Government to adopt the Free Trade Act of ’46.  The wheat of the world flowed into every port in England, and the hopes of Canada, especially the hopes of Ontario, based then, as now, on “preferential” treatment, were blasted to the root.  Enterprise was laid flat, mortgages were foreclosed, shops were left empty, the milling and forwarding interests were temporarily ruined, and the Governor-General actually wrote to the Secretary of State in England that things were so bad that not a shilling could be raised on the credit of the Province.

Now Mr Winter did not blame the people of England for insisting on free food.  It was the policy that suited their interests, and they had just as good a right to look after their interests, he conceded handsomely, as anybody else.  But he did blame the British Government for holding out hopes, for making definite pledges, to a young and struggling nation, which they must have known they would not be able to redeem.  He blamed their action then, and he would blame it now, if the opportunity were given to them to repeat it, for the opportunity would pass and the pledge would pass into the happy hunting ground of unrealizable politics, but not—­and Mr Winter asked his listeners to mark this very carefully—­not until Canada was committed to such relations of trade and taxes with the Imperial Government as would require the most heroic efforts—­it might run to a war—­to extricate herself from.  In plain words, Mr Winter assured his country audiences, Great Britain had sold them before, and she would sell them again.  He stood there before them as loyal to British connection as any man.  He addressed a public as loyal to British connection as any public.  But—­once bitten twice shy.

Horace Williams might riddle such arguments from end to end in the next day’s Express, but if there is a thing that we enjoy in the country, it is having the dodges of Government shown up with ignominy, and Mr Winter found his account in this historic parallel.

Nothing could have been more serious in public than his line of defence against the danger that menaced, but in friendly ears Mr Winter derided it as a practical possibility, like the Liberals, Young and Windle.

“It seems to me,” he said, talking to Octavius Milburn, “that the important thing at present is the party attitude to the disposition of Crown lands and to Government-made railways.  As for this racket of Wallingham’s, it has about as much in it as an empty bun-bag.  He’s running round taking a lot of satisfaction blowing it out just now, and the swells over there are clapping like anything, but the first knock will show that it’s just a bun-bag, with a hole in it.”

“Folks in the old country are solid on the buns, though,” said Milburn as they parted, and Alfred Hesketh, who was walking with his host, said—­“It’s bound in the end to get down to that, isn’t it?”

Presently Hesketh came back to it.