His campaign for annexation, or for the reunion of the
English-speaking peoples on this continent, as he preferred to
call it, was able and persistent but moved only a narrow circle
of readers. It was in vain that he offered the example of
Scotland's prosperity after her union with her southern neighbor,
or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and unrelated
sections each of which could find its natural complement only in
the territory to the south. Here and there an editor or a minor
politician lent some support to his views, but the great mass of
the people strongly condemned the movement. There was to be no
going back to the parting of the ways: the continent north of
Mexico was henceforth to witness two experiments in democracy,
not one unwieldy venture.
Commercial union was a half-way measure which found more favor. A
North American customs union had been supported by such public
men as Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward,
by official investigators such as Taylor, Derby, and Larned, and
by committees of the House of Representatives in 1862, 1876,
1880, and 1884. In Canada it had been endorsed before
Confederation by Isaac Buchanan, the father of the protection
movement, and by Luther Holton and John Young. Now for the first
time it became a practical question. Erastus Wiman, a Canadian
who had found fortune in the United States, began in 1887 a
vigorous campaign in its favor both in Congress and among the
Canadian public.
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