Until they have acquired it, if we allowed our country to be flooded with the manufacturing products of the United States, of the Old Country, and of France, Germany, and other countries, we should be beaten hands down and our rising manufacturing industries would be strangled in their cradle. You Britishers do not understand why we Canadians favour Protection. Protection really means that we are compelling the United States and yourselves to teach us how to become a manufacturing nation.” This will not satisfy, perhaps, English Free Traders, among whom I confess myself to be a convinced believer in the open market, but it is the view-point from which I found Canadians throughout the Eastern Provinces generally looked at the question. When I visited some of the manufacturing cities and saw the factories, through several of which I was taken, I was forced to think there was something after all in the views of the Ontario Londoner. [Illustration: TORONTO. YONGE STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ADELAIDE STREET.] Take Hamilton, Ontario, for instance. This flourishing city is one of the oldest in Canada. It is magnificently situated for trading on the shores of Hamilton Bay, a land-locked harbour at the head of Lake Ontario. The manufacturing quarter is well away from the beautiful residential quarters, where the prosperous Hamiltonians live in handsomely-built houses, each isolated on its own freehold plot, surrounded by a border of grass or shrubs with abundance of forest trees. It rises to the Mountain, as a steep hill is called, from the summit of which there is a very striking view of the city and a picturesque outlook over one of the most fruitful parts of the Dominion, abounding in peach and apple orchards and vineyards. Hamilton is only forty miles from Niagara Falls, and its interest in the Falls is utilitarian as well as artistic and sentimental, for it is the electric power generated at the Falls which drives the works of Hamilton, lights its streets and houses, and supplies the heating power. On my visit to the Falls I saw the great power-house in which the mighty rush of the Rapids is harnessed and tamed by the engineering skill of man and compelled to serve alike the industrial prosperity, the domestic comfort, the tram service, and the house and street lighting not only of Hamilton, but of Toronto and of many other cities. The first thing that strikes a visitor to Hamilton, if he should arrive after dark, is what he will consider the scandalous luxury of the brilliant electric lighting with which the fronts of business houses and places of entertainment literally blaze, but should the visitor express his concern at such apparent wicked waste he will be told that electricity is so cheap that its cost is practically negligible. It is to the cheapness of natural sources of power, that is given without stint, that the growing manufacturing prosperity of Canada is largely due.