Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/237

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JESUIT EDUCATION IN THE 19th CENTURY.
217

The Governor's Bronze Medal has been awarded twenty-two times from 1879 to 1900. Seven out of these twenty-two times it has been won by a student from St. Boniface College. Considering that, during all these years, the candidates from St. Boniface College were in an extremely small minority—about one in twenty-two, or four and one-half per cent on an average,—this proportion of seven out of twenty-two, almost a third, struck every one, especially the opponent, as very extraordinary. Had St. Boniface won that medal, the most highly valued of all the University distinctions, once in twenty-two years, the Catholic college would have been doing well, would have had its fair share of success. Manitoba College (Presbyterian), the largest of all the colleges, which sometimes boasts of as many students as all the other colleges put together, has won the medal only three times. Then the proportionate value of Latin and Greek was lowered; the classics were a strong point at St. Boniface. But St. Boniface nevertheless secured the medal two years in succession. Then Greek, hitherto obligatory on all, was made optional after a long fight, in which St. John's College (Anglican) sided with St. Boniface against this innovation. The result of this move, coupled with the preponderance of mathematics and chemistry over Latin alone, prevented St. Boniface from winning the medal for seven years, although its students often headed the list in special subjects. But 1899 and 1900 the St. Boniface students forged ahead again, and won the medal two years running.

During the vacation of 1900, a change has occurred in the statute that concerns the University scholar-