Excerpt from The Experience, Prospects and Purposes of King's College, Fredericton: Oration Delivered at the Enc�nia, June 26, 1851

When therefore I received from His Excellency Sir Howard Douglas, then in England on public business, my appointment to this College, I was informed that accommodation had been provided in the building for twenty Students. The number was much less than I had previously anticipated; but I was assured that more were not likely to apply for admission in the then existing state of the population of the Colony. On my arrival I found in fact but twelve actually assembled, to whom four were added during the first Term. The venerable gentleman, then as President administering the Government of the Province, congratulated however the General Assembly on this, as he was pleased to describe it, auspicious commencement; and the two branches of the Legislature responded to his view. Some few accessions were subsequently made but the experience of our first seven years indubitably proved that, although the College was then without the name or shadow of a rival, it had received its complement of ingenuous youth at that period requiring a collegiate education. E'er long indeed a change in the commercial relations of the Colony, together with the reduction of the support affordedto the Clergy of the Church of England, an] the abrogation of its Divinity Scholarships, involved a painful diminution; while the members of other communions proceeded to estab lish their separate places of education which, although disclaiming any thing like unfriendly competition, could scarcely fail to intercept some who might otherwise have repaired to the Provincial University. Complaints were at the same time made, more especially by ministers and members of the Church of Scotland, (and they were in some measure founded in reason) that the ecclesiastical character imposed on the College by the Charter was too exclusively Begish. The appointment of Professors from the sister Church, under the auspices of Sir Archibald Campbell and his successor Sir John Harvey, simultaneously with the return of commercial prosperity, and the restitution of the English Scholarships, (on which Sir William Colebrooke had an early opportunity of congratulating the Convocation) so far operated favourably that the Students rose to thirty - the greatest number yet attending in any one Term; and that, I may remark, according to the statements published by the late much lamented Bishop of Nova Scotia, nearly double the average attendance at King's College, Windsor, during thirty years of its existence, under his Lordship's zealous patronage, and the munificent support of the British Parliament and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as the sole University for that Province, together with New Brunswick and the adjoining Colonies.

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