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