both ends in some degree,
all were advanced.

The Liberals, _ex officio_, that is, being out of office, opposed these
increases one and all. Neither Blake nor Laurier, however, was an
out-and-out free-trader like Mackenzie. Mackenzie had received his
point of view from his British upbringing; his colleagues had been
brought up on a continent where protection ruled. Blake, after a
session or two, seemed content to accept the country's verdict and
criticized chiefly the details of the N.P., as the National Policy of
Protection to Native Industries was affectionately called by its
supporters. Laurier, while admitting that in theory it was possible to
aid infant industries by tariff pap, criticized the indiscriminate and
excessive rates of the new tariff, and the unfair burden it imposed
upon the poorer citizens by its high specific rates on cheap goods.
But in 1880, after a night of seven years, prosperity dawned in
America. The revival of business in the United States {58} proved as
contagious in Canada as had been its slackening in the early seventies.
The Canadian people gave the credit for the improvement in health to
the well-advertised patent medicine they had taken just before the
change set in; and for some years all criticisms of the N.P. were fated
to fall on deaf ears.

Then came the contract for the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, and the tariff question was shelved. Both parties were
committed to build the road to the coast. Both had wavered between
public and private construction. But the Macdonald Government had now
decided upon pushing the road through with all speed, regardless as to
whether current revenues sufficed to build it, while the Opposition
advocated a policy of gradual construction within the country's means,
concurrent with a close and steady settlement of the western plains.
The Government's first plan of building the road out of the proceeds of
the sale of a hundred million acres of prairie lands proved a flat
failure. Then in 1880 a contract for its construction and operation
was made with the famous Canadian Pacific Syndicate, in which the
leading figures were a group of Canadians who {59} had just reaped a
fortune out of the reconstruction of a bankrupt Minnesota
railway--George Stephen, Richard B. Angus, James J. Hill, and in the
background, Donald A. Smith.[1]

Under Blake's leadership instant and determined attack was made upon
the bargain, in parliament, in the