ng a rear lantern for a headlight. I had come East
from a six months' tour of the northwestern states and Northwestern
Canada. I chanced to meet a magazine editor who for twenty years had
been the closest exponent of Republican politics in New York. The
Canadian elections were to be held that very day. In Canada a party
does not launch a new policy like reciprocity without going to the
country for the electorate's approval or condemnation. The editor
asked me if I would mind reading over a ten-page advance editorial
congratulating both countries on the endorsation of reciprocity. I was
paralyzed. I was a free trader and had been trained to love and revere
Laurier from childhood; but I knew from cursory observation in the West
that there was not a chance, nor the shadow of a chance, for
reciprocity to be endorsed by the Canadian people. The editor would
not believe me. He was in close touch with Taft. He sat up overnight
to get returns from Canada, and the next night I left for Ottawa to get
the views of Robert Borden, Canada's new Conservative Premier, as to
why it had happened.

It had happened because it could not have happened otherwise, though
neither President Taft nor Premier Laurier, neither the editor of the
_Globe_ nor the free-trade Governor-General seemed to have the faintest
idea what was happening. Canada rejected reciprocity now for precisely
the same reason that Uncle Sam had rejected reciprocity ten years
before--because Uncle Sam had no quid pro quo, no equivalent in values
to offer, which Canada wanted badly enough to make trade concessions.
Said Canada: you have exhausted your own lumber; you want our lumber;
pay for it. You want it so badly that you will ultimately put lumber
on the free list without any concession from us. Meanwhile, for us to
remove the tariff would simply lead to our lumber going across the line
to be manufactured. It would build up your mills instead of ours. The
higher you keep the tariff against our lumber the better pleased we'll
be; for you will have to build more and more mills on our side of the
line. We are even prepared to put an export duty on logs to compel you
to keep on building mills on our side of the line. This was the
argument that swayed and won the vote in British Columbia and Quebec.
A similar argument as to wheat and meat swayed the prairie provinces
and Ontario.

From Montreal to Vancouver there is hardly a hamlet that has not some
American