Ryerson Memorial Volume: Prepared on the occasion of the unveiling of the Ryerson statute in the grounds of the Education department on the Queen's birthday, 1889Hodgins, J. George (John George)
History
Ryerson Memorial Volume: Prepared on the occasion of the unveiling of the Ryerson statute in the grounds of the Education department on the Queen's birthday, 1889
Hodgins, J. George (John George)
Education -- Ontario; Ryerson, Egerton, 1803-1882
Egerton Ryerson has deserved well of his country. His best days
and his best energies were given to the upbuilding of its grandest
institution. Well should his country guard and cherish his memory,
so that the young who are here assembled to-day may learn this
lesson, that he who devotes his life for his country's good, his
country will hold his memory not in fragrant only, but in perpetual
remembrance.
REPRESENTATIVE OF VICTORIA UNIVERSITY, COBOURG.
The Rev. N. Burwash, S.T.D., President and Chancellor of Victoria
University, spoke as follows:
_Ladies and Gentlemen_:
It is particularly appropriate that on this occasion Victoria
University should speak. We meet to do honor to one of the greatest
of Canada's sons. Dr. Ryerson has written his name indelibly upon
the pages of his country's history. He has done so not merely
by superior gifts of intellect, although to few men have more
noble talents been entrusted. Nor has he done so merely as the
successful leader of a great party in Church or State, although he
was a leader, one of the first three in one of Canada's greatest
movements towards a perfect political constitution. The success of
this movement, after a struggle stretching through the lifetime
of a full generation, and its results of which all good men now
approve, might well ennoble the name of any man. But that for which
we honor Dr. Ryerson's name and memory to-day is his work as an
educator; and from Victoria University he first received the call
to consecrate his life to his work. He was the first President of
Victoria College. He, a Canadian of the Canadians, was the first
Canadian to occupy that position in our Province; and Victoria has
maintained the Canadian succession unbroken from his day to the
present. Victoria was the first institution in this Province in
active operation as a teaching institution with University powers.
And it fell to Dr. Ryerson to shape its character and curriculum,
and to give it a form, many features of which it has retained to
this present hour.
It was from this duty of laying the foundations of our University in
this young Province that Dr. Ryerson was called to the wider field
of fashioning the primary and intermediate education of the whole
people.
It would be presumption on my part to attempt to speak to-day of
the difficulties which beset him in his task, and of the skill and
judgment with which those difficulties were met and overcome. That
has already been the more appropriate duty of one who has just
spoken, and who was for long years his most valued and honored
associate in his life-work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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