The smaller field within which
the contest was waged gave it a bitter personal touch; but racial
hostility did not enter in, and the British Government proved less
obdurate than in the western conflicts. In both Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick little oligarchies had become entrenched. The Government was
unprogressive, and fees and salaries were high. The Anglican Church had
received privileges galling to other denominations which surpassed it in
numbers. The "powers that were" found a shrewd defender in Haliburton,
who tried to teach his fellow Bluenoses through the homely wit of "Sam
Slick" that they should leave governing to those who had the training,
the capacity, and the leisure it required. 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. 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,