pete
with the traditions of his family. Drury looked to Laurier to
emancipate the farmer. In vain. Laurier created more farmers,
thousands of them in the West; but he only enslaved them with the
voters' lists; the very party over which Drury had almost wept with joy
when at the age of eighteen he had felt them like the armies of Israel
sweeping out the scoundrels of the National Policy.

Thus his hope was no longer in Laurier, who knew nothing about the
farmer, nor dreamed that in the very West which he had put on the
political map with his prosperity of imported people and borrowed
money, there was arising a race that would repudiate him and his.
Drury had a weather eye on the West. There were farms in Simcoe county
now worked by old men whose sons had gone to that Promised Land. In
the constant drift of the hired man and the farmer's son to the town
and the city for shorter hours, higher wages and more amusement, he saw
the fluidity of labour, the first evidence that there was some common
ground between the farmer and the labour class. Working in his own
fields, driving his own teams, operating his own machinery, this
capitalistic labour-unionist of the soil said to himself that the
farmers of Canada were entitled not merely to representation in
Parliament, but to the organization of a class interest that should
take hold of the country's economic horns and turn it on to the right
road.

In the lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions
that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and
cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury
was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on
tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger
determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less
united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized the Liberals.

Drury was a rural Liberal. He saw in the reciprocity campaign of 1911
some glimmer of hope that Liberalism might succeed without a
revolution. The election settled that. From then on to the war the
philosopher of Crown Hill bent himself to the deeper study of the one
force that now seemed to him to be left capable of breaking the
nation's bondage. He no longer had the fervent desire to see a new
town grow among the farms that he had when he was a youth. Every
bigger town, unless it had industries that could widen the farmer's
low-cost market, was a mitig