The first to
bring the question within the field of practical politics was A.
T. Galt, but when attempt after attempt in 1864 to organize a
Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, it was George
Brown who proposed that the party leaders should join hands in
devising some form of federation. Macdonald had hitherto been a
stout opponent of all change but, once converted, he threw
himself into the struggle, with energy. He never appeared to
better advantage than in the negotiations of the next few years,
steering the ship of Confederation through the perilous shoals of
personal and sectional jealousies. Few had a harder or a more
important task than Cartier's-reconciling Canada East to a
project under which it would be swamped, in the proposed federal
House, by the representatives of four or five English-speaking
provinces. McDougall, a Canada West Reformer, shared with Brown
the credit for awakening Canadians to the value of the Far West
and to the need of including it in their plans of expansion.
D'Arcy McGee, more than any other, fired the imagination of the
people with glowing pictures of the greatness and the limitless
possibilities of the new nation. Charles Tupper, the head of a
Nova Scotia Conservative Ministry which had overthrown the old
tribune, Joseph Howe, had the hardest and seemingly most hopeless
task of all; for his province appeared to be content with its
separate existence and was inflamed against union by Howe's
eloquent opposition; but to Tupper a hard fight was as the breath
of his nostrils.
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