THIS BOOK IS EXPERIMENTAL and, as far as I know, a
pioneering effort. A good many types of history have been written
about Canada--constitutional, economic, and political--and
there have been plenty of articles and small books lighting up the
life of a countryside or city. But as yet no one has tried to put
things together in an effort to depict the growth of the country
as a whole, and throughout its history.

I have kept a few fixed points in view. First of all, I have
tried to distinguish sharply between economic and social history
by telling myself that economic history consists of the story of
what man does to his environment, whereas social history has to
do with what his environment does to man. The economic his-
torian looks at the axe in the settler's hands and he traces its
effects through clearings to ploughed fields, crops, statistical
returns of crops, and the towns that such efforts eventually
bring into existence. The social historian looks at the settler
and tries to estimate what effects new conditions have on him
and the subtle changes in his relations to his fellows which
eventuate in a new social group. Or, again, the economic his-
torian will be interested in the raft of logs got out of the bush
in the spring and the processes of its conversion into lumber--
such as the techniques of river-driving, of the operation of lum-
ber-mills--but the social historian will be interested in the new
type of man all this activity produces, the river driver.

Secondly, I have had to wrestle continuously with that pro-
tean notion 'progress'. It would have been easy to accept the
continental norm of 'progress' as that which is bigger and newer
than that which went before, but that would seem to be to
throw away all critical, philosophical detachment. And it would
probably reduce social history to some kind of boring statistical
success story. Yet the alternative to finding a theme that can be
systematically developed and which will support appropriate
general positions is to go on giving endless, more or less pic-

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