One of these
offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the
veteran of so many good fights, in being asked to contest
South Fox with an opponent who had not so much as a
village reeveship to his public credit. If the Conservative
candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he
concealed it.
In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also
begun to point the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear
field. Official reports gave him figures to prove the
great and increasing prosperity of the country, astonishing
figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of
new lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new
railways projected, of stocks and shares normal safe,
assured. He could ask the manufacturers of Elgin to look
no further than themselves, which they were quite willing
to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise
which reigned in the land. from one end to the other. He
could tell them that in their own Province more than one
hundred new industries had been established in the last
year. He could ask them, and he did ask them, whether
this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from
British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with
applause that it was not.
Country audiences were not open to arguments like these;
they were slow in the country, as the Mercury complained,
to understand that agricultural prospects were bound up
with the prosperity of the towns and cities; they had
been especially slow in the country in England, as the
Express ironically pointed out, to understand it.
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