President Taft's
reference to the "light and imperceptible bond uniting the
Dominion with the mother country" and his "parting of the ways"
speech received sinister interpretations. Speaker Champ Clark's
announcement that he was in favor of the agreement because he
hoped "to see the day when the American flag will float over
every square foot of the British North American possessions" was
worth tens of thousands of votes. The anti-reciprocity press of
Canada seized upon these utterances, magnified them, and
sometimes, it was charged, inspired or invented them. Every
American crossroads politician who found a useful peroration in a
vision of the Stars and Stripes floating from Panama to the North
Pole was represented as a statesman of national power voicing a
universal sentiment. The action of the Hearst papers in sending
pro-reciprocity editions into the border cities of Canada made
many votes--but not for reciprocity. The Canadian public proved
that it was unable to suffer fools gladly. It was vain to argue
that all men of weight in the United States had come to
understand and to respect Canada's independent ambitions; that in
any event it was not what the United States thought but what
Canada thought that mattered; or that the Canadian farmer who
sold a bushel of good wheat to a United States miller no more
sold his loyalty with it than a Kipling selling a volume of verse
or a Canadian financier selling a block of stock in the same
market.
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