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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
in securing the complete confidence of everyone concerned, that matters 
were brought to a satisfactory issue. It is true that in the case of the 
Episcopalian Training College no transfer took place. But even there the 
Committee and the Church parted company on the friendliest terms. As 
far as the two Presbyterian bodies were concerned, much of the work which 
had to be done had to be done in common with the Provincial Committees 
of Glasgow and Aberdeen. Chrystal was chairman of a Joint Committee 
representing the three, so that his labours in this matter secured apprecia- 
tion from a circle much wider than his position as chairman of the 
Edinburgh Committee alone might have implied. 
“ In the third place, the whole of the business arrangements for the new 
body had to be organised. How complex an undertaking this was may 
be gathered from the fact that an expenditure of somewhere about £30,000 
a year of public funds was involved. Innumerable individual suscepti- 
bilities had to be taken account of and considered. All sorts of con- 
tingencies had to be provided for. Yet the whole machinery was brought 
into working order without friction of any kind in a comparatively brief 
period. If mistakes were made in this matter of detail or in that, Chrystal 
himself made none. And he was, as I know from the personal testimony 
of those who worked under him, most unselfish in taking upon his own 
shoulders, ungrudgingly and uncomplainingly, the burden of rectifying any 
error for which anyone else was responsible. 
“ His work in these and in many other ways met with comparatively 
scant recognition from the public. I daresay the average man might 
have thought more of him if he had accepted the knighthood which the 
Government is understood to have offered him. But, as you know, he 
cared for none of these things, and was content with the consciousness 
of having done his duty. If, however, the circle of those who learned, 
through his connection with the Provincial Committee, to appreciate his 
worth and to care for his personality was small, the measure of that 
appreciation, and of the liking that was engendered, was large indeed. 
I do not know any instance of a public man whose labours and whose 
personality have been spoken of with greater or more uniform cordiality 
by all of those who were privileged to be in touch with what he was doing.” 
Another important activity of the last ten years of his life was his 
membership of the Committee which, as one of the results of the South 
African War, had been appointed by the War Office to advise in regard to 
the education of officers. This gave him yet another opportunity of placing 
at the disposal of his country his administrative gifts and his ripe experi- 
ence as a teacher and a master of educational methods. The deliberations 
