It is unnecessary to follow here the Governors' subtle reasoning. They seem to have forgotten the Provincial funds granted from the Jesuits' Estates, and to be unmindful of the fact that they were at that very moment still pleading for a Provincial grant, as indicated in the letter quoted above. They justly emphasised, however, the necessity of providing a convenient power of management within the College itself and the ending of the dual control. It was absurd, they rightly contended, that every cent expended for a piece of stove pipe or a chair should be first approved by the Board. The Governors resented, too, the visitatorial power of the Royal Institution. "In what spirit," they asked, "and for what purpose do they carry out the right of visitation?" Such power was useful, they declared, only for the purpose of interposing in the minutest details of the management of McGill College, although a Corporation and a board of Governors existed for that purpose; the Royal Institution, in short, was, in its connection with McGill, nothing more than "a source of interference and impediment," and the Governors asked that the Legislature should investigate the whole situation with a view to remedying it. This appeal, like the others, failed to make any impression on the authorities, and the causes of friction were not removed. In this atmosphere of discord and dissension and disputed powers the College buildings were opened on September 6th, 1843, and collegiate instruction was at last commenced in accordance with the founder's bequest. Twenty-two years had passed since the College had been established by Charter, and fourteen years had gone since its actual opening. They were years of doubt and uncertainty, of protracted litigation and differences, even of virulent wrangling and bitter strife. But amidst it all and in the face of all its obstacles, the College had gone slowly but steadily forward. Its sign-posts had pointed onward. Reading to-day the troubled pages of its early story revealed in a mass of musty documents written by hands long since folded, or dictated by voices long since stilled,--which then helped to shape its destiny,--we wonder how it survived. The explanation lies in the fact that the men who guided it, whether of Governors or of Royal Institution, were men of unfaltering faith; they believed in the future of McGill; amidst their disagreements and their controversies, they never lost sight of the founder's hope although their ways for the fulfilment of that hope lay often painfully apart. From the struggles of its early years McGill now emerged to be an established fact. The first of its buildings, the present Arts or Centre Building, had been erected and opened. The College had at last an actual home. But the days of its travail and its worry, its poverty and its depression, its fight for life itself, had not yet passed. CHAPTER VI THE COLLEGE IN THE FIRST MCGILL BUILDINGS