Canada -- Description and travel; Canadian poetry -- History and criticism
"Manners are formed and personality is built up in the school of
life,--even the student school. Honesty, purity, reverence,--all the
moral virtues, in fact,--are just as important for the youth of the
country as are learning and scholarships. We want to have a
hall-mark for McGill men by which they may be known and recognised
the world over. It lies with our students themselves to set the
standard. 'How truly it is in man,' as Mr. Gladstone said to the
students in Edinburgh, 'in man, and not in his circumstances, that
the secret of his destiny resides. For most of you that destiny will
take its final bent towards evil or {78} towards good, not from the
information you imbibe, but from the habits of mind, thought, and
life that you shall acquire during your academic career. In many
things it is wise to believe before experience; to believe until you
may know; and believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will
repay you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most
sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle,
alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beneath your darkest
reckonings.'"
There was one little incident in the scientific history of McGill
that is not without its special interest to-day in the safe-guarding
of human life. This was the first application of wireless telegraphy
to the operation of moving trains. Many people now believe that in
the wireless control of moving trains lies in the future the most
effectual protection against railway accidents. It was in 1902, just
six years after Marconi made his successes in England, that the
experiment was first tried. Professor Ernest Rutherford, now of the
University of Manchester, and Professor Howard T. Barnes, both of the
Macdonald physical laboratory of McGill, were invited to accompany
the American Association of General Passenger and Ticket Agents, who
in that year held a convention in Portland. The Grand Trunk provided
a special train from Chicago to Portland, and on this train, when
moving at fifty miles an hour, signals were exchanged with a given
station, and with the comparatively simple apparatus installed it was
found possible to keep the train in communication with a station for
a distance of eight or ten miles.
{79}
Ottawa was obviously created to be the capital of the Dominion. Her
interesting history, initiated by the choice of Queen Victoria, the
glory of whose long reign is a priceless possession of the Dominion,
attracts careful study; and the first view over the charming city and
its equally charming environment, is one to linger for a lifetime.
The majestic beauty of her Parliament Buildings
"Set on the landscape like a crown;"
towers and bastions and buttresses clinging to the height on which
they are built above the river; and the exquisite outline of the
turrets and high-pointed tower of the magnificent Château Laurier all
silhouetted against the western sky--
"Dim in the sunset's misty fires,"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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