CHAPTER X 



THE PROFESSOR AS A STUDENT OF CANADIAN ECONOMICS 



Owing to the pressure of business and the urgency of distress- 

 ing family matters, it was some time before Mr. Joseph Keeler 

 could return with any enthusiasm to the studies, which had 

 for him so keen an interest. But the professor had been put 

 on a keen scent and, like the trained hound, ran his quarry to 

 earth, so that when he again found himself in the cosy study of 

 the Keeler home, he was not long in taking up the story which 

 Mr. Keeler had brought up to 1850. He said: 



"Comparing English with Canadian historical events, he 

 found, while world-wide British trade, now freed from the shack- 

 les of discriminating tariffs, was rapidly recovering from the 

 serious depression of the * Forties,' that in Canada the enormous 

 immigration had created an era of land speculation, which kept 

 up so long as new towns could be exploited along the lines of the 

 Great Western Railway now building from Niagara Falls to 

 Detroit and of the Grand Trunk from Portland to Sarnia, and 

 as new townships remained to be opened in Perth, Huron and 

 Grey. Labour, with the employment of the large number of 

 immigrants in railway building, remained high, and all prices 

 were made still more exorbitant during the two years, 1854- 

 1856, of the Russian war, in which the wheat supplies of Russia 

 were suddenly cut off from the millions of needy mouths of 

 Britain's work-people, making wheat in Canada and the neigh- 

 boring States rise to $2.50 per bushel. Nevertheless the crisis 

 was rapidly approaching which was to so lessen Canadian credit 

 that a period of extreme depression was created, lighted only 

 by occasional sunshine, which was to last for forty years. He 

 found that towns had been laid out in the Queen's Bush even 

 and sales held in the nearest town of Guelph on the marketplace 

 where marquees were erected and liquors, even champagne, 

 flowed like water, while the mad orgy of trading in ephemeral 

 values went on. The American railways, having once reached 



41 



