etching far to the east and west from Quebec, and containing all the
rudiments of national life--

"The raw materials of a State,
Its muscle and its mind."

A century later than that Treaty of Paris which was signed in the
palace of Versailles, and ceded Canada finally to England, the
statesmen of the provinces of this northern territory, which was still
a British possession,--statesmen of French as well as English
Canada--assembled in an old building of this same city, so rich in
memories of old France, {4} and took the first steps towards the
establishment of that Dominion, which, since then, has reached the
Pacific shores.

It is the story of this Canadian Dominion, of its founders, explorers,
missionaries, soldiers, and statesmen, that I shall attempt to relate
briefly in the following pages, from the day the Breton sailor ascended
the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga until the formation of the confederation,
which united the people of two distinct nationalities and extends over
so wide a region--so far beyond the Acadia and Canada which France once
called her own. But that the story may be more intelligible from the
beginning, it is necessary to give a bird's-eye view of the country,
whose history is contemporaneous with that of the United States, and
whose territorial area from Cape Breton to Vancouver--the sentinel
islands of the Atlantic and Pacific approaches--is hardly inferior to
that of the federal republic.

Although the population of Canada at present does not exceed nine
millions of souls, the country has, within a few years, made great
strides in the path of national development, and fairly takes a place
of considerable importance among those nations whose stories have been
already told; whose history goes back to centuries when the Laurentian
Hills, those rocks of primeval times, looked down on an unbroken
wilderness of forest and stretches of silent river. If we treat the
subject from a strictly historical point of view, the confederation of
provinces and territories comprised within the Dominion may be most
conveniently grouped into {5} several distinct divisions. Geographers
divide the whole country lying between the two oceans into three
well-defined regions: 1. The Eastern, extending from the Atlantic to
the head of Lake Superior. 2. The Central, stretching across the
prairies and plains to the base of the Rocky Mountains. 3. The
Western, comprising that sea of mountains which at last un