ers? Canada wanted to buy cheaper boots and cheaper
implements and cheaper factory products generally. She wanted a higher
market for her wheat and her meat and her fish and her crude metals and
her lumber. She would knock off her tariff on American factory
products, if the United States would knock off her tariff against
Canadian farm products. One can scarcely imagine Republican
politicians going to American farmers for votes on that platform. What
had Canada to offer? She had meat and wheat and fish and timber and
crude metals. Yes; but from 1893 to 1900 Uncle Sam had more meat and
wheat and fish and timber and crude metals than he could digest
industrially himself. Look at the exact figures of the case! You
could buy pulp timber lands in the Adirondacks at from fifty cents to
four dollars an acre. You could buy timber limits that were almost
limitless in the northwestern states for a homesteader's relinquishment
fee. Kansas farmers fed their wheat to hogs because it did not pay to
ship it. Texas steers sold low as five dollars on the hoof. Crude
metals were such a drug on the market that the coinage of free silver
was suggested as a panacea. Canada hadn't anything that the United
States wanted badly enough for any quid pro quo in tariff concessions.

This was the time that Uncle Sam rejected reciprocity.

Fielding, Laurier and Cartwright came home profoundly disappointed men;
and--as stated before--old Sir John may have turned over in his grave
with a sardonic grin.

When Sir John had launched the Canadian Pacific Railroad to link Nova
Scotia with British Columbia, when his government to huge land grants
had added cash loans, when he had offered bonuses for factories and
subsidies for steamships--no one had sent home such bitter shafts of
criticism as these old-guard Liberals hungry for office. Why give away
public lands? Why push railroads in advance of settlement? Why build
railroads when there were no terminals, and terminals when there were
no steamships? Why subsidize steamships, when there were no markets?
Was it not more natural to trade with neighbors a handshake across the
way than with strange nations across the ocean? I have heard these
barbed interrogations launched by Liberals at Conservatives with such
bitterness that the wives of Conservative members would not bow to the
wives of Liberal members met in the corridors of Parliament.

Now mark what happened when the free-trade Liber