The benefits accruing to Canada from the treaty were immediate and plain to every {153} eye. In the first year of its operation the value of commodities interchanged between the two countries rose from an annual average of fourteen million dollars to thirty-three millions, an increase of more than one hundred per cent. The volume of trade rose steadily at the rate of eight or nine millions per annum. When the war broke out between the North and the South, prices jumped, and, during the four years of the struggle, Canada had a greedy market for everything she could produce. The benefit to both countries was obvious. For the first time since the Revolution the currents of North American trade flowed unchecked in their natural channels. Canada had never known such a period of prosperity, and was never to know such another, until the great West was opened up by the railways and until immigrants began to flock in by hundreds of thousands, to draw from the rich loam of the prairies the bountiful harvests of man-sustaining wheat. Lord Elgin's pact held good for twelve years. In the last year the volume of trade was more than eighty-four millions. The agreement ended from a variety of causes, economic and political. Canada had raised the tariff on American manufactures in order to meet {154} her increasing expenditure; and she tried to divert American commerce from its regular routes to a profitable transit through Canadian territory. But the chief cause was the bitterness of the United States at the attitude of Britain during the Civil War. The _Trent_ affair, the ravages of the _Alabama_ and other commerce destroyers, the open and avowed sympathy with the South expressed in British journals and elsewhere, convinced the American people that Britain would be glad to see the Republic broken up. That, with such provocation, the Americans should deprive a British colony of a commercial advantage was not unnatural. One statesman even proposed that the whole of Canada should be handed over to the United States in compensation for the _Alabama_ claims. That the treaty was negotiated at all, and that the experiment in trade was so beneficial to both countries, has certain important lessons. The episode proves that a colonial governor, while governing in strict accordance with the constitution, can do for his government what no one else can do. Lord Elgin's success has never been repeated. Delegation after delegation of Canada's ablest politicians have pilgrimed from Ottawa to Washington, seeking {155} better trade relations, with no result. The second lesson is the tendency of trade to mock at political boundaries and to wed geography. Even now, with high tariffs on both sides of the line, Canada spends fifty-one dollars in the United States for every thirty-three she spends in England.