en were awaking to their isolation. There was
not, in the Maritime Provinces, any popular desire for union with the
Canadas or any political crisis compelling drastic remedy, but the
need of union for defense was felt in some quarters, and ambitious
politicians who had mastered their local fields were beginning to sigh
for larger worlds to conquer.

It took the patient and courageous striving of many men to make this
vision of a united country a reality. The roll of the Fathers of
Confederation is a long and honored one. Yet on that roll there are
some outstanding names, the names of men whose services were not merely
devoted but indispensable. 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. In New Brunswick, Leonard
Tilley, a man of less vigor but equal determination, led the struggle
until Confederation was achieved.

It was in June, 1864, that the leaders of the Parliament of Canada
became convinced that federation was the only way out. A coalition