t was not my
first attempt at historical fiction, because I had written 'The Trail of
the Sword' in the year 1893, but it was the first effort on an ambitious
scale, and the writing of it was attended with as much searching of
heart as enthusiasm. I had long been saturated by the early history of
French Canada, as perhaps 'The Trail of the Sword' bore witness, and
particularly of the period of the Conquest, and I longed for a subject
which would, in effect, compel me to write; for I have strong views upon
this business of compulsion in the mind of the writer. Unless a thing
has seized a man, has obsessed him, and he feels that it excludes
all other temptations to his talent or his genius, his book will
not convince. Before all else he must himself be overpowered by the
insistence of his subject, then intoxicated with his idea, and, being
still possessed, become master of his material while remaining the slave
of his subject. I believe that every book which has taken hold of the
public has represented a kind of self-hypnotism on the part of the
writer. I am further convinced that the book which absorbs the author,
which possesses him as he writes it, has the effect of isolating
him into an atmosphere which is not sleep, and which is not absolute
wakefulness, but a place between the two, where the working world
is indistinct and the mind is swept along a flood submerging the
self-conscious but not drowning into unconsciousness.

Such, at any rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that the books
of mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of the
Mighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just such
conditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the subject,
which must of itself have driving power, then the main character, which
becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own
work has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of my
books has always been reducible to its title.

For years I had wished to write an historical novel of the conquest
of Canada or the settlement of the United Empire loyalists and the
subsequent War of 1812, but the central idea and the central character
had not come to me; and without both and the driving power of a big idea
and of a big character, a book did not seem to me possible. The human
thing with the grip of real life was necessary. At last, as pointed out
in the prefatory note of the first edition,