“As matters now stand, Canada is an agricultural State, paying for all the manufactures she consumes in the raw productions of the earth. She has been but a very short time in this position, and yet she already groans under the free-trade experiment. Her wants are the same; but the more timber and corn she exports, the less she gets for them. Instead of growing rich under this beneficent free-trade system, she is every day getting poorer. She has had enough of free trade, and is anxiously seeking some way of escape from it. Such is ever the inevitable result, when the attempt is made to pay for manufactures with raw productions; and the longer it is continued, the worse will be the situation of the agricultural state. “Can she mend her position by adopting the proposed ‘Remedy?’ If her representatives in parliament happen to be the true representatives of her interests—which is very far from certain—and if they can persuade the government to restore the bounty upon her timber and corn—the answer is, yes. But we see little chance of that, for the situation of Canada is perfectly well known now by that same government; her case has been examined in all its bearings, and she has been deliberately sacrificed to ‘free trade,’—in other words, to the manufacturing interest of Great Britain; and it will take something more than the eloquence of a few Canadian orators, admitted to seats in parliament, to induce that interest to reconsider her case, or to yield a hair’s-breadth to her claims. She has not been sacrificed through ignorance, but because she stood in the way of a great theory. She will look in vain to this source for relief. But if the proposed consolidation should cause British capital to cross the water and set up manufacturing establishments, would not the end be gained? Perhaps so. Of this, however, the chance is small, unless labour is as cheap in Canada as it is in England, which it never can be until the United States, ceasing to afford any protection to labour, become parties to the Free Trade League, and so bring all the labour of North America down to the level of the labour of Europe. Such a suicidal system can never be permanently established here, and, therefore, we look upon this second source of relief as equally visionary with the first.”—_Boston Atlas._