other with a great deal of vim.  They had no well drawn out formulae to work upon as we have, but they went at things in a sort of rule-of-thumb, rough-and-ready style, and when one party had dragged the country into the mire, the other dragged it out again.  It was customary for the party that was out of office to say that the party that was in was corrupt and venal—­that every man of it was a liar, was a thief, was taking bribes, would soon be kicked out, etc.  Then the party that was in had to say that the party that was out should look to its own sins and remember that everyone of its men when they were in proved himself incapable, insensible to every feeling of shame, with no susceptibilities except in his pocket, corrupt in every fibre, being justly rewarded when hurled from office by an indignant people, etc., etc.  The wonder is that the country ever got governed at all, but it seems that all public men who had any fixed and sensible ideas and wished to see them carried out, had to make themselves callous, pachydermatous, hardened against this offensive mud-slinging.  Of course politics did not elevate the man, nor the man politics, while things went on thus.  A general demoralization and lowering of the tone of public opinion naturally resulted, which did not improve till the stirring events of the summer of 1887 brought men to their senses again.  The number of members sent to Parliament was something so enormous, that it seems as if the people must have had a perfect mania for being represented.  Nowadays we get along splendidly with only fifteen members (one for each Province) and a speaker.  Formerly several hundred was not thought too many, and before the constitution was revised in 1935, there were actually over seven hundred representatives assembled at Ottawa every year.  Perhaps this was all right under the circumstances, as there did not then exist any organization for training men for Parliamentary duties, or selecting them for candidature such as now exists; so there was safety in numbers, though the floods of talk must at times have been overwhelming.  Besides the Central Parliament at Ottawa, there was a Local Parliament to every Province, and in some Provinces two Houses.  It seems a mystery to us, now, how any measure could be got through in less than twelve months, but our forefathers apparently took pleasure in interminable harangues and oceans of verbosity, and prominent men contrived to make themselves heard above the universal clatter of tongues, so that good measures got pushed through somehow to the satisfaction of a much-enduring public.  Nowadays our fifteen members put by as much work in two days as would have kept an old Parliament talking for two years.  Provincial Parliaments, with their crowds of M.P.P’s, were abolished in 1935, and it was then also that the number of members at Ottawa was reduced from the absurd total of 750 to 15, and the round million or so which they cost the country saved.  Members