186 THE TEACHING NOT ADAPTED TO THE 



college and university with fifteen students and large 

 endowments ! &quot; The funds are sufficient,&quot; said a leading 

 member of council to me, &quot; to send all the students home 

 to Oxford, and educate them as gentlemen-commoners.&quot; 

 One cannot wonder that, where money-incomes are so 

 small, this great cost of an education given only to a 

 small number of young persons of one denomination 

 for few but members of the Church of England yet avail 

 themselves of its advantages should add to the other 

 causes of its unpopularity. 



Yet the establishment of this university on its present 

 restricted basis was a natural, and, as very many will 

 consider, a commendable act on the part of its first 

 founders. The early settlers at least such of them as 

 had anything to say in the management of provincial 

 affairs were nearly all gentlemen, men of education, 

 merchants, and others, whom loyalty brought from the 

 United States at the close of the War of Independence, 

 or whom large grants or public appointments induced to 

 come from home. These men, seeing their sons growing 

 up, and the sons of others, who had already grown up, 

 roughening and becoming rude in the absence of the edu 

 cational advantages they had themselves enjoyed, natu 

 rally availed themselves of the earliest opportunity of 

 supplying in the province what they could not send their 

 sons to England to procure ; and it was just as natural 

 that the institution they founded should be framed after 

 the model of those famed seats of learning at which they 

 and their fathers for generations had studied, and where 

 they themselves had spent so many happy days. 



Nothing was more natural than all this. But the 

 circumstances were not favourable to the growth of an 

 institution such as in an old country may still flourish. 

 People who are battling with nature in the clearing of 

 a new country require material and positive knowledge 

 to aid them. They have no time to spare from the 



