In whatever you do put the interest of Canada first, first before politics and everything. (Loud applause.) I addressed a number of meetings during the fall of the year and winter, all on patriotic subjects, endeavouring to arouse the people against Reciprocity or Annexation, and urging Imperial Unity as the goal for Canadians to aim at. I spoke on the 11th September, 9th October, 5th December, 29th December, 9th January, 1891, 19th January, 27th February, and the 17th March. I had written in February, 1890, as already mentioned, to Sir John A. Macdonald expressing my opinion that the next election would be fought on the question of loyalty as against disloyalty. All through the year I became more and more convinced of this, and foresaw that if the elections were postponed until 1892 it would give the Commercial Unionists and Annexationists more time to organise, and, what I dreaded most, give more time to our enemies in the United States to prepare the way for an election favourable to their views. I cannot do better to show the trend of affairs than copy from the _Empire_ of the 7th February, 1890. After referring to the disloyalty of Premier Mercier of Quebec, and quoting a statement of the Toronto _Globe_ that the Canadian people "find the colonial yoke a galling one" and that "the time when Canadian patriotism was synonymous with loyalty to British connection has long since gone by," the article copies the extract from the New York _World_ in which it states that "Nobody who has studied the peculiar methods by which elections are won in Canada will deny the fact that five or six million dollars judiciously expended in this country would secure the return to Parliament of a majority pledged to the annexation of Canada to the United States," and then goes on to say: This dastardly insult to our country is not only the work to order of a member of the staff of the New York _World_ but is adopted and emphasised by it with all the parade of display headings and of the black letter which we reproduce as in the original. So these plotters are contemplating the wholesale purchase of our country by the corruption of the electors on this gigantic scale, to return members ready to surrender Canada to a foreign Power. And for such insults as these we have mainly to thank the dastardly traitors who from our own land have by their secret information and encouragement to the foreign coveters of our country invited the insulting attack. By such baseness our enemies have been taught to believe that we will fall easy victims to their designs.