Читать книгу McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 - Cyrus Macmillan - Страница 11

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 long and troubled years of baffling difficulty and bitter discouragement, and at times, despair.