for one side
could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the
scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of businessmen of
both countries. Such persons, Mr Winter said, if they could have their
way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England
nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that. He
professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party
organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views. That was what
would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the
country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election. He was
against the scheme, root and branch.

Mr Winter was skilled, practised, and indefatigable. We need not follow
him in all his ways and works; a good many of his arguments, I fear,
must also escape us. The Elgin Mercury, if consulted, would produce
them in daily disclosure; so would the Clayfield Standard. One of these
offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the veteran of so many
good fights, in being asked to contest South Fox with an opponent who
had not so much as a village reeveship to his public credit. If the
Conservative candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he
concealed it.

In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also begun to point
the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear field. Official reports gave
him figures to prove the great and increasing prosperity of the country,
astonishing figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of new
lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new railways projected, of
stocks and shares normal safe, assured. He could ask the manufacturers
of Elgin to look no further than themselves, which they were quite
willing to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise which
reigned in the land from one end to the other. He could tell them that
in their own Province more than one hundred new industries had been
established in the last year. He could ask them, and he did ask them,
whether this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from
British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with applause that it
was not.

Country audiences were not open to arguments like these; they were
slow in the country, as the Mercury complained, to understand that
agricultural prospects were bound up with the prosperity of the towns
and cities; they had been especially slow in the country in England, as
the Express i