The master got on his feet and begged permission to be heard in reply. He was invited to the platform and, with his usual directness and force, at once assailed what Mr Snellgrove had advanced. He says, let us have a law that will compel us to cease buying goods abroad, for thereby the money now sent away will be kept in Canada. What right has any government to pass such a law? With the money I get for my wheat may I not buy what I need where I see fit? Such an arbitrary law as he pleads for would undoubtedly help the manufacturer, but would it help me, who am a farmer? The question I ask, is not will the money stay in Canada, but will the money I have justly earned stay in my pocket? I will be none the richer if the money goes into the pocket of the owner of a factory. In the Old Country the farmers carry the aristocracy who own the land on their backs, are the laws of Canada to be so shaped that the farmers here are to carry the manufacturers? It may not be plain to you city gentlemen, but it is to me, that under the system you have heard advocated, factories would increase and their owners grow rich while the farmers would become poor, for they would have to pay more than they now do for the goods necessity makes them buy. My family needs about $300 worth of store-goods in a year. That is what I pay now. Under Protection these same goods would cost me $400, perhaps more. The Canadian manufacturers would be the richer by the hundred extra dollars I would pay, and I would be the poorer by a hundred dollars. The point at issue, is not keeping money in the country, but of keeping it in the pockets of the men who first earned it by cultivating the soil. Canada is a farming country and always will be, and taxing each farmer's family on an average of say a hundred dollars a year is going to discourage the farmer. Let every tub stand on its own bottom. If any commodity can be made in Canada at a profit under present conditions, I wish all success to the man who undertakes to make that commodity, but to tax me to give the man a bonus to do so is to rob me of my honest earnings. We have been told we want more population. Yes, if it be of the right kind, of people who will go, as I did, into the bush and carve out farms. These will add to our strength, but hordes drawn from cities who cannot and will not take to the plow, will prove in the long run a weakness. If you knew the poverty and misery that exists among the factory operatives of the Old World you would not entertain a project to bribe them to come here and reproduce the same conditions. Today you have not a beggar on Toronto's streets; adopt Protection and you will have thousands of paupers. This is a new country and our aim should be to make it one where honest industry can find a sure reward in its forests and not be creating factories by artificial means. As an Old Countryman, I take exception to the land I came from being treated as foreign and a ban placed on the goods it has to export.