Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

I have been re-reading Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and was amazed by how attractive the description of the corruption and irrationality of small-town Ontario politics at the turn of the last century. The technique for grabbing the rural vote is to have a meal with every single farmer in the surrounding countryside? The overall picture is of an engaged citizenry who actually have generally met their Member of Parliament even though he is described as generally not travelling to the town very often. And how many newspapers? In the pre-blog era, most towns only had one, and that was not nearly as vigorously or openly partisan as the newspapers described in Sunshine Sketches.