Howe was a man lavishly gifted, one of the most effective orators America has produced, fearing no man and no task however great, filled with a vitality, a humor, a broad sympathy for his fellows that gave him the blind obedience of thousands of followers and the glowing friendship of countless firesides.There are still old men in Nova Scotia whose proudest memory is that they once held Howe's horse or ran on an errand for a look from his kingly eye.
Howe took up the fight in earnest in 1835.The western demand for responsible government pointed the way, and Howe became, with Baldwin, its most trenchant advocate.In spite of the determined opposition of the sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his successor, Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham and whom Howe threatened to "hire a black man to horse-whip," the reformers won.In 1848 the first responsible Cabinet in Nova Scotia came to power.
In New Brunswick the transition to responsible government came gradually and without dramatic incidents or brilliant figures on either side.Lemuel Wilmot, and later Charles Fisher, led the reform ranks, gradually securing for the Assembly control of all revenues, abolishing religious inequalities, and effecting some reform in the Executive Council, until at last in 1855 the crowning demand was tardily conceded.
From the Great Lakes to the Atlantic the political fight was won, and men turned with relief to the tasks which strife and faction had hindered.Self-government meant progressive government.With organized Cabinets coordinating and controlling their policy the provinces went ahead much faster than when Governor and Assembly stood at daggers drawn.The forties and especially the fifties were years of rapid and sound development in all the provinces, and especially in Canada West.Settlers poured in, the scattered clearings; widened until one joined the next, and pioneer hardships gave way to substantial, if crude, prosperity.
Education, notably under the vigorous leadership of Egerton Ryerson in Canada West, received more adequate attention.Banks grew and with them all commercial facilities increased.
The distinctive feature of this period of Canadian development, however, was the growth of canals and railroads.The forties were the time of canal building and rebuilding all along the lakes and the St.Lawrence to salt water.Canada spent millions on what were wonderful works for their day, in the hope that the St.
Lawrence would become the channel for the trade of all the growing western States bordering on the Great Lakes.Scarcely were these waterway improvements completed when it was realized they had been made largely in vain.The railway had come and was outrivaling the canal.If Canadian ports and channels were even to hold their own, they must take heed of the enterprise of all the cities along the Atlantic coast of the United States, which were promoting railroads to the interior in a vigorous rivalry for the trade of the Golden West.Here was a challenge which must be taken up.The fifties became the first great railway era of Canada.In 1850 there were only sixty-six miles of railway in all the provinces; ten years later there were over two thousand.
Nearly all the roads were aided by provincial or municipal bonus or guarantee.Chief among the lines was the Grand Trunk, which ran from the Detroit border to Riviere du Loup on the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and which, though it halted at that eastern terminus in the magnificent project of connecting with the railways of the Maritime Provinces, was nevertheless at that time the longest road in the world operating under single control.
The railways brought with them a new speculative fever, a more complex financial structure, a business politics which shaded into open corruption, and a closer touch with the outside world.
The general substitution of steam for sail on the Atlantic during this period aided further in lessening the isolation of what had been backwoods provinces and in bringing them into closer relation with the rest of the world.
It was in closer relations with the United States that this emergence from isolation chiefly manifested itself.In the generation that followed the War of 1812 intercourse with the United States was discouraged and was remarkably insignificant.
Official policy and the memories of 1783 and 1812 alike built up a wall along the southern border.The spirit of Downing Street was shown in the instructions given to Lord Bathurst, immediately after the close of the war, to leave the territory between Montreal and Lake Champlain in a state of nature, making no further grants of land and letting the few roads which had been begun fall into decay thus a barrier of forest wilderness would ward off republican contagion.This Chinese policy of putting up a wall of separation proved impossible to carry through, but in less extreme ways this attitude of aloofness marked the course of the Government all through the days of oversea authority.
The friction aroused by repeated boundary disputes prevented friendly relations between Canada and the United States.With unconscious irony the framers of the Peace of 1783 had prefaced their long outline of the boundaries of the United States by expressing their intention "that all disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented." So vague, however, were the terms of the treaty and so untrustworthy were the maps of the day that ultimately almost every clause in the boundary section gave rise to dispute.
As settlement rolled westward one section of the boundary after another came in question.Beginning in the east, the line between New Brunswick and New England was to be formed by the St.Croix River.There had been a St.Croix in Champlain's time and a St.
