ntry, a week after
Congress had accepted the agreement.

After parliament, the people. Apparently the Government anticipated
that the bargain would be welcomed by nearly all Canadians. That
expectation was not without warrant. It was such a treaty as Canada
had sought time and again during the last fifty years, and such as both
parties would have accepted without question twenty years before.
Every important leader of the Conservative party was on record as
favouring such an {264} arrangement. Yet it was received first with
hesitation, then more and more freely denounced, and finally
overwhelmed.

On the economic issues concerned the advocates of the agreement
apparently had a good case. The farmer, the miner, the fisherman stood
to gain from it, not so notably as they would have done twenty years
before, but yet undoubtedly to gain. It was contended that the United
States was itself a rival producer of most of the commodities in
question, and that Canada would be exposed to the competition of the
British Dominions and the most-favoured nations. These arguments had
force, but could not balance the advantages of the arrangement,
especially to the western farmer. That this gain would accrue and a
large trade north and south be created, to the destruction of trade
east and west, was in fact made by the opponents of the treaty the
chief corner-stone of their economic argument. It was held, too, that
the raw products of farm and sea and forest and mine ought not to be
shipped out of the country, but ought to be kept at home as the basis
of manufacturing industries. And though the arrangement scarcely
touched the manufacturers, the thin end of the wedge argument had much
weight {265} with them and their workmen. It would lead, they thought,
to a still wider measure of trade freedom which would expose them to
the competition of American manufacturers.

But it was the political aspect of the pact that the Conservatives most
emphasized. Once more, as in 1891, they declared Canadian nationality
and British connection to be at stake. Reciprocity would prove the
first long step towards annexation. Such was the intention, they
urged, of its American upholders, a claim given some colour by
President Taft's maladroit 'parting of the ways' speech and by Speaker
Clark's misplacedly humorous remark, 'we are preparing to annex
Canada.' And while in Canada there might be as yet few annexationists,
the tendency of a vast