ery
moment still pleading for a Provincial grant, as indicated in the letter
quoted above. They justly emphasised, however, the necessity of
providing a convenient power of management within the College itself and
the ending of the dual control. It was absurd, they rightly contended,
that every cent expended for a piece of stove pipe or a chair should be
first approved by the Board. The Governors resented, too, the
visitatorial power of the Royal Institution. "In what spirit," they
asked, "and for what purpose do they carry out the right of visitation?"
Such power was useful, they declared, only for the purpose of
interposing in the minutest details of the management of McGill College,
although a Corporation and a board of Governors existed for that
purpose; the Royal Institution, in short, was, in its connection with
McGill, nothing more than "a source of interference and impediment," and
the Governors asked that the Legislature should investigate the whole
situation with a view to remedying it. This appeal, like the others,
failed to make any impression on the authorities, and the causes of
friction were not removed.

In this atmosphere of discord and dissension and disputed powers the
College buildings were opened on September 6th, 1843, and collegiate
instruction was at last commenced in accordance with the founder's
bequest. Twenty-two years had passed since the College had been
established by Charter, and fourteen years had gone since its actual
opening. They were years of doubt and uncertainty, of protracted
litigation and differences, even of virulent wrangling and bitter
strife. But amidst it all and in the face of all its obstacles, the
College had gone slowly but steadily forward. Its sign-posts had pointed
onward. Reading to-day the troubled pages of its early story revealed in
a mass of musty documents written by hands long since folded, or
dictated by voices long since stilled,--which then helped to shape its
destiny,--we wonder how it survived. The explanation lies in the fact
that the men who guided it, whether of Governors or of Royal
Institution, were men of unfaltering faith; they believed in the future
of McGill; amidst their disagreements and their controversies, they
never lost sight of the founder's hope although their ways for the
fulfilment of that hope lay often painfully apart. From the struggles of
its early years McGill now emerged to be an established fact. The first
of its buildings, the