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I am very glad to have my name associated with the preparation of this volume. While it is being written and prepared, our country and our Empire are passing through the shadow and storm of war. But this dark hour is illuminated by the white light of human courage; the bitterness of this suffering is alleviated by the inspiration of patriotism; and this dark cloud carries a silver lining that foretells the coming dawn.

It is at the present hour that a book such as this is meant to be may well come forth. The strength and unity of our Empire, which is proving its salvation in our present crisis, rests upon its past. We have built on this bedrock of human freedom. This structure still shall last when those erected on the dead sands of despotism shall be washed away by the rising tide.

We can best learn to value this heritage of freedom by reflecting on its history. We can best appreciate the present in the light of the past, and in the same light we can realize the measure of our duty and obligation towards the future.

Here then is the story of the making of Canada. The aim of the narrative is to show the foundations of our present national life. The large canvas of our Canadian history carries a wonderful wealth of light and colour, in the romance of exploration and adventure. In its foreground are the waving banners that mark the alternating fortunes of war. But set within all this is the real picture, the deeper colours and the quiet shades that reflect the life of a people, the silent growth of a nation.

Our country carries upon its surface the traces of over three hundred years of settlement. It has already its antiquities, its mouldering stones, its sites and shrines, its venerable buildings falling to decay. It has already in places its “long, long ago.” With this are the annals of three centuries of history unrivalled in its varied and picturesque interest. But we realize on reflection that the vastly greater part of our country, as regards civilized settlement and occupation, is a thing of yesterday. Here are great cities that within living memory were solitary prairie, crowded harbours where but half a century ago the sea rolled in unheard, unheeded.

This very novelty is an inspiration. This very lack of history is the foundation of history itself. We can begin at the beginning. We can mark the site of the earliest cabin, the grave of the first settler. Those short and simple annals of the lowly, too humble for narration in our older world, overlooked in the majesty of royal records and titled genealogies, can be the basis of our Canadian story.

It is in this light, this fading light if you will, that those of us now grown old view our Canadian history. For much of English-Canada our own memories and our own recollection of those before us carry it all. While we have time we should set it down so that for those who come after the record shall endure with its proper surrounding and setting.

If it may be said with becoming modesty, I myself can claim a certain qualification as such a witness. I was a child of six when my father came, sixty-five years ago, to settle in the Lake Simcoe district, thirty miles from the nearest railway. We lived in an isolation not known to-day even in the Arctic. The nearest village was four miles away, over rough roads and through cedar swamps. Newspapers we never saw. No one came and went. There was nowhere to come and go. And the stillness of the winter nights was as silent as eternity. So I am qualified to speak of settlement.

This part of Canada was never settled till the new migration from the old country, after the great war with France, supplemented the earlier opening of Upper Canada by the American Loyalists. Till after 1815 it was one vast stretch of unbroken forest, dense cedar and close-packed tamarack and the tall hemlocks and pines that overtopped it. The earliest grants of land were to retired officers and men, mustered out after the war. I can myself remember some of these oldest settlers who had first come to settle in the woods around the Lake, and, among them, old men who had been rebel and loyalist in the rebellion of 1837 and carried still something of its angers, fading out with age.

I speak of such recollections not in a personal way but as a heritage common to so many of us in Canada. Carry them back through a generation or two of memory and hearsay, and you can reach to the days of the American Revolution and the founding of the Maritime Provinces. With our French-Canadian fellows such memories and recollections carry back even further, till they are lost in the golden mist of the royal history of France. In our Western Canada the annals of settlement are still for the most part those of a single life, and memory and history are one. It is to this softened light of a history that blends so largely with living memory that this narrative looks for its colouring.

But this relative shortness of the past serves to lengthen and enlarge our future. Canadians instinctively think more of what is still to come in their country than of what has happened in the past. People of older lands typically and commonly look back. They think of their thousands of years of history, they see all about them the monuments and the majesty of the past. The face of the earth beneath their feet has been changed and refashioned at the hands of man. Of nature as it was there is but the unchanging sea and the sky, fickle with the changes of the hours but in centuries the same. Thus people in England or Scotland turn their aspirations towards living up to their past, keeping their country as great as it has been. “There’ll always be an England” sings the Englishman, and the Scot doesn’t even have to sing. But Canadians would never sing that there will always be a Canada—like this one. This is just a beginning. We have hardly started. Wait a hundred years and see.

Hence any proper story of Canada, even in narrating the past, must open the windows of every outlook to the sunshine of the future.

I would like to add one further word. It may well be that in the writing of this book the execution has fallen short of the aim. But there is no doubt of the value to our country of such a record of the history and the life of its people as this book was designed to be by those who collaborated in planning it. Canada has always been fortunate in the generous help given in the past to education, art and science by those eminent in commercial life. The House of Seagram in their public-spirited design in the production of this volume, worthily take their place in this honoured company.