Whether there was any chance of insidious sapping was precisely what the country was too indifferent to discover.

Indifferent, apathetic, self-centred--until whenever, down the wind, across the Atlantic, came the faint far music of the call to arms.

Then the old dog of war that has his kennel in every man rose and shook himself, and presently there would be a baying! The sense of kinship, lying too deep for the touch of ordinary circumstance, quickened to that; and in a moment "we" were fighting, "we" had lost or won.
Apart, however, from the extraordinary, the politics of Elgin's daily absorption were those of the town, the Province, the Dominion.

Centres of small circumference yield a quick swing; the concern of the average intelligent Englishman as to the consolidation of his country's interests in the Yangtse Valley would be a languid manifestation beside that of an Elgin elector in the chances of an appropriation for a new court house.

The single mind is the most fervid: Elgin had few distractions from the question of the court house or the branch line to Clayfield.