Excerpt from Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth, Vol. 1: Historical Character Study During the progress of my historical labors, the fact gradually forced itself upon me that the men who had made the history were not receiving sufficient attention. The narrative of events I could present in clear, connected form, but the artificers of those events I was forced to leave too much in the back ground. Throughout this westernmost America, within a comparatively short period, a. Great work had been accomplished, the results of which I could give; but the men who had achieved those results I could not properly present without so breaking the narrative as' to deprive it of much of its historical value. In the history proper I could accord the usual space and attention nay, more, I could and did give fully and freely biographical notices of greater or less extent; but this was not enough. They were not merely his torical characters in the ordinary sense, but something more. T hey were not alone factors or originators of progress they were authors of actualities, creators of commonwealths, having with their own hands fashioned from raw material the fabrics of destiny. And as such I could not but feel they were entitled to more than passing notice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.