ld Michael Clark so well
have demonstrated the virtues of Free-Trade. On those plains, buffaloes
worth multi-millions of dollars in trade annually migrated across
"Parallel 49" into Montana and back again into the Territories. The
prairie schooner trekked northward over the border carrying migrants in
search of homes when there was no government official to turn them back
or to question the terminus of their travels. The freight wagons creaked
up from the south into MacLeod and past it into the valley of
Saskatchewan, carrying goods made and bought in the land of the Western
Yankee long before the great antidote to Free Trade, the Transcontinental
Railway, put those crooked trails out of business.

Clark was spouting free-trade on the prairies at a time when many men in
the West scarcely knew that trade had any restrictions except in the
matter of beverages. He was an apostle of Cobdenism almost before the
Territories were baptized into party politics at all; when Regina was the
home of a Territorial County Council that had neither Tories nor Grits.
He was farming and prophesying commercial union before James J. Hill
began to compete with the protective C.P.R. for trade north and south
instead of the long-haul east and west. Before ever a real Agrarian
began to head out on the plains he was contending like a tribune of the
plebs, that unrestricted reciprocity between two halves of a great
productive continent, of which one-half contains nine-tenths of the
people, was not a prelude to annexation away from the grand old Empire.
And when he got into Parliament the voice that had been so mighty in the
trail-side school houses and the little town-halls became more potent
than ever as "Red Michael" went full tilt in the House against the high
protectionists.

High courage was here. Bucking bronchos from the West who had gone to
Ottawa were duly corralled, haltered, hobbled, surcingled and thrown,
finally harnessed and driven by either of the old parties. In breaking a
political broncho the Liberal party was as good as the other. But the
House is full of insurgents now, lining up into a tyrannized and
tyrannous group organizing as a party. In Clark's inaugural days, and
for years after, there was but one real solo voice calling like a
trombone from a high tower for Free Trade as the Kingdom of God which, if
they would first seek it, all other things would be added unto them.

French psychology traces certain forms o