" A mail for England was dispatched about once a month. It went by
way of New York and took from three to four weeks to reach that city; it
was then forwarded by packet-ship to England, and usually at least four
months passed before an answer could be received. The incoming mail was
put off the New York packet at Halifax; it came overland from Halifax to
Montreal, this part of the journey alone taking nearly four weeks.

[Illustration: Photo Rice Studios
The Burnside Estate]

Such was the somewhat primitive city in which James McGill lived and
laboured and amassed his wealth. Such was the community to the service
of which he contributed unstintingly of his material substance, his
energy and his talent. Such, too, were the conditions in which this
hard-headed, practical business man dreamed a dream,--a dream of a
greater Canada with a distinctly Canadian nationality trained to solve
its own problems in its own way, and of the necessity for providing for
the youth of the great land mirrored in his mind the privileges of an
adequate education similar to that which he had enjoyed in his own
native country. For James McGill seems to have been a combination of the
practical Scottish business man and the dreaming Scottish mystic. Like
the other early Canadian pioneers of his race he was a hard-fisted man
battling by necessity in a hard-fisted new world, but he kept in that
new world the spiritual vision born of Scottish glens and mists and
hills. He worked like his ancestors for the building of churches and
schools and court houses, symbolic of religion, education and law, as
milestones of civilisation in a new land and without which no country
could make progress. He knew that without the torch of a free and
liberal education the land of promise to which he had come and from
which he had received much, could not advance to what he believed to be
its destined place of power and service in the world. And so he dreamed
of a great University which would not only be local in its usefulness,
serving a small city which his faith told him would one day grow to
giant size, but also national in its influence, and ministering to the
enlightenment of that larger Canada which his vision saw in the far and
dim distance. The making of his bequest two years before his death for
the establishment and the endowment of McGill College was the first step
towards the fulfilment of his hopes. But between the dream and its
ultimate realisation lay