Sir William Macdonald
This final period of Principal Dawson's work saw a sure and steady advancement and many changes in the University. Among the evidences of growth were the establishment of courses for women in 1884, with their extension in 1886; the addition of the Medical Building in 1886, and its still further enlargement in 1893; the endowment of several chairs; the increase in the teaching staff; the establishment of scholarships and exhibitions; the creation of new courses, and the plans for new and much-needed buildings. In 1886 the Vice-Principal, the Rev. Dr. Leach, retired after over forty years of service. He was succeeded as Vice-Principal by Dr. Alexander Johnson, Professor of Mathematics. Towards the close of this period the Faculty of Applied Science, which had been established as a separate school in 1878, was placed, at last, on an independent foundation—after its many trials and struggles—by the munificent gifts of Thomas Workman and William C. Macdonald, afterwards Sir William Macdonald, a native of Prince Edward Island. Preparations were made for the erection of Science buildings with adequate equipment and endowment. In February, 1893, a few months before Sir William Dawson's resignation of the Principalship, two buildings for the Faculty of Applied Science were opened—the Macdonald Engineering Building, including the Workman wing, and the Macdonald Physics Building, the equipment and facilities of which soon afterwards enabled Professor Ernest Rutherford to carry on his experiments in radioactivity. Meanwhile the Library in Molson Hall had become totally inadequate for the volumes and documents that had been gathered by the University. Peter Redpath, who had already given the Museum, was now the Senior Governor of the University. On November 12, he wrote to the Chancellor enclosing plans of a projected library and proposing to commence building operations early in the following spring. The building was practically completed before Sir William Dawson's retirement, but it was not formally opened until October, 1893. In the last four years of the Principalship of Dr. Dawson the University was given more than a million and a half of dollars for endowment and equipment. What gratified him most in receiving this amount was the fact that it included many minor gifts which testified, at the close of his long career, to the good will and confidence and co-operation of the general public.
As a result of Sir William Dawson's constant anxieties and strenuous labours, his health had been for some time in a precarious state. In his annual University Lecture ten years before, he had said, “My connection with this University for the past twenty-eight years has been fraught with that happiness which results from the consciousness of effort in a worthy cause, and from association with such noble and self-sacrificing men as those who have built up McGill College. But it has been filled with anxieties and cares and with continuous and almost unremitting labour on the details of which I need not now dwell.” Ten years had passed since then, and the “anxieties and cares and unremitting labour” to which he referred had not grown less. They had finally broken his already weakened strength. On the 26th of May, 1893, after thirty-eight years of arduous service, he tendered his resignation of the Principalship of McGill to the Board of Governors, and reluctantly it was accepted. After his retirement his interest in the University did not diminish. He continued his researches and his writings. There was a last visit to England in the summer of 1896, to attend meetings of the Evangelical Alliance, the Royal Society, the Victoria Institute, the Geological Society, and the British Association, at the latter of which he illustrated to a large meeting of eminent geologists the structure of Eozoon. In the summer of 1897 he was stricken with partial paralysis from which he recovered somewhat, but which left him an invalid. Two years later, in the autumn of 1899, his illness became acute. He lapsed into partial unconsciousness. For several days he lingered. Then on November 19th, a gray Sunday morning, very quietly at the last, he slipped away. The next day, the Governors, Principal, members of the teaching staff, and students gathered in the Molson Hall to do honour in a Memorial Service, to the memory of the teacher, the administrator and the man they admired and loved. The Memorial Address, here included in the [Appendix], was given by his successor, Principal Peterson.
Sir William Peterson
Principal of McGill University
1895-1919
Sir William Dawson was Principal of McGill for thirty-eight years, more than a third of the century that has passed since the establishment of the University, and almost half of the period since its actual opening. It has not been possible here to speak of his researches, his writings, his connection with learned societies. Many honours came to him from Britain, from America, and from Canada. He was the first President of the Royal Society of Canada; he was President at various times of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the American Geological Association, and of the British Association. In 1884 he was knighted. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he received honorary degrees from Edinburgh,—his old University, from McGill and from Columbia. But all his activities were incidental and subservient to his work as Principal of McGill and to his efforts for the advancement of the University. He saw the institution grow slowly but surely under his guidance, in the face of many discouragements, from very small beginnings to a foremost place among the great seats of learning of America and Europe. He found in 1855 a college struggling under debt, with inadequate revenue, with abandoned buildings, with few professors and with only one hundred students. In the last session of his Principalship more than a thousand students were in attendance, of whom three hundred and fifty were in the Faculty of Arts, and one hundred and thirty-five degrees were conferred; more than half a dozen spacious college buildings had been added to the original structure; the lower campus or yard was practically what it is to-day except for the new Medical Building; the endowments had increased to over a million and a half of dollars, the yearly income to nearly a quarter of a million and the disbursements to nearly two hundred thousand dollars. The growth of the University in equipment, in instructors, in courses and in general educational opportunities has already been indicated. In bringing about this marvellous growth, the Principal had the generous assistance and sympathetic encouragement of a loyal band of friends, among whom his greatest gratitude was recorded to William Molson, John H. R. Molson, Peter Redpath, Sir Donald Smith, afterwards Lord Strathcona; Thomas Workman, and William C. Macdonald. Without their aid and their generous gifts the expansion of the University, needless to say, would not have been possible.
But greater perhaps than the material and numerical growth which he accomplished, was the spirit of service William Dawson brought to McGill, and the influence of that spirit on the men and women who went out from the University to help in the development of Canada. It is difficult briefly and adequately here to outline the ideals which shaped his policy in guiding the University and the students over whose instruction he presided. They are found in his addresses on various occasions. Perhaps they are best summed up in his farewell message to the students in December, 1893, when he was leaving the University to pass a few months in the South in a vain effort to restore his already shattered health: