nor unmake the ministry. The
more important House was the Council, which consisted of twelve
gentlemen appointed by the king, and holding their offices practically
for life. This body was at once the Upper House of the Legislature,
corresponding to our present Senate, and the Executive or Cabinet. It
was also to a certain extent a judicial body, being the Supreme Court
of Divorce for the province. It sat with closed doors, admitting no
responsibility to the people. Yet no bill could pass but by its
consent. It discharged all the functions of government; all patronage
was vested in it. It might do these things ill; its administration
might be condemned by every one of the representatives of the people;
but its authority remained unaffected.

In this Council sat the heads of departments, as they do in our modern
Cabinet. They were appointed in and by Great Britain, and helped to
control the commercial policy. Another member was the bishop of the
Anglican Church, for the seemly ceremonies and graded orders of clergy
of this body were deemed to be a counterpoise to popular vagaries and
vulgarity. Prior to the American Revolutionary War there had been no
colonial bishopric; {35} three years after its close the first bishop
of Nova Scotia was appointed.

Owing to the favour shown to this Church, education long remained
almost entirely in its hands, and to the political struggle an element
of religious bitterness was added. King's College at Windsor, at first
the only institution of higher learning in the province, was not open
to any person who should 'frequent the Romish mass, or the meeting
houses of Presbyterians, Baptists, or Methodists, or the conventicles
or places of worship of any other dissenters from the Church of
England, or where divine service shall not be performed according to
the liturgy of the Church of England.' It is true that the Church
enjoyed no rights which she did not at the time enjoy in England, and
that King's College was less illiberal than were the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge; but the circumstances were widely different. In
England the Anglicans comprised the bulk of the people, and almost the
whole of the cultivated and leisured classes; in Nova Scotia they were
in the minority. Yet when, in 1820 and again in 1838, an attempt was
made to found Dalhousie College at Halifax on a more liberal basis, the
opposition of {36} the Church of England led to the failure of the
schem