It will be imagined how Mr Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced in the aspect of things.  The fundamental change, with its incalculable chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in politics—­and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it was satire—­the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him down to the ground.  He professed himself, though no optimist under any circumstances very well pleased.  Only in one other place, he declared, would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do it there, and that place was England.  He cast an envious eye across the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of empires.  If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever had for them, which wasn’t much, he acknowledged.  When his opponents twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad for one side could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of businessmen of both countries.  Such persons, Mr Winter said, if they could have their way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that.  He professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views.  That was what would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election.  He was against the scheme, root and branch.

Mr Winter was skilled, practised, and indefatigable.  We need not follow him in all his ways and works; a good many of his arguments, I fear, must also escape us.  The Elgin Mercury, if consulted, would produce them in daily disclosure; so would the Clayfield Standard.  One of these offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the veteran of so many good fights, in being asked to contest South Fox with an opponent who had not so much as a village reeveship to his public credit.  If the Conservative candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he concealed it.

In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also begun to point the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear field.  Official reports gave him figures to prove the great and increasing prosperity of the country, astonishing figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of new lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new railways projected, of stocks and shares normal safe, assured.  He could ask the manufacturers of Elgin to look no further