nited
States, in those quarters where Canada was given a thought at all,
curious misconceptions existed of her subordination to Great Britain,
of her hopelessly Arctic climate, and of her inevitable drift into the
arms of the Republic. Elsewhere abroad, Canada was an Ultima Thule, a
barren land of ice and snow, about as interesting and important as
Kamchatka and Tierra del Fuego, and other outlying odds and ends of the
earth which one came across in the atlas but never thought of otherwise.

Twenty years earlier glowing pictures had been painted of the new
heights of honour and of usefulness which the new Dominion would afford
its statesmen. The hard reality was the Canada of gerrymanders and
political {95} trickery, of Red Parlor funds and electoral bribery.
The canker affected not one party alone, as the fall of Mercier was
soon to show. The whole political life of the country to sank low and
stagnant levels, for it appeared that the people had openly condoned
corruption in high places, and that lavish promises and the 'glad hand'
were a surer road to success than honest and efficient administration.

Sectional discontent prevailed. That the federation would be smashed
'into its original fragments' seemed not beyond possibility. We have
seen that a racial and religious feud rent Ontario and Quebec. Nova
Scotia strained at the leash. Her people had never forgotten nor
forgiven the way in which they had been forced into Confederation.
'Better terms' had failed to bribe them into fellowship. A high tariff
restricted their liberty in buying, and the home markets promised in
compensation had not developed. In the preceding year the provincial
legislature had expressed the prevalent discontent by flatly demanding
the repeal of the union.

Manitoba chafed under a thirty-five per cent tariff on farm implements,
and complained of the retention by the Dominion of the vacant lands in
the province. And her {96} grievances in respect to transportation
would not down. The Canadian Pacific Railway had given the much
desired connection with the East and had brought tens of thousands of
settlers to the province, but it had not brought abiding prosperity or
content. The through rate on wheat from Winnipeg to Montreal was ten
cents a bushel more than from St Paul to New York, an equal distance;
and, from the farm to Liverpool, the Minnesota farmer had fifteen cents
a bushel the advantage of his Manitoba neighbour. Local r