n the
Charter be obtained at once. On February 5th, 1839, the Board again
expressed their views. They were sensible, they said, of the necessity
for the appointment of additional professors, but they emphasised the
folly of waiting for this permission before erecting a College building.
Approval of the amended Charter might be postponed indefinitely, and the
present Charter provided for a building for collegiate education. They
added: "The Board are not aware of the circumstances under which the
_Medical Faculty of Montreal_ became possessed of all the Professorships
of the College but they must suppose that it could only have been a
temporary arrangement, without remuneration, adopted with such
precautions as not to allow the present holders of Professorships
setting up the pretension to continue to fill them to the exclusion of
other branches of knowledge. The existing arrangement appears to the
Board to be clearly liable to the objection that it is contrary to the
terms of the Charter and the intention of the founder since an
institution of which the offices are so filled for the purpose of one
science alone cannot in law or in common parlance be considered as a
University where all the branches of literature are or may be
universally taught, and such an Institution is erected by the Charter
according to the express will of the testator."

Their plan was to appoint a permanent Principal who should be required
to lecture in some branch or branches of knowledge, and to establish
temporary Lectureships which could be changed to Professorships when the
amended Charter, permitting an increase in the number of Professorships,
was approved. Under this plan they saw "an easy means of opening at once
a course of public instruction which would meet the present wants of the
Province and be capable of future extension." They would devote the
endowment fund, they said, to the payment of Professors' salaries. The
house on the Burnside Estate was sufficient, they thought, "for the
limited purpose at present contemplated," and "in that building, if
nowhere else, a College should be put in actual operation," for by so
doing "an effective answer would be afforded to any demand or pretension
that might be raised to obtain the forfeiture of the property bequeathed
on the pretence of the College not being in operation." They promised to
proceed to the erection of a building "with all despatch consistent with
due caution. But at least a y