e professions, and the farmers. Both
sides could leave out of their counsels the interests of the leisured
class, since the leisured class in Elgin consisted almost entirely of
persons who were too old to work, and therefore not influential. The
landed proprietors were the farmers, when they weren't, alas! the banks.
As to the retail men, the prosperity of the stores of Main Street and
Market Street was bound up about equally with that of Fox County and
the Elgin factories. The lawyers and doctors, the odd surveyors and
engineers, were inclined, by their greater detachment, to theories and
prejudices, delightful luxuries where a certain rigidity of opinion
is dictated by considerations of bread and butter. They made a factor
debatable, but small. The farmers had everything to win, nothing to
lose. The prospect offered them more for what they had to sell, and less
for what they had to buy, and most of them were Liberals already; but
the rest had to be convinced, and a political change of heart in a bosom
of South Fox was as difficult as any other. Industrial, commercial,
professional, agricultural, Lorne Murchison scanned them all hopefully,
but Walter Winter felt them his garnered sheaves.

It will be imagined how Mr Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced
in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable
chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment
in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the
second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in
politics--and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it
was satire--the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him
down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any
circumstances very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared,
would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on
the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do
it there, and that place was England. He cast an envious eye across
the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such
straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of
empires. If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government
over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever
had for them, which wasn't much, he acknowledged. When his opponents
twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad