n the currents of North
American trade flowed unchecked in their natural channels. Canada had
never known such a period of prosperity, and was never to know such
another, until the great West was opened up by the railways and until
immigrants began to flock in by hundreds of thousands, to draw from the
rich loam of the prairies the bountiful harvests of man-sustaining
wheat. Lord Elgin's pact held good for twelve years. In the last year
the volume of trade was more than eighty-four millions. The agreement
ended from a variety of causes, economic and political. Canada had
raised the tariff on American manufactures in order to meet {154} her
increasing expenditure; and she tried to divert American commerce from
its regular routes to a profitable transit through Canadian territory.
But the chief cause was the bitterness of the United States at the
attitude of Britain during the Civil War. The _Trent_ affair, the
ravages of the _Alabama_ and other commerce destroyers, the open and
avowed sympathy with the South expressed in British journals and
elsewhere, convinced the American people that Britain would be glad to
see the Republic broken up. That, with such provocation, the Americans
should deprive a British colony of a commercial advantage was not
unnatural. One statesman even proposed that the whole of Canada should
be handed over to the United States in compensation for the _Alabama_
claims. That the treaty was negotiated at all, and that the experiment
in trade was so beneficial to both countries, has certain important
lessons. The episode proves that a colonial governor, while governing
in strict accordance with the constitution, can do for his government
what no one else can do. Lord Elgin's success has never been repeated.
Delegation after delegation of Canada's ablest politicians have
pilgrimed from Ottawa to Washington, seeking {155} better trade
relations, with no result. The second lesson is the tendency of trade
to mock at political boundaries and to wed geography. Even now, with
high tariffs on both sides of the line, Canada spends fifty-one dollars
in the United States for every thirty-three she spends in England.

From his triumph at Washington the governor-general returned to Canada
to undergo another experience of democratic manners. The Hincks-Morin
government was nearing its end. Parliament had no sooner assembled in
the ancient capital, Quebec, than it was dissolved. In the political
tug-