Commercial and Political Events of Forty Years 49 



ing of the immigration ocean by the great American octopus 

 created during those many years, causing the people from every 

 country and beyond all from its neighbor Canada to be drawn 

 within the reach of its tentacles and to be slowly swallowed up 

 to the number of over 2,000,000 by 1900 from Canada alone." 



It would have been hard, indeed, for the professor to appre- 

 ciate the full meaning of this tragic recital, had he not lived in 

 Canada during the decade of 1890-1900, and been an inter- 

 ested witness of the enormous development during the succeed- 

 ing decade. He recalled to Mr. Keeler how he had come to 

 Canada in time to witness the third strange political agitation, 

 which like those of 1837 and 1849, had for its object closer, even 

 political, relations with the United States. Its cry "Commer- 

 cial Union" had originated in New York with two ci-devant 

 Canadians, Wyman and Glenn, and in Canada was fostered by 

 that literary giant, but political enigma, Professor Goldwin 

 Smith. Supported by a newspaper, financed and edited by men, 

 previously conservatives, a great impetus was given to a move- 

 ment, which appealed especially to the opponents of high 

 tariffs in both countries, owing to the melancholy results com- 

 mercially of the decade, which had opened with a blare of trum- 

 pets, regarding what the new Canadian Pacific Railway begun 

 in 1881 was to do in opening up the Great West. Its first 

 through train to the Coast, leaving Montreal, June 24, 1886, 

 was indeed an impetus to western settlement; but there had 

 been already dissatisfaction over the land laws in the West. 

 Indeed the Half -Breed rebellion of 1885 grew out of this; while 

 time, under the best of conditions, was needed to overcome the 

 prejudice against the country and its climate, where plagues 

 of locusts had occurred as recently as 1875 and frosts had not 

 infrequently injured the wheat and droughts had occurred as 

 late as 1886. . . . 



Mr. Keeler here broke in : 



"As I look back on those seemingly so hopeless days for 

 Canada and find from the blue book returns that not only did 

 the population not increase through immigration to any notable 

 extent, but further that we actually were short in our total popu- 

 lation in 1891 by 120,000 of what we should have had, had we 

 retained our natural increase for the ten years, I wonder why 



