formed. So we have to act on historical grounds, however little history we may know; our farm or our business depends for its prosperity on conditions in parts of the world which we can no longer leave to the writers of the school geography. The man least interested in mechanics is forced to learn the principles of the motor; the healthiest of us is no longer at ease without some knowledge of preventive medicine.
We are surrounded by oceans of print, but our newspapers are full of inaccuracies, and their despatches, even when well informed, call for further information to be intelligible. We realize as never before the inconveniences and the perils of ignorance. In point of time we are, as it were, standing on a great watershed of history—a height of land between the slope down which run streams back into the distances of the pre-war period, and the slope down which are beginning to wear their channels the currents of the new time. We are all agents in determining the course of these currents. We need to know, as we stand on the Great Divide, the signs of wind and sky and the points of the compass. A great work of reference is our chief resort for the information that we must have if we are to save ourselves and be intelligent and beneficent as members of the society of the future. The two great needs of the day are the power to think clearly and logically, and the knowledge of the facts with which our thinking is to deal. The power to think can come only through hard and persistent and conscientious effort; the facts are to be had for the seeking. It has been the effort of the makers of this book to make these facts available, to arrange them for the greatest convenience of the reader, to corroborate them so that they can be trusted. The editors have finished their task, and they hand the results to the reader that he may take up his.
![[Signed] W. A. Neilson](/wiki/File:William_Allan_Neilson_signature.png)
