Against these conditions Manitoba protested as one man. The Winnipeg Board of Trade denounced the policy of 'crushing and trampling upon one hundred thousand struggling pioneers of this prairie province to secure a purely imaginary financial gain to one soulless corporation.' Every Conservative candidate {98} for the House of Commons in the province pledged himself to vote for a motion of want of confidence if the Macdonald Government persisted in its course. The Conservative administration of the province was overthrown because it did not go fast or far enough in the fight. At last, in 1888, Ottawa gave way and bought off the Canadian Pacific by a guarantee of bonds for new extensions. After some further negotiations the Northern Pacific was brought into Canada; and if this did not work all the miracles of cheap rates that had been expected, Manitoba at least knew now that her ills were those which had been imposed by nature and geography and not by her sister provinces. It was not only in Manitoba that economic depression prevailed, though nowhere else were the grievances so concrete and so irritating. Throughout the Dominion the brief gleam of prosperity which dawned with the eighties had vanished. After the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway stagnation was everywhere the rule. Foreign trade, which had reached a total of $217,000,000 in 1873, was only $230,000,000 in 1883 and $247,000,000 in 1893; these were, however, years of falling prices. Bank discounts, the {99} number of tons of freight moved, and other records of general business activity showed creeping progress and sometimes actual falling back. Homestead entries had risen to nearly seventy-five hundred in 1882, when the construction of the Canadian Pacific was bringing on the first western boom, but a great part of these had been cancelled, and up to the middle nineties entries averaged fewer than three thousand a year in the whole vast West. The movement of population bore the same melancholy witness. Even the West, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, grew only from 180,000 in 1881 in 250,000 in 1891, whereas Dakota alone grew from 135,000 to 510,000 in the same period. The Dominion as a whole increased at less than half the rate of the United States, and Sir Richard Cartwright had little difficulty in establishing the alarming fact that in recent years one out of every four of the native-born of Canada had been compelled to seek a home in the Republic, and that three out of every four immigrants to Canada had followed the same well-beaten trail. There were in 1890 more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth and descent in the United States as in Canada itself. Never in the world's history, save in {100} the case of crowded, famine-stricken, misgoverned Ireland, had there been such a leakage of the brain and brawn of any country.