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VOLUME III

BRITISH NORTH

AMERICA

1763-1867

BY

A. WYATT TILBY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1912

174963

PREFACE

WHAT is all the rubbish of the past, asked the great British Rájá of Sarawak, when compared with the promise of the future? What indeed, one may answer; it is no more than the days which man has lived when compared with his hope of immortality.

But not all the past is rubbish, else memory were a useless gift, and that longer memory which we call history a delusive toil. For if the old do well to remember the days of youth, when the blood rose hot through limbs now stricken with the palsied pains of age; it is good also to search a wider horizon than opens between our own short span of years, and to recall the deeds of our fathers.

For in truth their deeds were great and worthy of remembrance. They were the explorers of fresh paths, the pioneers of new lands, the founders of new nations. They subdued the wastes of the earth, and made them fertile; and we inherit the fruits of their toil.

Their bodies are spread throughout the world; their bones are scattered in the five continents and at the bottom of the seven seas. Some there were that returned to the motherland, that now lie resting in hallowed ground, by village spire or in cathedral cloister; others are at peace in far-off lands, where the soil which God created has known no other tread.

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