milies a
tendency to ape the military classes and to despise business. The
private soldiers and non-commissioned officers, with little to do in
the piping times of peace, took to the dissipations of the garrison
town. Drunkenness was common, though not more so than in the England
of that day. 'I ask you,' said Howe in his first great speech, 'if
ever you knew a town of the size and respectability of Halifax where
the peace was worse preserved? Scarcely a night passes that there are
not cries of murder in the upper streets; scarcely a day that there are
not two or three fights upon the wharves.'

Yet along with the drink and the snobbishness went much of finer grain.
Many of the British officers brought traditions and standards of social
life and of culture sometimes lacking in the Canada of to-day. At the
dinner-tables of Halifax in the early nineteenth {10} century, when the
merchant aristocracy dined the officers, the standard of manners was
often high and the range of the conversation wide.

From the rest of British North America Nova Scotia was cut off by
hundreds of miles of tumbled, lake-studded rock and hill. Its
intercourse with the outer world was wholly by sea. The larger loyalty
was to England across the Atlantic. It was by sea that Halifax traded
with St John and Boston and Portland, which were a hundred times better
known in Nova Scotia than were Montreal and Toronto. The staple trade
of the merchants was with the West Indies, to which they sent fish and
coal and lumber, receiving in return sugar and rum and molasses. Most
of this sea-borne commerce centred at Halifax, rather to the detriment
of the rest of the province, for from Halifax inland the ways were
rough and difficult. But gradually the other coast towns won their
privileges and became ports of entry. At Pictou, especially, the
industry of building wooden ships grew up, which, until knocked on the
head by the use of iron and steel, made Nova Scotian industry known on
every sea, and gave her in the fifties a larger tonnage than all the
other British colonies combined.

[1] Chisholm, _Speeches and Letters_, vol. ii, p. 177.

[2] See _The War with the United States_, chap. v.

{11}

CHAPTER II

BIRTH AND TRAINING

Howe was born on the 13th of December 1804, in an old-fashioned cottage
on the steep hill that rises up from the city side of the Northwest Arm,
a beautiful inlet of the sea stealing up from the entrance of t