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The Dawson Memorial Address

On November 20th, 1899, the day after Sir William Dawson's death, a Memorial Service, attended by Governors, Professors, and students, was held in Molson Hall. Principal Peterson in his address said:

“Since we met in our various classrooms last week, a great and good life has been brought to its appointed end. Sir William Dawson had considerably overpassed the span of life of which the Psalmist speaks: it was 'by reason of strength' that it was for him well-nigh fourscore years. Ever since he assumed the Principalship in November, 1855—that is, for a period of exactly forty-four years—he has been the most prominent figure connected with this University. The last years of his life—since 1893—have been spent, it is true, in retirement from active work, but he has been with us in spirit all this time. Many of us know how closely, and with what a fatherly interest, he has followed all our later history. And now his life has closed, in great physical weakness, but happily unaccompanied by distress or suffering:

“Busy, active and strenuous all his days, he must have chafed, I fancy, during recent years under a growing sense of uselessness—almost an impatience at being laid aside from work, which had been to him so long the very breath of life; yet none ever said with more simple, childlike resignation, 'Thy way, not mine!' For such a painless passing out of life, no vote of sorrow need be struck. There is no sting in a death like his: the grave is not his conqueror. Rather has death been swallowed up in victory—the victory of a full and complete life, marked by earnest endeavour, untiring industry, continuous devotion and self-sacrifice, together with an abiding and ever-present sense of dependence on the will of Heaven. His work was done, to quote the Puritan poet's noble line: 'As ever in his great taskmaster's eye'; and never for a moment did he waver in his feeling of personal responsibility to a personal God. Others will speak to you of his record as a scientific man. I shall permit myself only to say that few can have an adequate idea of the power and forcefulness revealed in the mere fact that one who had so onerous a part to play as a college head should have been able to keep up scientific work at all. A weaker nature would have exhausted itself in the problems of administration.

“He, himself, has left it on record, in his paper entitled, 'Thirty-eight Years of McGill,' that these years were 'filled with anxieties and cares, and with continuous and almost unremitting labour.' There are on my library table at the present time three volumes, in which three college presidents may be said to have summed up the lifework it has been given them to do for the institutions with which they were severally connected—Caird of Glasgow, Eliot of Harvard, and Gilman of Johns Hopkins. The first was a massive intellect which, in the security of a long-established university system, delighted to deal, in a series of addresses to the Glasgow students, with such subjects as the unity and progressiveness of the sciences, the study of history, the study of art, and the place in human development of Erasmus and Galileo, Bacon, Hume and Bishop Butler. The two American Presidents have lived more in the concrete, and they have put on record their attitude to, and their methods of dealing with, the various problems they have had to face in the educational world in which their work has been done. Alongside their memorial volumes I like to place a still more unpretending collection of 'Educational Papers,' which Sir William Dawson circulated among his friends. They mark the various stages, full of struggle and stress at every point, of his college administration, and they form a record of what he was able to accomplish—apart from his work as a geologist—in the sphere of education, for the High School and the Normal School of this city, for the schools of the province, and above all for McGill itself, which he found in 1855 a mere college with eighty students, and which he raised to the level of a great university with over a thousand.

“Not even in his well-earned retirement could he permit himself to be idle. To me, one of the most touching sights in the first year of my arrival here, was the indomitable perseverance with which every day the well-known figure of the old Principal would make its way, bag in hand, across the campus to the museum he loved so well, there to work for a time among the valuable collections which the University owes to his zeal, industry and devotion. It was in 1841 that he published his first scientific paper, and the activity which began then was continued down to the Thursday in the week before his death, when some reference to the mining industry of this country suggested to him that once more with failing hand and wearied brain he should put pen to paper on the subject of the 'Gold of Ophir.' And now he has entered into his rest,—affectionately tended to the last by the gentle care of a devoted and heroic wife, and solaced by the presence of a distinguished son and loving daughter. The world had no power to hold him any more. His work was done and his spirit yearned to pass beyond all earthly bounds.

“He is gone and we shall see his living face no more. But teachers and students alike may have ever with them the inspiration of his noble life and the stimulus of his high example. What he was to those who were so long his colleagues I leave others on this occasion to set before us. My closing words to the students of McGill must be the expression of a confident hope that the record of Sir William's life and work will always be an abiding memory in this place. If you will bear it about with you in your hearts, not only will you be kept from lip service, slackness, half-heartedness in your daily duties,—and from the graver faults of youth at which his noble soul would have revolted,—from dishonesty, sensuality and impurity in every form,—but you will be able, each in his sphere, to realise more fully the ideal of goodness and truth, so that at the last you, too, may hear the voices whispering as they have now spoken to him,—'Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'”