Manitobans, too, though the Irish element had become very strong, did not intend to succumb to Fenian raiders, however well organized and backed up.  The weakest points were the Maritime Provinces, Ontario and British Columbia; not that the feeling in British Columbia was not loyal to the Dominion, but that some 30,000 rowdies who had assembled and organized in San Francisco were preparing for a descent upon her poorly fortified ports.  Now was the turning point in the destinies of the country.  If the ministers at Ottawa had not stood firmly to their guns, all our subsequent career, instead of being the golden century of magnificent progress and peace that it has been, would have been linked with all the turbulence and the alternate advance and retrogression of the States.

A general election for the Dominion had been timed to take place in the beginning of June, and the day was looked forward to by all the noisy demagogues of Ontario as the day when the blood-thirsty Tories were to be hurled from power by the people in righteous wrath, and the country saved from the horrors of war.  According to these garrulous parties, Ontario, the wealthiest and most populous Province of the seven, was to welcome the invaders, bidding them enter Canadian territory in the name of the people, and plant the Stars and Stripes wherever they halted.  Bloodshed would thus be avoided, and everyone would soon come round to the new order of things and take to it naturally.  Quebec might perhaps object, “but what did a few handfuls of Frenchmen matter anyway.”

On the day before the election, one party was full of boisterous, bragging insolence; the other, still steadfast, firmly clinging to what seemed a forlorn hope.  Before the ending of another day all was changed—­a complete transformation scene had taken place.

When the morning journals on the election day appeared, their news from the United States was such a terrible chapter of accidents as has rarely fallen to the lot of journals to publish in one day.  The President had been shot at in New York by an unemployed foreign artisan, the night before, while leaving a mansion on Fifth Avenue.  Troubles between labor and capital, which had been brewing for some time, had broken out in several manufacturing centres, and were threatening to spread to all large cities.  The money market was showing signs of considerable derangement.  Fearful storms and floods were chronicled from all parts; while last, but not least, three transports which had embarked the greater part of the “army,” at San Francisco, that was to have “delivered” British Columbia, had foundered in a hurricane only two miles out, dragging all the poor deluded fellows to a watery grave.  The same day brought good news from the old world.  Ireland’s great statesman had won for Britain a wonderful diplomatic triumph in the East, which added to the Empire, without a drop of blood being shed, territories extending from the confines of British India to the Mediterranean.