industry. The schools that used to have boys sitting on the woodpile
by the box stove shrank to about four scholars in a class.
Congregations dwindled. Little towns lost their mills and began to
feel like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Then came the age of farm
machinery, when the big towns had more overalls than the farms, and
every good farm began to be a sort of factory.

All this was meat and drink to E. C. Drury, who came to voting age with
the solemn conviction that though the fathers had worked hard, the sons
were not prosperous. They paid too much for what they had to buy and
got too little for what they had to sell; a fate which seems to
overtake most of us in varying degree. With stagnant local towns the
markets for perishable products declined. In the open markets of the
world, reached by long railway and steamship hauls, the Canadian
farmer's staple products were in competition with nations of cheap
labour. Across the lake a nation of twelve times our population was
retaliating against our protective tariffs by duties on Canadian grain,
cattle and hogs. The Tory party and the Canadian Pacific and the Bank
of Montreal and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association were becoming
British at the expense of the Canadian farmer. At the back of all the
gods of things as they are and ought not to be, stood the damnable,
desolating tariff that fattened the town and starved the farmer in
order to bloat the banks and the manufacturer and the railways--under
the cloak of patriotism! Heaven deliver us! Was it not a Tory
manufacturer of stoves who said in Toronto that he would build a tariff
"as high as Hainan's gallows?" Was it not a Tory President of the
C.P.R. who said he would have a tariff as high as a Chinese wall to
keep out the Yankees? Was it not the President of a great Canadian
bank who deserted the Liberal party when it sought to enact a measure
of reciprocity?

On all hands Mr. Drury could see the evidence of a master conspiracy
against the farmer, who was to become the helot of civilization. He
could see it in his own barn as he reckoned the cost of his machinery,
and over against that the price of what he had in the bins of his
granary and on the hoof outside. That thousands of farmers voted and
talked Conservative proved the astonishing power of heredity. That all
farmers did not become Liberals and make the Liberal party a solid
rural party proved that even a man's depleted pocket cannot com