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Washington would not seriously entertain any proposals in the direction of free trade; for despite all Mr. Blaine's anxiety to secure extended trade relations with the South American republics, his party is pledged to protectionism, and must in consistency disapprove of all at tempts to emancipate the masses from the "protection" of the plutocracy, which rules in the United States, as well as in Canada.

The lesson of the Dominion election, however, is obvious to every intelligent observer. Sir John's government has from the beginning depended upon the support of the manufacturers it has artificially created out of the nation's coffers; millions of borrowed money have been sunk in building railroads to lull the people to sleep, with apparent evidences of prosperity and development; and the agricultural community, the backbone of Canada, has been taught to believe that all this taxation was for its ultimate benefit, in opening up vast new home markets, which would more than compensate for the markets cut off by the policy of isolation and high tariff adopted by the government. Some one has said that "the nation which builds on manufactures sleeps upon gunpowder"; and Sir John Macdonald, after a long and successful policy of procrastination, is just being forced to recognize that a system of wholesale political corruption and reckless postponement and promises must end in an explosion. The Canadian people have long and patiently borne impoverishment at the hands of the subsidized manufacturing corporations, deluded by the conservative theories that only through the creation of manufactures by high tariff legislation could the country attain prosperity. Now there is a movement throughout the country similar to that of the Farmers' Alliance in the Western States and in New England, and Sir John and his followers hope to compromise with this growing sentiment in favor of free trade in natural channels, by pretending to try to obtain for the people the commercial liberty they desire, and by skilful manipulation obtaining a sharp refusal of free trade from Congress, and so bring the advocates of free trade in Canada into disfavor, as traitors desiring to sell their country to a foreign nation which will have none of them. But this cannot last. A change from the existing order of things in Canada is inevitable; and Sir John Macdonald's sudden conversion to the unrestricted reciprocity idea is one of the surest indications of the fact that commercial union, with its natural sequence of political union, will be the supreme issue in Canada at no very distant date.

There is still a protectionist government at Ottawa, but the whole Dominion is saturated with free trade ideas; and the growing discontent with protection in the United States is a good augury of success in future negotiations, when true democracy and liberalism shall have obtained both at Washington and at Ottawa—events which present indications seem to point to as being possible before the end of this century. In 1900, this continent will most probably have shaken off the last shred of monarchism, and will be one harmonious and powerful republic—truly, the greatest nation in the world.