Alexander T. Galt, Canadian Minister of Finance,
had no difficulty in showing that the tariff increases were the
only feasible sources of revenue, that the agreement with the
United States did not cover manufactures, and that the United
States itself, faced by war demands and no longer controlled by
free trade Southerners, had raised duties still higher. The
exports of the United States to the Provinces in the reciprocity
period were greater, contrary to the later traditions, than the
imports. On economic grounds the case for the continuance of the
reciprocity agreement was strong, and probably the treaty would
have remained in force indefinitely had not the political
passions roused by the Civil War made sanity and neighborliness
in trade difficult to maintain.
When the Civil War broke out, the sympathies of Canadians were
overwhelmingly on the side of the North. The railway and freer
trade had been bringing the two peoples closer together, and time
was healing old sores. Slavery was held to be the real issue, and
on that issue there were scarcely two opinions in the British
Provinces.
Yet in a few months sympathy had given way to angry and
suspicious bickering, and the possibility of invasion of Canada
by the Northern forces was vigorously debated. This sudden shift
of opinion and the danger in which it involved the provinces were
both incidents in the quarrel which sprang up between the United
States and Great Britain.
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