Alberta was leaping to a great life. Almost in the middle of it north
and south is the town of Red Deer. All about it were the settlements of
"nationals" emancipated from bondage in Europe. What was the use, quoth
Clark, of bringing such people to a country of free homestead land, of
alleged free institutions and making them the slaves, first of political
machines, second of protected interests in the East? If enslaved people
were to become free in a new land why should the wheat and the oats and
the cattle which they raised not be made free to move for a market as
naturally as the wind blows across the borders?

This may not have been the precise order in which such ideas generated in
the mind of Michael Clark; but it is the way those ideas confronting such
a man strike a contemporary. I have lived in the land where Clark lives,
though not at Red Deer, and remember well the burning desire of twenty
years ago in that far northwest for economic emancipation. Then at any
meeting, no matter what, any little dinner to a citizen no matter whom,
men rose to talk about the need of conquering the isolation of the
country. They remembered the tyranny of the old Trading Company into
Hudson's Bay. They clamoured for more people, more farms, more towns,
more railways, more life--from the East. And when it came they said the
East was a tyrant, an economic monster to bleed them white. Clark, as
one remembers him best, has not been so much a foe to the East as he has
wanted to be a friend to the South.

But a new oligarchy was arising on the great prairies. As official
liberalism got its grip on the three Provinces and became itself a
tyrant, while unofficial Toryism in league with the big railways got a
stranglehold on British Columbia, and when even "Honest" Frank Oliver
ceased to be an independent Liberal and became a red-taped Minister of
the Interior, Clark the Free Trader in Parliament found himself striking
hands with a sect mainly of Liberal Radicals first called Grain Growers,
next Agrarians, and by some the very devil. With official Liberalism as
expressed by Scott, Sifton, Cross, Norris and Martin he had only
superficial sympathy. These men were more or less on masquerade. The
Agrarians were barefaced, one-faced Radicals who would open the borders,
and abolish the customs houses, and set up a sort of Western political
autonomy whose root idea was that trade should be as free as
grasshoppers. These people w