It had happened because it could not have happened otherwise, though
neither President Taft nor Premier Laurier, neither the editor of the
_Globe_ nor the free-trade Governor-General seemed to have the faintest
idea what was happening. Canada rejected reciprocity now for precisely
the same reason that Uncle Sam had rejected reciprocity ten years
before--because Uncle Sam had no quid pro quo, no equivalent in values
to offer, which Canada wanted badly enough to make trade concessions.
Said Canada: you have exhausted your own lumber; you want our lumber;
pay for it. You want it so badly that you will ultimately put lumber
on the free list without any concession from us. Meanwhile, for us to
remove the tariff would simply lead to our lumber going across the line
to be manufactured. It would build up your mills instead of ours. The
higher you keep the tariff against our lumber the better pleased we'll
be; for you will have to build more and more mills on our side of the
line. We are even prepared to put an export duty on logs to compel you
to keep on building mills on our side of the line. This was the
argument that swayed and won the vote in British Columbia and Quebec.
A similar argument as to wheat and meat swayed the prairie provinces
and Ontario.

From Montreal to Vancouver there is hardly a hamlet that has not some
American industry, packing house, lumber mill, flour mill, elevator,
machine shop, motor factory, which operates on the Canadian side of the
border because the tariff wall compels it to do so. These industries
have doubled and trebled the populations of cities like Montreal,
Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Moose Jaw. Would removal of
the tariff bring more industries to these cities or move them south of
the border? The cities voted almost to a man against reciprocity.

Allied with the cities were the great transportation systems running