align="left">Percival Molson

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

CHAPTER I

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The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning

THE Charter under which McGill University was established, was obtained on March 31st, 1821. The century mark in the University's history has now been passed. One hundred years is a long period in the life of a nation or a country; it is a longer period still in the life of an individual; but it is perhaps longest relatively in the life of an educational institution, particularly if that institution had its birth in struggling pioneer days. It is a period in university life which sees, as a rule, an undreamed of growth and development from small beginnings to unlimited influence, from scanty resources and great disappointments to a large if not always adequate endowment and equipment, from a merely local service to a national and even a world educational power. This is distinctly true of the century of McGill University's story. It began as a College, intended to minister to a very small community. It has grown in one hundred years to serve the world. It has graduated over twenty-five hundred Bachelors, over thirty-three hundred Doctors of Medicine, over nineteen hundred Engineers, over eight hundred Lawyers besides holders of higher or graduate degrees; it has given hundreds of graduates to high positions in the Church, the State, and industrial and educational institutions. It has drawn its students from all lands, and it has sent its products in trained men and women into every country on the globe. Long ago it divested itself of the merely local, and to-day the old term, Studium Generale, used in the middle ages to designate a University, may well be applied to McGill,—“a School where students of all kinds and from all parts are received.”

The establishment of McGill University was but part of a more comprehensive plan to improve educational conditions in Canada in the beginning of the 19th century. After the peace treaty of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War and gave Canada to the British, immigration to the colony was comparatively small, and little effort was made by the Home Government to provide educational opportunities for the children of those who sought happiness or fortune in the new land beyond the ocean. Indeed, in that time the authorities were too busy trying to solve difficult problems at home to devote much energy to the internal problems of the colony. They had no time and perhaps they had even less care for their colonists. The treaty of 1763 had not brought peace. The advocacy for political change was causing deep anxiety and the new radicalism under the plea for the new democracy was making a slow but steady advance which troubled the statesmen of the age. Then came in quick succession the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Peninsular War, all of which absorbed the attention of the Home Government. By her steadfast attitude in 1776, Canada had proved her right to expect and to receive sympathetic attention and encouragement from the Home Government, but it is perhaps not to be wondered at that in the circumstances of the troubled period the educational advancement of Lower Canada was neglected or ignored, and that educational opportunities were practically non-existent.

In other parts of Canada education seems to have received more sympathetic interest. Particularly in the Maritime Provinces good schools had been established, largely, however, through the efforts of the colonists themselves. A new impetus was given to education by the arrival of many settlers from the United States during and after the Revolution. These settlers had enjoyed in New England excellent educational advantages; they had lived close to great universities with their beneficent influence, the Universities of Harvard and Yale, of Williams and Dartmouth and Brown, and they determined to establish in their new home the educational facilities which they had already enjoyed in another land. It was felt in Lower Canada that similar opportunities should be speedily provided for the English-speaking children of the country. The majority of settlers in Lower Canada were of Scottish origin. They were largely soldiers or the descendants of soldiers who had fought in the Highland Regiments during the campaign of 1759, and who after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 had taken up the land assigned to them by the Crown. Many of these soldiers, too, later became fur-traders and entered the service of the North-West Company. These settlers were all eager that their children should have at least an elementary education. It was felt, too, that in the unrest and the uncertainty of the period immediately following the American Revolution it was not advisable to send students in search of higher professional training to the universities of the United States, which in the days of their British allegiance had attracted Canadian students in large numbers. But above all, the settlers realised the necessity for the establishment of schools in which the children of the French-Canadians should be taught English. It was declared that from the national point of view such training would have a far-reaching influence on the future of Canada as an integral part of the British Empire, and that without such instruction, which would result in a bond of language, Canada could never be a united land.

Efforts were accordingly made to establish a system of free schools, with the hope that later a university might be founded. As early as 1787 the matter received the serious consideration of the Legislative Council, and a scheme of education in the Province was actually prepared. But the scheme met with vigorous and determined opposition from one section