ated menace. Every foundry and implement
works and furniture factory and boot industry making goods more or less
from imported material, considerably with imported labour, and selling
to the consumer at a normal price plus the duty, roused in Mr. Drury as
much hostility as a natively kind and Christian character would permit.

And at last he saw the predicted slump begin to come in the year 1913,
when the boomster dodged the boomerang of inflated and speculative
values; when east and west the farmers, crimped by high railway rates
and cost of materials, machinery and labour, ceased to be the backbone
of Canadian buying.

And then the War.

Whatever may be traced to the normal development of this Ontario
Cincinnatus, it was the War which made Drury. But for the war he would
have bided his time to be elected to Ottawa on a straight tariff issue.
The war, backed by the man's religion and his tariff theology, drove
him to the Premiership of Ontario.

There were times during the war when, if Mr. Drury was as honest with
himself as he is about government, he must have reflected that the
Canadian farmer was getting pretty well paid back in part of one
generation for the wrongs and adversities suffered by generations ago.
Pork at $20 per cwt., oats at $1.50 a bushel, wheat fixed by the
Government at $2.40 to keep it from bulling to more than $3--none of
these could have been economically justified by Mr. Drury except as an
act of compensating Providence. The farmer of all people as a class
benefited most, when he was driven to the worst labour hardship he ever
had by the terrific prices paid for war work, which robbed him of hired
help almost at any price. The higher the price and the scarcer the
help, the more the Government clamoured for production. The Ontario
farmer responded to the call. He was no more a patriot to do it than a
man was to buy Victory Bonds. He was simply a profitee (we leave off
the r).

And this was the first call of the war to which the farmers as a class
made a hearty response. No doubt most farmers were better servants of
the nation in the furrow than in the trench. But the time came when
they had to leave the furrows. On top of the Government's most frantic
call for more production by the farmer came the Military Service Act,
which refused to exempt him. The call to the plough-handle came before
the election of 1917. The call to the bayonet came afterwards in a
crisis unforeseen at t