Excerpt from My Windows on the Street of the World, Vol. 1

There are two ways of knowing the world, one way is to go about it and the other is to allow the world to revolve around a fixed point. In either case we look upon the world through the window afforded by a science or an art, fully mastered or otherwise, and whether we travel or not, we see only what is revealed to us through this window. If we sit still we do so by a tangible opening through which, as well as through the other, we may watch the passing show. Both the plein-air method and the cloistral offer advantages. An academic position, involving as it does more or less lengthy vacations, enables the occupant to adopt each of these methods alternately. Since my particular vocation has been the study of economics and especially the comparison of the economical development of different peoples, this is naturally the principal window through which it has been my fortune to look upon the world, although from time to time I have been able, after a fashion, to look through other media.

As for my tangible gateway to knowledge, I have been singularly lucky. For many years I lived in a house some of whose windows looked upon a road along which there passed nearly all tourists who visited the New World as well as nearly every inhabitant who travelled about it. Such travellers find their way to Niagara Falls, and most of them cross Lake Ontario or go round the head of it, and thus arrive at the city of Toronto. All who do so are taken as matter of course to the park in which the University is situated, and so soon as they entered the precincts of that dispenser of learning they had to pass my window. Not long ago they had to pass within a few yards of it, but later, owing to the pertinacious advance of modern science in the shape of chemical and physical laboratories, my window was thrust somewhat back from the passing human stream. Yet the tourist was still visible and audible, for he usually came in a huge sight-seeing automobile equipped with guide and megaphone. By means of this offensive instrument, the guide imparted his ignorance by attributions more or less at variance with the truth.

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