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Like any other history, that of Canada has been written within the framework of intellectual concepts, some of which have been consciously applied by historians, while others have shaped their work more or less indirectly through the influence of the surrounding climate of opinion.  It would obviously be impossible to draw out and catalogue all the concepts that have affected the writing of Canadian history, even in the most general way.  Yet it does seem possible to discern certain underlying ideas or patterns of thought that have given character to various phases of Canadian historiography.  And in more recent times, in particular, one can note the powerful influence of what might be called (for want of a more precise term) "frontierism" in the history of Canada.

The idea of the dynamic frontier as a great and distinctive force moulding North American development has left an enduring mark on the writing of history in Canada, just as it has in the United States.  No doubt this frontier idea is no longer as fresh and vital in its application to this country, as it was in the period before the Second World War: indeed, it is largely because its original influence has declined, and the concept has thus become a historical phenomenon in itself, that we are entitled to discuss and assess its influence.  Nor was the frontier thesis proper, as propounded by Frederick Jackson Turner and elaborated by his disciples, ever adopted as fully or dogmatically in Canada as it was in the United States-and there, of course, it has long been the subject of qualification and criticism.  Nevertheless, the frontier interpretation broadly affected the thinking of a number of distinguished Canadian historians who in the main began their work about a quarter-century ago.1 Today we can hardly examine the current state of Canadian historiography, and perhaps project its lines of growth, without giving heavy weight to the North American-environmentalist view of our history which stemmed originally from Turner's frontier thesis and which still leaves a rich heritage on both sides of the Canadian-American boundary.  

There were other approaches to Canadian history before the rise of frontierism, and at present there are still others, which may involve the modification, complication, or even the virtual reversal of the frontier concept.  Accordingly, in order to put frontierism in its proper context, it is first necessary to generalize-rather alarmingly, perhaps-on several "schools" of Canadian history.  Each of these had some sort of interpretative approach, or at least some underlying assumptions, which gave a broadly similar character to the works its members produced.

These schools, however, are being set forth merely for convenience in tracing the general patterns of Canadian historiography and not as an all-inclusive filing system; for when individual historians are considered they do not always fit neatly into one particular classification.  Some may change their school allegiance with the passage of time, while others, so to speak, may fall between schools.  Furthermore, since the writing of history in French- and English-speaking Canada has largely been carried on as two separate enterprises, it would be of small consequence to try to link French-language schools with the English ones to be established below.  And yet, despite these limitations, it can still be asserted that at various stages in Canadian historiography certain general approaches have seen followed by important groups of historians, so that the designating of "schools" to illuminate that fact is by no means an unprofitable exercise. 

The first school to be so designated might be termed the Britannic, or Blood is Thicker than Water School.  The writers of this group were often convinced imperialists of the later nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and were closely attached in sentiment and background to Great Britain.  They tended, as William Kingsford, that dull dean of Canadian historians, said he did, to make their theme the emergence of a new Britannic community within the empire, a part of one imperial organism, whose people enjoyed the British institutions of their forefathers and were worthy members of that indefinable company, the "British race.”2 This Britannic

School was inclined to ignore North American forces except when they were concentrated in the threatening power of the United States.  The defeat of American pressure from without in 1776, 1812, and 1867 had "kept Canada British." So much for North America: a foe to be resisted.

Yet this group contributed something of lasting significance to the thought of Canadian history: the idea that Canada represented a declaration of independence from the United States, an attempt to build a second community in North America outside the American republic, and one marked off from it, indeed, by the longer persistence of the imperial tie.  For some time this Canadian community would look to the bond with Britain to offset American dangers.  But in the young twentieth century, when the days of actual threat had passed, that bond seemed to change increasingly in its implication-from protection to subordination.  It was now that another school of Canadian historians began to arise ' who viewed the imperial tie more critically in the light of the growing spirit of nationalism.  And their main theme now became the march of Canada to political nationhood, through many a parliamentary manoeuvre and struggle of words as colonial limitations were progressively overcome.

This new School of Political Nationhood chiefly concentrated on the paper-strewn path to national status, directing Canadian history to Colonial Office dispatches, the records of imperial conferences, and tense questions of treaty-making powers.  Two phases, however, may be discerned in the writings of this school, though both were concerned with the peaceful and piecemeal evolution of Canada to nationhood.  The first of these mainly treated the achievement of responsible government and confederation, and on the whole was favourably disposed to things British, since leading historians like Chester Martin and R. G. Trotter saw these national advances as being considerably aided by British advocacy and still as taking shape within the general framework of British institutions.' As this indicates, there was really no sharp break here

between the Britannic and Nationhood schools, and contemporary opinion in Canada largely tended to think in terms both of national development and of maintaining some degree of connection with Britain.  Yet gradually a watershed was being crossed, as more and more stress was laid on the winning of national rights.  Thus came the second phase, which dealt primarily with the achievement of autonomy in external affairs, and the motto of most of its authors might well have been, A Canadian Citizen I will Die.

Sometimes, it is true, these historians might welcome the emergence of the new British Commonwealth as the concomitant of Canada's advance to nationhood.  But generally they were less friendly to British influences, and the nationalist note was clear, as in the writings of J. W. Dafoe or 0. D. Skelton.  British influences, in short, were largely equated with imperial leading strings, and the more nationalistic writers were ever on guard against imperialist designs to enmesh pure young Canada in a web of power politics though one might wonder why gentlemen so keenly perceptive of the harsh realities of power in the European world could not recognize, in fixing their watchful eye on the British menace, that, after 1918, at least, the fearsome British lion had become rather a straw-stuffed beast.  Still, this preoccupation with straw men or straw lions may perhaps be explained by the fact that much of their writing was done amidst the somewhat unreal atmosphere of Mackenzie King's bold crusade of the 1920's for Canada's right to have no foreign policy.  And these authors were often strongly Liberal in sympathies.  At times they seemed to write as if Canadian history was in essence a steady Liberal broadening-down of freedom to the ultimate end of national status-after which absolutely memorable History would come to a dead stop.5

Nevertheless the Political Nationhood group, first phase or second, did solid service in uncovering the process whereby Canada obtained the various attributes of self-government.  Moreover, in stressing the theme of nationhood they were themselves expressing the basic truth that a society distinct from that of Britain had taken shape in Canada and was demanding recognition and the full right to manage its own affairs.  As these historians, however, generally talked in political and constitutional terms, they did not effectively analyze the social, economic, and intellectual forces within North America, which were creating a Canadian community increasingly conscious that it was far from being an overseas projection of Britain.

To fill this gap, a new school of historians began to take shape in the later 1920's, although it is important to note that its members were often closely related to the nationalist authors of the day.  Indeed, this was nationalism in another sphere, seeking to demonstrate that Canadian desires for nationhood were rooted in the native North American environment: that Canadian institutions and viewpoints were not simply British, but were in their own way as American as those of the United States.  The environment had done it. This, then, was the Environmentalist School, or North Americans All.

It was this group that built particularly on the concept of the frontier in North American history derived from Turner and his followers in the United States.  The frontier, where man came most immediately into contact with the North American physical environment, was the great seed-bed for the growth of a truly North American society.  From the start, as the United States and Canada had spread across the continent, environmental influences that first began on the frontier had worked to shape a native American character different from that of the Old World, left far behind.  Here was the key principle to be applied by Canadian environmentalist historians: that thanks to the continuous process of adaptation to the environment, an American content had steadily grown in Canada within external forms of government, society,, or culture inherited from Britain or France." 

It followed that Canadian history could be most fruitfully compared to that of the United States in its essentially North American nature and course of development.  In pursuing this promising theme, however, these writers took over the general approach and mood of Turner and company -  the frontier and its agrarian population as emblematic of native democratic, progressive, perhaps even of "Good” forces in the history of the continent-rather than the precise frontier thesis, which received little direct application in Canada . Yet because that original thesis was so powerful in its impact and so pervasive in its influence, it requires examination here; although, admittedly, the subject is hardly a new one."

 II

 Turner had held in his frontier thesis that "the greatest formative influence" in American history had been the long existence of "the open frontier, the hither edge of free land,," continually moving westwards." The conditions of frontier society had determined the character of western institutions, and these in turn had reacted on the East.  Out of the frontier, in fact, had come American individualism, democracy, inventiveness, coarseness, and idealism.  Turner wrote that the seeds of American democracy were not carried to the New World in the Mayflower but sprang up out of the native forest.  The effect of the frontier was to make Americans out of Europeans.  In brief, the West was the true America, that ever taught the populous but effete East the American way of life.

This was environmental determinism at its most forthright.  The wilderness and the men it produced had made America.  Defenders of Turner might claim that he had not proposed a frontier hypothesis as the onl ' y key to American history, but it was widely seized upon as the true explanation, especially as its nationalist and romantic implications gripped the American imagination.9 Its effects may still be found today, on different cultural levels in the United States.  Indeed, it may not be irrelevant to note that Hollywood, that lowest common denominator of the American mind where myths are mass-produced, still pours forth a flood of highly technicoloured Westerns each purporting to touch the very soul of America, as some pioneer rugged individualist with iron hands and blazing guns "carves out an empire" for the nation at various points west, while Indians in their thousands from Central Casting Office go down before the onward march of democracy.

Of course Hollywood is a far cry from the academic world of history, and here there have been repeated and detailed criticisms of the frontier thesis as applied in the United States.  Nevertheless the stimulus it gave to environmentalist-at times even isolationist-study of American history remained a powerful one.  Moreover, a broad survey of the opinions of American historians made a little over a decade ago revealed that the majority would still accept the frontier thesis, with qualifications, although the trend seemed to be turning against it.10 In this trend were men like Carleton Hayes, who asked, concerning the American frontier, "frontier of what?" and answered that America was essentially the western edge of European civilization.  Accordingly, its story could be read as part of the expansion of Europe; and its culture and institutions should be studied not solely in national isolation as native products, but rather as elements transferred from Europe, adjusting-no doubt-to a somewhat different environment.11

Dixon Ryan Fox also pursued this theme of transfer, finding that the ideas and institutions transmitted from Europe bulked far larger in American development than any modifications of them or new contributions made on this side of the Atlantic.  He observed, in fact, that ideas and institutions had steadily been carried west to the frontier, and considered that the East had far more shaped the West in America than vice versa-that the real story of the United States was the progressive turning of pioneer Wests into developed Easts.12 Further in this vein, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. sought to demonstrate that the upsurge of Jacksonian Democracy, long regarded as the very incarnation and triumph of the free farming frontier, was instead far more strongly based amid the urban masses of the East."

The frontiersmen among American historians have, however, struck back.  One of them, W. P. Webb, has recently launched a most dazzling counter-attack on all fronts by proclaiming that the whole expansion of Europe since 1500 was one "Age of the Great Frontier."14 He contends that most of modem Western European civilization as we know it, with its characteristic capitalism, democracy, and individualism, is the product of world frontiers that opened up to Europe when its peoples began to go adventuring across the oceans, He speaks of a four-hundred-year frontier boom, now ended, when Europe grew rich and developed the twin luxuries of freedom and the All-important individual, a boom that resulted from the "windfalls" of vast natural resources that were found in the empty Americas, Australasia, and South Africa.  Europe became a dominating metropolis-a word we shall return to later-organizing, controlling, and exploiting these tremendous overseas frontiers, but in consequence having its development moulded by them.

How does all this relate to Canadian history?  To some extent there have been similar stages in the use of the frontier interpretation, though these, indeed, might overlap.  In the first stage, there were stimulating applications of frontierist themes and concepts to the Canadian half of the North American environment, seen most clearly perhaps in W. N. Sage's paper of 1928, "Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History." This treated Canadian expansion across the continent as an integral part of a total North American frontier movement that ignored the international boundary.15 Then there were the valuable investigations of F. H. Underhill into the nature of Canadian political parties, and especially the Clear Grit Liberal movement directed by George Brown and the Toronto Globe.  With regard to Canadian parties, Professor Underhill traced their development according to conflicts between western agrarian areas and eastern business interests, in sound Tumerian fashion (1935)."' With regard to the Clear Grits, be saw them as "an expression of the 'frontier' in Canadian politics" (1927).27 E. H. Oliver applied frontierism to Canadian religious development, and in his Winning the Frontier (1930) depicted the Canadian churches as being moulded by a frontier environment."' Somewhat later A. S. Morton emphasized the dominant power of 'the environment in the extension of settlement into the Prairie West (1938).19 And A. L. Burt effectively used a frontier interpretation to show how the people of New France were shaped by North American forces to become truly an indigenous people, not just a seeming copy of Old World "feudal" France (1940).20

In the second stage, there came criticisms and modifications of the frontier interpretation, although the environmentalist emphasis was still much in evidence." A. R. M. Lower noted in a paper of 1930, "The Origins of Democracy in Canada," that "There can be little question but that American democracy had a forest birth." Yet he went on to assert that frontier equality might not result in political democracy unless "theoretical positions as to its nature" had already been projected into the frontier environment.  In Canada's case, the egalitarian conditions of pioneer life had interacted with traditions brought from across the Atlantic; and Canadian democracy had developed more slowly than American because of Canada's briefer, more limited frontier experience, its stronger attachments to the Old World, and the lon'g-enduring, overriding power of the imperial authority in government." Nevertheless, despite this recognition of non-environmental, transferred influences, Professor Lower, in his Colony to Nation (1946) continued to stress the power of the New World "to chancre old institutions and give them new form and spirit.”23 North American democracy, he reiterated, was "forest-born." In short, though this was modification, environmentalism sprung from the frontier concept still remained strong.

In the third stage, as in the United States, new emphasis was given to the role of eastern rather than western forces in Canada, to urban interests and to the dominating power of the organizing, controlling metropolis.  Thus Professor Underhill, for example, noted in 1946 that the original frontier agrarianism of the Clear Grits had subsequently been qualified by urban and business leadership introduced to the party by George Brown and other Toronto worthies.24  And Professor Lower in his same Colony to Nation paid marked attention to the economic power wielded by metropolitan centres like Montreal and London, which, he made clear, did much to affect the course of events in raw Canadian settlements.25 On another tack, Professor Fred Landon, in describing the frontier era in western Ontario, gave chief place to the transmitted influence of American democratic ideas and practices rather than to actual frontier conditions in forming the outlook of the pioneer community.26 But this only pushed the influence of the environment one stage back, to patterns of life worked out in the former frontier states below the Great Lakes.  In any case it was evident that, despite qualifications and shifts of emphasis, environmentalism was still flourishing in Canadian history.

Still, it should be plain from this discussion that Canadian environmentalists did not generally follow any rigid frontier dogma and did show regard for other than native or western forces in analysing Canadian developments.  After all, in a country which had obviously maintained many transatlantic ties and long continued as a colony there could not be as strong an assertion as in the United States of a separate North American growth in isolation from the world.  And yet there was an inclination for environmentalists to see as much as possible of the history of Canada in terms of common North American experience in driving back the wilds-to suggest that the really important features in Canadian development had in truth been "forest-born"; in other words, that the various Wests had been the principal source of transforming energy and of national progress, in which they had pulled along and supported the conservative, exploitative East.

There was, moreover, a certain tendency to fix values.  Thus pioneer society, the West, and simple farmers became virtuous and forward-looking to the beholder, while town society, the East, and un-simple business men became selfish and reactionary.  There might be an element of truth here, but moral overtones somewhat coloured the picture, so that western farmers who wanted free trade established in their interests were Good, while eastern business men who wanted a protective tariff enacted in theirs were Evil.  Similarly, the West appeared as the true home of Canadianism, while the East, which worked out a distinctive Canadian economic nationalism in railway and tariff policy, was hardly Canada at all.  No doubt powerful eastern business interests fattened themselves considerably through these arrangements.  But could environmentalists properly become moral about business elements adjusting themselves to problems of the environment in their own way?

In sum, Canadian environmentalists frequently displayed the compelling mood of the frontier school, with its moral implications of a struggle between sound native democratic forces and elements that clung to privilege, exploitation, and empty Old-World forms.  In so doing they often oversimplified a conflict between West and East, or better, between pioneer agrarian interests and exploitative urban centres.  As a result, major Canadian movements for political change might be viewed too narrowly in the light of frontierism.  For example, Upper Canadian radicalism of the 1830's, Clear Grit Liberalism of the mid-century, and Progressivism of the 1920's might all be explained in terms of the upsurge of the then newest West, as western forces of pioneer individualism launched crusades against privilege and urban business domination.27 Yet it could also be shown that Mackenzie radicalism was probably more influenced by the working model of American political democracy and the ideas of British radicalism; that Clear Grittism was closely organized about the rising urban centre of Toronto; and that Western Progressivism was not based on self-sufficient pioneer farmers but on organized grain specialists engaged in a highly complex kind of agricultural business, whose goals involved not the triumph of individualism but the replacement of a set of unfavourable government controls centred in the tariff with another represented by Wheat Boards and government provision of major services.

Furthermore, it might well be a result of frontierism, sprung as it was from the mid-western heart of the continent, that a viewpoint characteristic of mid-western isolationism often appeared among environmentalist writers in Canada.  Their view of the environment, like Turner's, was primarily continental.  Thus it tended to neglect the influence of the seas beyond, the "maritime environment" that had always tied the continent to Europe.  Canada might be treated as a northern extension of certain continental physiographic provinces, without due consideration of geographic and historic forces that bad from the beginning of white penetration made this country an east-to-west projection from Europe.  And logically it would follow that geography-in the continental sense only-had shaped Canada as a number of disparate American regions, held out of the American republic by mainly emotional forces and by the chance of history: in short, a loose grouping of less well-favoured, somewhat backward, American states. A rather paradoxical basis, this, for the nationalism environmentalists usually professed.

However, it is worth repeating that leading contemporary historians who have been referred to here in connection with the vigorous environmentalist phase of Canadian history have themselves, in more recent writings, not only shown awareness of the shortcomings of interpretations stemming from frontierism but have also done much to reconsider and to correct them.  Nor, certainly, have their ideas ceased to develop beyond this one approach.  None the less it may be hazarded that the effects of frontierist teachings remain strong today in suggesting for Canadian history, and doubtless for its readers, certain stereotypes about the dynamic West and the torpid East, and about the nature of Canada as a more restricted, backward version of the American model to the south.  And frontierism may still leave a tendency to overvalue the influence of native North American forces and the material environment, and a tendency to undervalue forces transferred from Europe and the non-material environment: that of ideas, traditions and institutions. Yet these latter factors were particularly important in a portion of North America that did not undergo a revolutionary upheaval, emotional as well as political, to break ties with Europe, and which continued to place a special premium on the word "British" as applied to institutions and ideas.  In fact, it is these very things which chiefly mark off the development of Canada from that of the United States.  They give validity to the study of a separate Canadian history, one which is not just a counterpart of United States history in having a similar North American content.

Accordingly, while in no way underrating the very great contributions which frontierism and environmentalism have made to the understanding of Canada as a part of North America, it does seem necessary to look for a wider framework for Canadian history.  But this, indeed, was already taking shape while the frontier interpretation was being usefully applied, and to a certain extent grew out of it, as an examination will show.

III

 This next framework was in some ways a qualified version of environmentalism and in others the frontier concept reversed.  It has appeared in most explicit form in the writings of D. C. Creighton, particularly in his Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1938) and Dominion of the North (1944), but its foundations were laid in earlier works bv H. A. Innis which broke rich new ground in Canadian economic history, notably A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923) and The Fur Trade in Canada (1930).  These studies of major Canadian economic enterprises, which were essentially great systems of continent-wide communications, pointed the way to a new general interpretation of Canadian history that would be forcefully developed by Professor Creighton.

His approach, in fact, has been said to establish a "Laurentian School" of Canadian historiography, since it largely rests on the idea that the long St. Lawrence water route and its connections across the continent became the basis of an extensive communications system around which Canada itself took shape.  The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, the broad domain of Montreal, first flung a Canadian fur trade across the continent, then competed vigorously with New York and the American seaboard through canal and railway enterprises for control of the trade of the midwestern heartlands of America, and finally built a new economic dominion across the northwestern plains to the Pacific that was, in fact, the Dominion of Canada.  It followed that the existence of a separate Canada was not just a fortuitous result of the American Revolution, of French determination to survive, nor of Lovalist emotional resolves to "stay British"-despite the hard facts of the environment-nor again of the mere continuance of the imperial tie.  It was also rooted in powerful factors of geography and commerce that underlay the whole Canadian development.

This, in a sense, was environmentalism, since the St. Lawrence was as real a feature of the North American environment as the North American forest, and a good deal more permanent.  Environmentalists had stressed before that the main natural lines of North American geography ran north and south, linking the regions of Canada more effectively with their United States counterparts below the border than with their Canadian neighbours to east and west.  But the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Saskatchewan, and the Fraser traced lines across the continent that were quite as natural; and, as the writings of Professors Innis and Creiahton indicated, they made possible the east-to-west linking of Canadian regions from the earliest days of the fur trade, as communications spread by the lakes and river valleys from sea to sea.  Perhaps we could even call this the Waterways School, especially since it made clear that the environment did not stop short at the Atlantic edge of North America.  For the St. Lawrence system that funnelled traffic from the continental interior out to the sea was closely connected with British finance and markets across the waters in an east-west trading network that thus reached halfway around the world.28 Yet the Laurentian interpretation did not mean just a new emphasis on material environmentalism, since it also revealed that this huge communications and transport system could transfer immigrants, ideas, and impulses in one direct channel from Britain deep into the heart of the continent.  As a result, the Ontario frontier of the earlier nineteenth century might actually be in closer contact with the sea and the mind of Europe than were the mid-western regions of the United States, more isolated behind the Appalachian barrier in a Mississippi Valley world of their own.

The Laurentian School, however, tended to go even further, and to reverse the earlier environmentalist position in this respect: it looked not from the forest-born frontiers for its perspective of Canadian history but from developing eastern centres of commerce and industry.  Indeed, it primarily studied the effects of the East on the West, and largely regarded business men and conservative urban political elements as agents of national expansion who might well be more far-sighted in their outlook than were their agrarian opponents.  Here then was a metropolitan rather than a frontier viewpoint.  Moreover, this Laurentian view could be effectively linked with the monumental studies of H. A. Innis on the organization of the staple products trade of broad North American areas through costly and complex transport systems controlled in large urban centers.29 The result was virtually to establish "metropolitanism”  in Canadian historiography, the study of the role of metropolitan forces in this country, a vitalizing approach that may yet undergo considerable development.  

Metropolitanism is at root a socioeconomic concept that has already seen some application in Canadian history.  As mentioned earlier, Professor Lower has made use of it in Colony to Nation, and elsewhere as well, 3" but it has been most closely applied in D. C. Masters' work, The Rise of Toronto, 1850-1890 (1947).31 In this he traced the rise of the city to a position of metropolitan dominance over Ontario, while at the same time it entered into vigorous competition with Montreal business interests for control of a broader Canadian hinterland.  Toronto's climb to metropolitan stature is an instructive particular theme in Canadian history, but the rise of the metropolis in general is one of the most striking features of modern Western society.  Briefly this implies the emergence of a city of outstanding size to dominate not only its surrounding countryside but other cities and their countrysides, the whole area being organized by the metropolis, through control of communications, trade, and finance, into one economic and social unit that is focussed on the metropolitan "center of dominance" and through it trades with the world. -12 Political activity, too, may often become centred on the metropolis.

London and New York are of course the classic examples of modern metropolitanism.  But the metropolitan relationship is a chain, almost a feudal chain of vassalage, wherein one city may stand tributary to a bigger centre and yet be the metropolis of a sizable region of its own.  Thus, for example, Winnipeg is Montreal's subsidiary but is the metropolis of a large area of the prairie West.  The Toronto metropolis is a subsidiary of both New York and Montreal, while Canada's main metropolitan centre, Montreal, has traditionally been bound to London.  These facts are not new in themselves; but when it is remembered that the metropolitan pattern includes not only economic ties but social and cultural associations also, then many effective lines of inquiry may present themselves.  For example, one might suggest that the survival Of British customs sometimes noted in the English-speaking ruling class of Montreal, or Toronto's split personality, whereby it strives both to be a minor New York and to maintain its "British” character, may be comprehended through the weighing of various metropolitan connections and influences in these cities’ history.

 At present, however, the chief point to observe is that the rise of metropolitanism is the other side of the coin to frontier expansion.  One may speak of the constant expansion of the frontier, or of the constant extension of the metropolitan power that is pushing out the frontier.  What Webb called the "Age of the Great Frontier," might just as well be called the "Age of the Great Metropolis,” when western Europe in general, by spreading out its system of communications and commerce, organized the world about itself.  The age of this great European metropolis has passed away.  Its predominant focus, London, has yielded in primacy of economic power to New York-though now there is no one main world metropolitan region, since, despite the rise of North America, Europe still maintains a vast overseas economic network, while a far-flung separate trading system is emerging in the Communist-dominated world.

Returning to the frontier itself, one might say that it is developed by a metropolitan centre of dominance, which supplies its capital, organizes its communications and transport, and markets its products.  The frontier's culture, too, originally stems from a metropolitan community; at root, learning and ideas radiate from there -and thus is Turner answered. True, there may be frontier religious movements, but these begin with preachers going out to the frontier and end in the focusing of the sect on the city.33 The economic and cultural metropolitan processes go hand in hand, as newspapers, books, and men of education spread from the center. Frontiers may often supply grievances for political movements.  Urban centres as often supply the intellectual leadership; so that frontier demands take form at the hands of urban journalists and professional men.

It may be seen when this analysis is carried through that the frontier, far from being essentially independent and self-reliant, is in the largest sense a dependent.  It constantly requires metropolitan aid and control, though by the same token it may come to resent and resist it.  Frontier protest movements are a natural accompaniment of the extension of metropolitan power into new areas.  The dynamic, organizing, hard-pressing forces of metropolitanism bring reaction on themselves.  This may occur either at moments when the frontier as such is rapidly expanding, and full of problems of adjustment, or when it is actually declining; that is, becoming organized into a more mature and integrated region with a new metropolitan centre of its own, which hopes to wrest control of the local economy away from the older centre, and therefore gives voice and leadership to a regional protest movement.

How does this pattern fit Canadian history?  No good historian would try to make it fit too exactly: if we reject a frontier determinism we should hardly replace it with a metropolitan determinism.  Still, there may be an approach here as instructive for Canadian historiography as the frontier interpretation was in its day.  For example, one might examine the unrest in Upper Canada in the 1830's, when this frontier area was rapidly expanding with the tide of British immigration, as a result of the vigorous extension of powerful business interests into a broad new domain, and of the spread of educated men and stimulating ideas from older communities, displayed notably in the rising power of the press and the journalist on the Upper Canada scene.  On the other hand, the Clear Grit movement of the 1850's would appear as the organizing of the maturing western community around Toronto, the rising young  metropolis, in a common campaign against the domination of e region by Montreal, the older centre.  In this campaign Toronto supplied both intellectual leadership, in the form of the Globe, and strong party direction, in the form of George Brown and other wealthy and prominent business or professional men: the urban element was critically important.  And as for Western Progressivism in the 1920's, was it not bound up with the rise of Winnipeg as a prairie metropolitan centre, was not a good deal of intellectual leadership centred in that city, and is there not evidence that here was a maturing western community now ready to contest outside metropolitan domination on a large scale?34

Metropolitanism can be seen operating even more clearly in Canadian history where there are no frontiers of actual settlement to block the view, so to speak, and by their undoubted colour and liveliness rather steal the centre of the stage.  In the Canadian fur trade, from earliest French times on, the role of the dominant organizing metropolis is plain: Montreal and Quebec the metropolitan centres for the posts of the whole fur-trading West, Paris and later London the metropolis for these Canadian towns.  On the Canadian lumbering and mining frontiers, in our present northern expansion, the directing, extending, organizing, and exploiting functions of metropolitan interests are evident once more.  In fact, metropolitanism has shown itself even more clearly in Canadian development than in American, precisely because we have had far less fertile acreage for agricultural settlement than has the United States.  Hence the agrarian frontier of the sort that Turner described has played proportionately less part in our history, This, then, is a distinctive attribute of Canada's own version of the North American story.

Furthermore, in Canada, with its small population heavily concentrated in certain areas, metropolitan influences have had a particularly free sweep.  The United States, of course, has much bigger metropolitan cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.  But it also has many more large centres, each organizing its own region, though all ultimately subordinate to New York.  Canada, however, has only three first-ranking metropolitan centres today: Montreal, the, greatest, Vancouver, which by organizing effective communications has extended its hinterland eastward into the prairies, and Toronto, which controls wealthy southern Ontario and is steadily advancing its empire in the mining North.  In Canada, therefore, metropolitan power is in comparison to the United States more directly centralized and more immediately apparent.

Historicallv speaking, the functioning of metropolitanism may do more to explain the course of Canadian history than concepts of frontierism borrowed from the United States and set forth before the significance of the modern metropolis was clear.  For example, the greater conservatism of Canada as compared to the United States may be read as a mark of the much stronger influence exercised in this country by conservative-minded eastern urban centres -which were certainly far removed from any impulses of forest democracy.  Moreover, the stronger influence of British ideas and institutions-and even of colonialism-must have been fostered in Canada by its long and close focusing on the British metropolis itself.  Finally, the fact that Canada has pioneered not so much in democracy as in the large-scale combination of public and private interests to overcome the problems raised by a difficult environment, again suggests the greater power throughout Canadian history of the forces seeking to organize communication systems and extend commerce.  One might well say that the building of the C.P.R. so far ahead of settlement, and Macdonald's policies of economic nationalism in general, were plain manifestations of the power of metropolitan influences in Canadian politics.  And many other instances might also be brought to mind.35

It could be objected with regard to some of the foregoing examples that applying a metropolitan interpretation only restates old problems in somewhat different terms.  It may be so: but what is particularly needed is a restatement, a new perspective that may disclose new vistas and produce new patterns for Canadian history.  At any rate, frontierism, along with earlier schools and approaches, has had its use and its day.  Environmentalism needs recasting, and is being recast.  The metropolitan approach largely recognizes what is already going on in Canadian historiography and provides a new framework-one which pays heed both to the distinctive features of the history of this country and to a notable modern phenomenon, the rise of metropolitanism all around the world.