were blasted to the root. Enterprise was laid flat, mortgages were
foreclosed, shops were left empty, the milling and forwarding interests
were temporarily ruined, and the Governor-General actually wrote to
the Secretary of State in England that things were so bad that not a
shilling could be raised on the credit of the Province.

Now Mr Winter did not blame the people of England for insisting on free
food. It was the policy that suited their interests, and they had just
as good a right to look after their interests, he conceded handsomely,
as anybody else. But he did blame the British Government for holding out
hopes, for making definite pledges, to a young and struggling nation,
which they must have known they would not be able to redeem. He blamed
their action then, and he would blame it now, if the opportunity were
given to them to repeat it, for the opportunity would pass and the
pledge would pass into the happy hunting ground of unrealizable
politics, but not--and Mr Winter asked his listeners to mark this very
carefully--not until Canada was committed to such relations of trade
and taxes with the Imperial Government as would require the most heroic
efforts--it might run to a war--to extricate herself from. In plain
words, Mr Winter assured his country audiences, Great Britain had sold
them before, and she would sell them again. He stood there before them
as loyal to British connection as any man. He addressed a public as
loyal to British connection as any public. BUT--once bitten twice shy.

Horace Williams might riddle such arguments from end to end in the next
day's Express, but if there is a thing that we enjoy in the country, it
is having the dodges of Government shown up with ignominy, and Mr Winter
found his account in this historic parallel.

Nothing could have been more serious in public than his line of defence
against the danger that menaced, but in friendly ears Mr Winter derided
it as a practical possibility, like the Liberals, Young and Windle.

"It seems to me," he said, talking to Octavius Milburn, "that the
important thing at present is the party attitude to the disposition
of Crown lands and to Government-made railways. As for this racket
of Wallingham's, it has about as much in it as an empty bun-bag. He's
running round taking a lot of satisfaction blowing it out just now, and
the swells over there are clapping like anything, but the first knock
will show that it's just a bun-bag, with a hole