1837. YEAR OF BLOODSHED AND PORTENT! Armed
rebellions in the Canadas! Louis Joseph Papineau scuttling
over the American border and William Lyon Mackenzie flee-
ing for his life! Old King William dead and a new monarch
on the throne--a young girl, a queen. "The twenty-fourth of
May, the Queen's birthday," the children shouted lustily. The
role that the day has played indicates the vast place the reign
was to have in Canadian life. In Canada "the twenty-fourth of
May" (or the nearest Monday) is still a public holiday, marked
by fireworks--the only fireworks day of our national year; and
now its relationship to monarchy has been weakened by
time, duly and properly made over by the children, those un-
failing realists, into "firecracker day". For their elders "the
twenty-fourth of May" brings back other images--of the
Queen's head on coins and stamps, of the great long summer
of peace that her reign constituted for Canadians, and of the
way in which time and history seemed to stop for a moment at
her death.

Under Victoria, Canada, as we know it to-day, grew up. The
long period of nearly sixty-five years that was her reign com-
prehended such a huge sector of our brief history! It saw
the scattered colonies come together into the Dominion and
slowly learn to face the world as one. It saw them grow and
mature in a dozen different ways. And simply because it was
so long and had upon it the unity of this single name and single
life, men came to think of it as part of the perpetual order of
things: there had always been a Queen upon the throne and
her name had always been Victoria. It had been Victoria in
her girlhood when old grandfathers had been boys, Victoria
in her widowhood when their sons were fathers, and Victoria,
the revered old grandmother, when grandsons--the grandsons
of the men who had built this country--were setting off their
rockets and Roman candles on the anniversary of her birth.
It had always been Victoria, it seemed as if it always would

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