in such things as the predominantly agricultural character of
"old" Ontario and the lumbering and mining of "new"
Ontario. Section II has as its basis the illustration of the
geographical determinant afforded by the waterways of the
St. Lawrence system. The life of "Laurentia" is bound up
with them and the country is opened up and exploited along
the lines that they dictate. They decide the orientation of
its trade and hence section III, which is concerned with
trade, is also built on the same geographical foundation. The
relationship comes out strongly in the great staple of the
period, wood, for the waterways determine the character
of the industry and their drainage basin corresponds with
some closeness to the range of the species of tree upon
which it is chiefly built, the white pine.

But the fate of British North America has never been
left to the free sweep of the forces of environment and of
economics. First the French, then the British, and lastly,
Canadians have tried to build up a certain type of com-
munity with activities, economic as well as political, running
in predetermined channels. While in the long run mostly
unsuccessful when opposed to the two fundamentals, policy
has always had important effects at the moment, as, for
example, in its creation of the timber trade; and when it has
been in line with the fundamentals, as it was when it en-
couraged the trade of the western states of the Union to
pass through the St. Lawrence, it has perhaps had
important permanent effects. Trading policy is considered
in section IV.

Even the simplest of societies soon build up rather
complex methods of meeting their problems, but elaborate
social and economic machinery has to be constructed if
complexity is to proceed beyond a certain point. Among
the pieces of mechanism of this sort that humanity has
found most useful are money and credit. The advantage
of studying these in a colonial milieu consists in the fact that
we begin with a blank page and fill in as we go along. In
section V, some material illustrative of these subjects will
be found.

Only those phases of the life of the second area, the
Maritime Provinces, which seem to be somewhat different

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