than themselves, which they were quite willing to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise which reigned in the land. from one end to the other.  He could tell them that in their own Province more than one hundred new industries had been established in the last year.  He could ask them, and he did ask them, whether this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with applause that it was not.

Country audiences were not open to arguments like these; they were slow in the country, as the Mercury complained, to understand that agricultural prospects were bound up with the prosperity of the towns and cities; they had been especially slow in the country in England, as the Express ironically pointed out, to understand it.  So Winter and his supporters asked the farmers of South Fox if they were prepared to believe all they heard of the good will of England to the colonies, with the flattering assumption that they were by no means prepared to believe it.  Was it a likely thing, Mr Winter inquired, that the people of Great Britain were going to pay more for their flour and their bacon, their butter and their cheese, than they had any need to do, simply out of a desire to benefit countries which most of them had never seen, and never would see?  No, said Mr Winter, they might take it from him, that was not the idea.  But Mr Winter thought there was an idea, and that they and he together would not have much trouble in deciphering it.  He did not claim to be longer-sighted in politics than any other man, but he thought the present British idea was pretty plain.  It was, in two words, to secure the Canadian market for British goods, and a handsome contribution from the Canadian taxpayer toward the expense of the British army and navy, in return for the offer of favours to food supplies from Canada.  But this, as they all knew, was not the first time favours had been offered by the British Government to food supplies from Canada.  Just sixty years ago the British Government had felt one of these spasms of benevolence to Canada, and there were men sitting before him who could remember the good will and the gratitude, the hope and the confidence, that greeted Stanley’s bill of that year, which admitted Canadian wheat and flour at a nominal duty.  Some could remember, and those who could not remember could read; how the farmers and the millers of Ontario took heart and laid out capital, and how money was easy and enterprise was everywhere, and how agricultural towns such as Elgin was at that time sent up streets of shops to accommodate the trade that was to pour in under the new and generous “preference” granted to the Dominion by the mother country.  And how long, Mr Winter demanded, swinging round in that pivotal manner which seems assisted by thumbs in the armholes of the waistcoat, how long did the golden illusion last?  Precisely three years.  In precisely three years the British nation compelled the British