In Prince Edward Island the land
question still overshadowed all others. Every proposal for its
settlement was rejected by the influence of the absentee
landlords in England, and the agitation went wearily on.
In Nova Scotia the outstanding figure in the ranks of reform was
Joseph Howe. The son of a Loyalist settler, Howe early took to
his father's work of journalism. At first his sympathies were
with the governing powers, but a controversy with a brother
editor, Jotham Blanchard, a New Hampshire man who found radical
backing among the Scots of Pictou, gave him new light and he soon
threw his whole powers into the struggle on the popular side.
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.
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