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“Patriotism,” said Dr. Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” He was, perhaps, thinking of politicians. To the immigrant Canadian hereinafter known as Hansen, patriotism presented itself as the first privilege of a citizen in a strange land. As a youth in an Ontario saw-mill village he had venerated John A. Macdonald. As a man he paid homage to Laurier. As a citizen trailsman he learned that true love of a country so vast, variegated and visionary as Canada must be greater than politicians, parties, sects, provinces or even racial idioms.

Which of course was a cheerful delusion possible only to one who indulged also the belief that a man must love his adopted country better than his native land, and that a voluntary citizen of Canada can love it as deeply as a man born in Canada. The fact of eight million people trying to make a nation with 3,729,000 square miles of territory seemed to him to need more than an Act of Confederation, three transcontinental railways and elections. He recognized it as one of the great epics of the world, possible only to races such as the Anglo-Saxons, British and French who together projected the geographical paradox known as the British Empire. As these sea races had the Viking’s love of travel, so patriotic Canadians, whether native or immigrant, must have a love of adventure deeper than making plausible orations without faith, and tremendous fortunes without hard work—and as great as the energies which created old Quebec and old Ontario, the Hudson’s Bay Co. and the transcontinental railways.

The story has the form and method of a novel, and the character of a large sketch which it has been found convenient to divide into four Books. It contains many characters, all but two or three of whom are taken from life, and some of whom reappear at various intervals over a canvas purposely made large, because Canada itself with nine millions of people and ten parliaments is itself a vast sketch in the picture gallery of nations.

A. B.

Note—The real preface to HANSEN is to be found near the back of the book: a speech to a strange crowd on the prairie in which Hansen, who had formerly seen “men as trees walking”, saw Canada as a picture gallery of romantic peoples in a country infinitely more complex than the Ontario saw-mill settlements of the ’80’s. Jericho was a village on Canada Company land which because of difficult drainage remained a forest primeval for years after higher Ontario had been cleared up. Plainsville is an incomplete aspect of a real market town in that country; Kirkville a mere suggestion of a different type of Ontario town, which in an earlier draft of the book was given four chapters. The incidents regarding the University of Toronto are casual extra-mural glimpses of the celebrated class of ’95, which contained the present Premier of Canada, the late Secretary of State for Ireland, four writers of fiction, one poet—and Henry Hooper.