It would be doing Bute a great injustice to suppose that in his attitude towards Dundee he was actuated by any feeling of hostility towards the newly-founded college. The very contrary was indeed the case. Keenly interested as he was in the higher education of the people, especially in large centres of population, he was naturally as favourably disposed towards University College, Dundee, as he had shown himself to be towards University College, Cardiff. But he could not view with equanimity the prospect which was, as he well knew, hopefully contemplated by some of the supporters of the new college, namely, that of its ultimately not only absorbing the ancient university to which it had been united within the last three years, but even possibly of crushing it out of existence altogether. Of this prospect he wrote on March 12, 1893: The object of the Dundee people is evidently to obtain entire command of the university, which they {192} will employ by secularising St. Mary's and translating all the Science subjects to Dundee, as well as starting, I take it, a complete Arts curriculum there, possibly allowing the United College to exist as a kind of outhouse. "It has been said, and said publicly, by one of that party," he wrote on another occasion, "'Give us two years more of the union, and we will drag St. Andrews at our chariot wheels.'" To Bute, with his almost passionate veneration for the ancient university, which for centuries had been the chief home of religion and learning in Scotland, it was intolerable to think of St. Andrews being deposed from its pride of place and sinking into a decaying village, a mere resort of sea-bathers and golfers. From this fate he was resolute, if possible, to save the "House of the Apostle" (as he loved to call it), at whatever cost to himself. "For months past," he wrote a little later, "I have been slaving for St. Andrews. The people--or some of them--may not be worth saving, but the place surely is. My vital force is, it is plain to myself, much diminished by all this anxiety and strain; but I shall work on as long as I have strength to do so."