Toronto and Montreal
newspapers joined the movement, and Ontario farmers' organizations swung
to its support. But the agitation proved abortive owing to the triumph
of high protection in the presidential election of 1888; and in Canada
the red herring of the Jesuits' Estates controversy was drawn across the
trail.

Yet the question would not down. The political parties were compelled to
define their attitude. The Liberals had been defeated once more in the
election of 1887, where the continuance of the National Policy and of
aid to the Canadian Pacific had been the issue. Their leader, Edward
Blake, had retired disheartened. His place had been taken by a young
Quebec lieutenant, Wilfrid Laurier, who had won fame by his courageous
resistance to clerical aggression in his own province and by his
indictment of the Macdonald Government in the Riel issue. A veteran
Ontario Liberal, Sir Richard Cartwright, urged the adoption of
commercial union as the party policy. Laurier would not go so far, and
the policy of unrestricted reciprocity was made the official programme
in 1888. Commercial union had involved not only absolute free trade
between Canada and the United States but common excise rates, a common
tariff against the rest of the world, and the division of customs and
excise revenues in some agreed proportion. Unrestricted reciprocity
would mean free trade between the two countries, but with each left free
to levy what rates it pleased on the products of other countries.

When in 1891 the time came round once more for a general election, it
was apparent that reciprocity in some form would be the dominant issue.
Though the Republicans were in power in the United States and though
they had more than fulfilled their high tariff pledges in the McKinley
Act, which hit Canadian farm products particularly hard, there was some
chance of terms being made. Reciprocity, as a form of tariff bargaining,
really fits in better with protection than with free trade, and Blaine,
Harrison's Secretary of State, was committed to a policy of trade
treaties and trade bargaining. In Canada the demand for the United
States market had grown with increasing depression. The Liberals, with
their policy of unrestricted reciprocity, seemed destined to reap the
advantage of this rising tide of feeling. Then suddenly, on the eve of
the election, Sir John Macdonald sought to cut the ground from under
the feet of his opponents by the announcement that in