THE year 1769 was an important one for Europe. In it were born two men who were destined between them to change the face of that continent. These were Wellington and Napoleon. There was another man who first saw the light in that year. His name was Isaac Brock, and while his life and work were hardly comparable in their effect and result to those of the two great Europeans, they were nevertheless an important factor in shaping the destiny of Canada. It may, perhaps, be laying undue stress on the work he did to call General Brock the Wellington of Canada. Necessarily he left less mark on the times in which he lived than did the Iron Duke, for his task was less monumental and his sphere less wide. Yet, in relative degree, Brock’s work was immensely important. We are beginning to realize, a hundred years after his death, just how directly he affected Canada and indirectly Europe. It would be interesting, however, to speculate on just what would have been the result had he remained in Europe. It might,—who knows?—have been his as much as Wellington’s to save the world from the ambitious schemes of Napoleon, but in the part he played, Brock admittedly did a very great deal to make the bounds of Empire “wide and wider yet.” Isaac was born on October 6th, 1769, and was the eighth son of John Brock. Of his father we know little. He was a sailor, had been a midshipman in the navy, and his duty had carried him far afield, to India and other outposts. Isaac’s birthplace was Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, which is one of the beauty spots of the world. There could have been no more fitting cradle for a child who was to become indeed a man of action than this rugged little island, with its rocky weather-beaten coast, stern and bold in outline. The heavy seas of the Channel beat upon it in vain, and it is possible that in after-life, when he was buffeted by circumstances, his thoughts may have gone back to his island home, a small but hardy defence against thundering waves and shrill winds and raging tempest. He had good blood in his veins, for, far back, there was a Sir Hugh Brock, a valiant knight of Edward III. Sir Hugh lived in Brittany, just across the Channel from England and at that time an English duchy. The French, however, bitterly mindful of Crecy and Poitiers, bided their time, and when Edward was old and enfeebled, rose and drove the English out of Northern France. Brittany again became French, and, when the English were expelled, it is thought that Sir Hugh’s family came to the Channel Islands, which was like a half-way house between France and Britain, and there settled.