks of life' and filling with competence and dignity the highest positions in the land. Chancellor Day's resignation letter had one further comment to make. He wrote: 'It will not I trust be out of place in this communication, probably my last of an official character, to give an expression of my esteem and gratitude to the distinguished Principal of the University, who with rare self-denial has devoted and is devoting the best portion of

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his life to its interests and has been chiefly instrumental in making it what it is.' When those words were written Dawson still had ten more years ahead of him as principal, and many material and social achievements were still to come, but they were the harvest which the long years of cultivation had already earned. When all the honourable names have been mentioned, it is still the name of Dawson which completes the tale. James McGill founded a college and John William Dawson made of it a university. When Dawson finally retired in 1893, there was, as one would expect, much speculation as to who would be chosen as his successor. A local party favoured Henry Bovey, the able, vigorous dean of applied science. Another group said that the principalship had been offered to William Osier and he had declined. But the governors kept their own counsel, and it was to be 1895 before their decision was known. In the meantime, none could doubt that for McGill an era had ended. The 1801 establishment of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning was almost a century past; the years of litigation with the Desrivieres family had long been forgotten; the quarrelsome, in retrospect rather pathetic, years of John Bethune seemed an irrelevancy of another age. McGill College had matured into McGill University, and none could say exactly when the metamorphosis had been complete. Yet all these past years and past personalities had played their part, and the McGill University awaiting its new principal to lead it into a new century was what the history of McGill College had determined it should become.

NOTES 1. 'The Future of McGill University', annual university lecture, 1880-81, p. 9; Addresses, item 6. 2. Regrettably, none of the other Canadian universities were in a much better position; Daniel Wilson at Toronto 'was not really a historian in the modern sense' and G.M. Wrong was appointed in that university in 1892, only two years before C. W. Colby's lectureship was designated as in history at McGill and three before he became the first Kingsford Professor of History in 1895. R.A. Preston, 'Presidential Address', Canadian Historical Association, 1962. 3. J. Stewart Marshall, Century of Records, McGill Observatory 18741974 (McGill Department of Meteorology, 1974), pp. 5 and 8. The old observatory site is now occupied by the Stephen Leacock Building, but the instruments were removed to the lower campus and Dr. Smallwood's observations are still maintained. 4. Daniel Torrance was a brother of Frederick Torrance, the long-time Governor of McGill: George Moffatt was the son of the George Moffatt of the Bethune days. Dawson made good use of family connections.

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5. Harrington graduated B.A. 1869, with first class honours in geology and with the Logan Gold Medal. He was one of the first Canadians to obtain the Ph.D. degree, his thesis being 'The Siemens-Martin Process for the Production of Steel'. He took over Sterry Hunt's work as lecturer in chemistry at McGill and as chief chemist to the Canadian Geological Survey. His appointment was made a professorship in 1874 and he became the first Macdonald Professor of Chemistry in 1899 and died in office in 1907. He married Dawson's daughter Anna in 1876. 6. Harrington was able in 1891 to point with pride to the number of McGill graduates who were holding responsible positions in Canada and the United States. M-Gov. 23 January 1891. 7. E.F. Surveyer, 'Une Ecole de Droit a Montreal avant le Code Civil', Revue Trimestrielle Canadienne 6 (June 1920) : 140-50. 8. He died in 1880 aged only 38, after a short career of unusual brilliance. His colleague at the institute, William Kerr, became acting dean in succession to John Abbott in 1876, and dean from 1881 to 1888. 9. The faculty used Burnside Hall in the i86os when the Arts Faculty moved out; it moved to Molsons Bank when Burnside Hall was sold but returned to the building when it became the Fraser Institute in 1885. It had access there to Judge Torrance's library, which had been left to the institute and took the major part of the collection with its own books when it removed in 1895. The faculty reluctantly parted with the last of the Torrance volumes in 1939. E.G. Moodey, The Fraser-Hickson Library (London, 1977), pp. 83-84, 127-29. 10. 'The University in Relation to Professional Education', annual university lecture, 1887-88, pp. 8ff.; Addresses, item 13. 11. M-Gov. 26 March 1887 and 22 March 1889. 12. M-Gov. 24 November 1877. 13. He also published A System of Medicine, a highly regarded encyclopaedia of medicine in seven volumes 1907-10, and several volumes of literary essays which presented the physician as a profound humanist as well as a research scientist. He was elected F.R.S. in 1898 and created a baronet of the United Kingdom in 1911. He died in 1919. 14. Referring to the opening of the Royal Victoria Hospital, the establishment of the nursing school at the Montreal General Hospital and the extensive improvements carried out there, and the developments within the faculty itself, W.B. Howell commented: 'No period in the history of McGill Medical Faculty has been so remarkable for quick progress as these years from 1892 to 1895.' Francis John Shepherd: Surgeon: His Life and Times, 7557-7929 (Toronto, 1934), p. 162. 15. Maude Abbott became an outstanding medical research scientist and was awarded the McGill degree M.D., C.M. honoris causa in 1910 and LL.D. honoris causa in 1936. But although she became the world authority on congenital diseases of the heart, and was offered the chair of pathology and headship of the department in the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, she was never more than an assistant professor at McGill—old prejudices die hard. S.B. Frost, 'The Abbotts of McGilF, McGill Journal of Education 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978) : 253-70.

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16. T. W. M. Cameron, 'Veterinary Education in Canada', The Veterinary Journal 93, no. 3 (1938) : 102-6. 17. The famous games against Harvard to which American football is said to owe its origins were played 15 and 16 May 1874. See the Canadian Illustrated News drawing, reproduced on p. 290. The Toronto games date from 1880. 18. First published in 1879. 'McGill Songs and Song Books', a paper given by Faith Wallis to the James McGill Society, i December 1977, MUA 2487. See also 'McGill College Songs'. 19. Dr. Cornish had kept the old 'College Boarding House' going as a private venture until 1873, when advancing years and costly repairs caused him to give it up, and no one else was willing to take it on. 20. M-Gov. 25 November 1882. Nothing was done, but the request for at least a dining hall was renewed in January 1885 and in September of that year, arrangements were made for a midday meal to be provided 'in the old Armoury'. 21. 'The Recent History of McGill University', annual university lecture, 1882-83, p. 17; Addresses, item 8. 22. The Royal Victoria College commenced operation in September 1899, but the formal opening did not take place until November 1900. Muriel V. Roscoe, 'The Royal Victoria College 1899—1962', a report to the principal (1964), p. 56. 23. McKenzie was appointed 'professor and director of the Department of Physical Education in the University of Pennsylvania in 1904. He attained an international reputation as a sculptor of figures, chiefly of an athletic character, and is represented by several works on the McGill campus. 24. 'Thirty-eight Years at McGill', annual university lecture, 1893-94, p. 19; Addresses, item 19. 25. Other institutions and programs received some assistance but the lion's share went to McGill. Maurry H. Epstein, 'Sir William C. Macdonald, Benefactor to Education' (M.A. thesis, McGill, 1969).

McGILL COLLEGE SONGS 'More solid Things do not show the Complexion of the Times so well as Ballads.' John Selden, a seventeenth-century collector of broadsides

A Pocket Song Book for the Use of The Students and Graduates of McGill College, compiled and published by a Student in Arts, Montreal, 1879, price thirty-five cents, hoped 'to supply a want long felt by the class for which it is intended'. Later editions appeared in 1885, 1895, and 1921. See p. 298, note 18. The following are selections from the 1879 edition, the first college song book in Canada. I. A H E A L T H TO OLD M ' G I L L

Written by Russ Huntingdon, B.C.L. (1875) for the class of 1874 The lights around the festeal [sic] board, on glass and silver quiver, The gen'rous wine is freely pour'd, the toast awaits the giver, So here's a health to old McGill, with feelings proud and tender, Let each a brimming bumper fill, and loving homage render.

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