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    The World for Sale, Volume 1.
    The World for Sale, Volume 1.
    The World for Sale, Volume 1.
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    The World for Sale, Volume 1.

    By Gilbert Parker

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    About this ebook

    Gilbert Parker was a late 19th and early 20th century politician and novelist who wrote prodigiously. The British-Canadian's works are still popular in the 21st century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKrill Press
    Release dateDec 31, 2015
    ISBN9781518354595
    The World for Sale, Volume 1.
    Author

    Gilbert Parker

    Gilbert Parker (1862–1932), also credited as Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet, was a Canadian novelist and British politician. His initial career was in education, working in various schools as a teacher and lecturer. He then traveled abroad to Australia where he became an editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. He expanded his writing to include long-form works such as romance fiction. Some of his most notable titles include Pierre and his People (1892), The Seats of the Mighty and The Battle of the Strong.

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      Book preview

      The World for Sale, Volume 1. - Gilbert Parker

      THE WORLD FOR SALE, VOLUME 1.

      ..................

      Gilbert Parker

      TENDER HOUSE PUBLISHING

      Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.

      This book is a work of fiction; its contents are wholly imagined.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2015 by Gilbert Parker

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      PRELUDE

      CHAPTER I

      CHAPTER II

      CHAPTER III

      CHAPTER IV

      CHAPTER V

      CHAPTER VI

      CHAPTER VII

      The World for Sale, Volume 1.

      By

      Gilbert Parker

      The World for Sale, Volume 1.

      Published by Tender House Publishing

      New York City, NY

      First published circa 1932

      Copyright © Tender House Publishing, 2015

      All rights reserved

      Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      About TENDER HOUSE PUBLISHERS

      People have been reading Romances since the invention of the written word, and Tender House Publishers has collected one of the Internet’s largest collections of classic Romantic novels and stories for the genre’s most devoted readers.

      INTRODUCTION

      ..................

      ‘THE WORLD FOR SALE’ IS a tale of the primitive and lonely West and North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found in ‘Pierre and His People’. Pierre’s wanderings took place in a period when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered. The Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of Pierre, except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at which Indians, half-breeds, and chance settlers occasionally gathered for trade and exchange-furs, groceries, clothing, blankets, tobacco, and other things; and in the long winters the post was as isolated as an oasis in the Sahara.

      That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile as ever stirred the veins of man. Sometimes the still, bright cold was broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the stray traveller in ravines of death. That was in winter; but in summer, what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here and there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians, half- breeds, and white pioneer hunters.

      The stories in ‘Pierre and His People’ were true to the life of that time; the incidents in ‘The World for Sale’, and the whole narrative, are true to the life of a very few years ago. Railways have pierced and opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving towns where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post with its store. Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain greet the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan yellow of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou provide for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science has given to civilized municipalities. Today the motor-car and the telephone are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town of the United Kingdom. After the first few days of settlement two things always appear—a school-house and a church. Probably there is no country in the world where elementary education commands the devotion and the cash of the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and Manitou had from the first divergent views. Lebanon was English, progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.

      It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the wastes. I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new country—intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries, he looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests. Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference, however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form, as was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of Lebanon or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy race, and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had come I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization. I had known such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life and movements by the prejudice in her veins—the prejudice of racial predilection.

      Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate, intellectual enterprise. The danger of it was that it might detract from the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life. Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this doubt which has occurred to me. They realize perhaps more faithfully than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns, with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life. For instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.

      I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show the vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town. It shows how racial characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom, tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations. The antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and unjustly deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them together, as one of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his success. Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost wrecked his own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by impulsive acts.

      The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it. Men like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple, and ne’er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West and North. Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic

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