al sentiment, resentment against the trade policy of the United
States, have all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels.
Only at two periods, in 1849, and forty years later, has there been any
active movement for annexation.

In the late eighties, as in the late forties, commercial depression and
racial strife prepared the soil for the seed of annexation. The chief
sower in the later period was a brilliant Oxford don, Goldwin Smith,
whose sympathy with the cause of the North had brought him to the United
States. In 1871, after a brief residence at Cornell, he made his home
in Toronto, with high hopes of stimulating the intellectual life and
molding the political future of the colony. He so far forsook the strait
"Manchester School" of his upbringing as to support Macdonald's campaign
for protection in 1878. But that was the limit of his adaptability. To
the end he remained out of touch with Canadian feeling. His campaign for
annexation, or for the reunion of the English-speaking peoples on this
continent, as he preferred to call it, was able and persistent but moved
only a narrow circle of readers. It was in vain that he offered the
example of Scotland's prosperity after her union with her southern
neighbor, or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and
unrelated sections each of which could find its natural complement
only in the territory to the south. Here and there an editor or a minor
politician lent some support to his views, but the great mass of the
people strongly condemned the movement. There was to be no going back to
the parting of the ways: the continent north of Mexico was henceforth to
witness two experiments in democracy, not one unwieldy venture.

Commercial union was a half-way measure which found more favor. A North
American customs union had been supported by such public men as
Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward, by official
investigators such as Taylor, Derby, and Larned, and by committees of
the House of Representatives in 1862, 1876, 1880, and 1884. In Canada it
had been endorsed before Confederation by Isaac Buchanan, the father of
the protection movement, and by Luther Holton and John Young. Now for
the first time it became a practical question. Erastus Wiman, a Canadian
who had found fortune in the United States, began in 1887 a vigorous
campaign in its favor both in Congress and among the Canadian public.
Goldwin Smith lent his dubious aid, leading