turesque, descriptions and more or less relevant anecdotes. This
would require a writer to sustain interest from page to page and
he would probably end up in a tide of small talk.

Perhaps a way out of the quandary can be found in a non-
committal definition of 'progress' as 'increase in complexity'.
There can be no question of the increase in the complexity of
Canadian society in the last three centuries. Yet a mere des-
cription of three centuries' increase in complexity would be
neither interesting nor important: something more must be
furnished. One line of analysis that will supply a good frame-
work, if nothing more, is that which attempts to distinguish the
various stages marking the evolution of society and to group its
material around them. If there is one thread binding the con-
tents of this book together, it is this conception of the stages
in a community's development. I have found it hard to apply
to every situation and I have not attempted to be rigorously
logical in shaping my material over this precise mould but, since
it comes close to furnishing the thesis on which I have written,
I must attempt to explain it.

We begin with the trading post: a few men in a make-shift
house, clinging to the shore and with nothing further from their
thoughts than passing the rest of their lives in such a situation,
far from home and families. Then comes interest in the new
land for itself and the thought that it might be possible really to
live in it and to make something of it. At that point the trading
post gives way to what might be called pioneer settlement. Any-
one who has been in a fur-trading post knows the sharp psycho-
logical line which separates it from the settlement. When women
come, we clearly get into this next stage, for women are host-
ages to the new world. And when they are followed by children
we have crossed the line from mere settlement to colony. A
colony has some aspects of permanence: some of its people have
committed themselves and cease to think of themselves primar-
ily as exiles. But a colony draws most of its life from its mother
country. It is dependent upon it for most of the necessities of
life beyond the simplest, even for food, and particularly for
defence and for recruits. Colonials still think of themselves as
severed parts of 'the nation', to which they refer lovingly as
'home'. About a colony, as the word is used here, there is al-
ways the final problem: will it or will it not endure?

When the new settlement gets beyond the point of mere sur-
vival and its society takes on some form and shape, it may be
thought of as having become a province. A provincial society
remains economically and emotionally attached to its mother
country and leans on it as the centre of its way of life. Its 'cul-

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