rough buying and cutting out the oaks for square timber that
floated away in rafts, probably to build tramp steamers in England.
The bush farmer hired to wield the broad-axe on that oak was as much an
industrialist as any moulder in a foundry. He would have fought with
his naked fists any agitator who proposed to interfere with that wages
revenue.

After the oak was gone came the elm buyers, shrewd Americans who paid
as much for a thousand feet of prime swamp elm as the pork buyer twenty
miles away paid for a cwt. of dead hog. Mr. Drury must have known
something about those friendly but niggardly Yankee dollars that saved
many a bush farmer from being sold for taxes. He may have seen bolt
mills go up and young men betwixt haying and harvest swagger down to
the docks to get 25 cents an hour loading elm bolts into the three-mast
schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of
youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire
worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw
the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry
come up out of these timber products. While he was a youth the farmers
were the first promoters of bigger towns, because the big town meant
more jobs for the young men whose father's acres were too few for the
families, and bigger markets close at hand for perishable products.
The farmers of that day would have tarred and feathered any
revolutionist who came preaching that a good market town was a wicked
conspiracy of _bourgeoisie_ and should become a deserted village.

Yankee money and Canadian industries were the economics of Drury's
boyhood. If he was as good a Canadian then as he is now he must have
had more faith in the Canadian factory than he had in the American
paymaster, or sometimes even in the Ontario farm. There never was a
bush farmer who would not have voted for a tariff that increased the
price of timber for the saw-mill.

By the time Drury was old enough to consider being a candidate for
Parliament, heaps of sawdust marked the grave of many a vanished saw
mill. Young men who could not get work in the near-by town drifted to
High School, to college, to law and medicine and the pulpit; they went
to the big cities across the border and got high wages; to the Canadian
West and got cheap land. The counties of Western Ontario began to
decrease in man wealth as they increased in the wealth of agricultural