Hon. Joseph Howe, Lieut.-governor of Nova Scotia: In Memoriam

“This great statesman, had he been born in the United States would have been at least Vice President; had he lived in England, he would have occupied a place beside John Bright in the affections of the British people. But he was born and lived in Nova Scotia; he ruled in the councils of his Province; he became a minister of the Dominion; and he came home to die the Governor of his native land.”

Griffin, Martin J. (Martin Joseph), 1847-1921. Hon. Joseph Howe, Lieut.-governor of Nova Scotia: In Memoriam. [S.l.: s.n.], 1873. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t41r7565m

Speech in favor of repeal, January 13th, 1868

“Let me say in conclusion that I have not instigated these meetings. Every action taken in Nova Scotia will in some quarters be attributed to me, and we will be told that the feeling is the result of my organized agitation. I had scarcely got home to Dartmouth when I got an invitation to attend the meeting there. This meeting sprung from the simultaneous feeling of the community, and it would be a great mistake to suppose that that feeling, in all its depth and strength, originates in the intellectual action of one man. If I had been drowned on my passage from England, the electoral returns would hardly have been reduced by a single seat; if I were to die tomorrow the people of Nova Scotia would go on with steady, steadfast roll of thought in this highly intellectual struggle for freedom.”

Howe, Joseph. Annand, William. Chisholm, Joseph Andrew. “The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe” Halifax, Canada: The Chronicle publishing company, 1909. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b724784?urlappend=%3Bseq=553

Speech on Election, November 27 1843

“Within the last six years, during all which time these wiseacres have been declaring that we were all going to the dogs, Halifax has grown one-third and Dartmouth has nearly doubled in size… Thirty miles of level main road have been made in the western part of the township… Turning to the east; its condition when I first visited it in 1837 was this; for fifty miles there was neither roads, bridges, magistrates nor schools. Now there are six schools dotting the shore, where formerly there was not one; magistrates have been appointed, and while the Great Eastern Road has been carried nearly to the bounds of our county, the shore settlements are becoming one after another closely connected by means of roads and bridges.”

Howe, Joseph. Annand, William. Chisholm, Joseph Andrew. “The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe” Halifax, Canada: The Chronicle publishing company, 1909. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t87h1hh71?urlappend=%3Bseq=467

Speech on Canadian affairs, April 14 1838

“The man who resides in Dartmouth complains that he has but one vote, while the man at this side of the harbor (Halifax) has two. An attempt has been made to rearrange the representation, but the attempt failed. We had not the courage or the impartiality to follow out a better system, and to equalize the elective privileges…”

Howe, Joseph. Annand, William. Chisholm, Joseph Andrew. “The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe” Halifax, Canada: The Chronicle publishing company, 1909. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t87h1hh71?urlappend=%3Bseq=210

Speech at Dartmouth, May 22 1867

howe-edited

In opposing the British North America Act… (Joseph Howe) always urged that it was not acceptable to the people of Nova Scotia. As an election was soon to be held, to make good his statement Mr. Howe felt that he must organize his forces, and demonstrate beyond dispute that the Province of Nova Scotia was overwhelmingly opposed to the union. He returned early in May, and on May 22nd delivered at Dartmouth the following speech, in which he betrays no loss of his old-time warmth and vigour:

MEN OF DARTMOUTH —

Never, since the [Mi’kmaq] came down the Shubenacadie Lakes in 1750, burnt the houses of the early settlers, and scalped or carried them captives to the woods, have the people upon this harbour been called upon to face circumstances so serious as those which confront them now. We may truly say, in the language of Burke, that “the high roads are broken up and the waters are out,” and that everything around us is in a state of chaos and uncertainty. A year ago Nova Scotia presented the aspect of a self-governed community, loyal to a man, attached to their institutions, cheerful, prosperous and contented. You could look back upon the past with pride, on the present with confidence, and on the future with hope.

Now all this has been changed. We have been entrapped into a revolution. You look into each other’s faces and ask, What is to come next? You grasp each other’s hands as though in the presence of sudden danger. You are a self-governed and independent community no longer. The institutions founded by your fathers, and strengthened and consolidated by your own exertions, have been overthrown. Your revenues are to be swept beyond your control. You are henceforward to be governed by strangers, and your hearts are wrung by the reflection that this has not been done by the strong hand of open violence, but by the treachery and connivance of those whom you trusted, and by whom you have been betrayed.

The [Mi’kmaq] who scalped your forefathers were open enemies, and had good reason for what they did. They were fighting for their country, which they loved, as we have loved it in these latter years. It was a wilderness. There was perhaps not a square mile of cultivation, or a road or a bridge anywhere. But it was their home, and what God in His bounty had given them they defended like brave and true men. They fought the old pioneers of our civilization for a hundred and thirty years, and during all that time they were true to each other and to their country, wilderness though it was. There is no record or tradition of treachery or betrayal of trust among these [Mi’kmaq] to parallel that of which you complain.

Let us, in imagination, do them the injustice they do not deserve, and assume that six of their young men went over and sold them to the Milicetes of New Brunswick or to the Penobscots of Maine. What would have happened? Would the old men, on their return, have folded them to their bosoms, or the young braves have trusted them again? No,—the tomahawk and the fire would have been their reward, and the duty of honour and good faith would have been illustrated by a terrible example. The race is mouldering away, but there is no stain of treason on its traditions. Even in its day of decadence and humiliation it challenges respect, and when the last of the [Mi’kmaq] bows his head in his solitary camp and resigns his soul to his Creator, he may look back with pride upon the past, and thank the “Great Spirit” that there was not a Tupper or a Henry, an Archibald or a McCully in his tribe.

Look again at that dreary and uncertain hundred and thirty years which preceded the foundation of Halifax, which Beamish Murdoch (whose book it always gives me pleasure to recommend) so carefully delineates, and you will find that even among the earlier explorers and occupants of our western counties, fitful and uncertain as were their fortunes, there were fidelity and honour. When Halifax and Dartmouth were founded, when there were but a few thousand men upon this harbour, living within palisades and defended by block-houses—when an impenetrable wilderness lay behind them, and the woods were full of [Mi’kmaq] and of French, we hear of no treachery, of no betrayal of trust.

The “forefathers of our hamlets” were true to each other. They toiled in the belief that they were founding a noble Province that their posterity would govern. The loyalists, who came in great numbers during the revolutionary war, cherished the same belief, and never dreamed that the Province they were strengthening by their intelligence and industry was to be wrested from their descendants and governed by Canadians. The Scotch emigrants who flowed into our eastern counties came, attracted by a name they loved, to govern themselves, and transmit the country untrammelled to their descendants. The Irish, fleeing from a land that had been swindled out of its legislature, fondly believed that here they would find the freedom and the self-dependence they had sighed for at home. For ninety years all these industrial, intellectual and social elements, fusing into an active and high-spirited community, were led and guided by able and patriotic men, now no more.

In fancy I can see them ranged around me in a noble historic gallery—Colonel Barclay and Isaac Wilkins, Sampson Salter Blowers, Foster Hutchinson, and many others. Was there one among them all who would have sold his country? Coming down to a later period, we find men of whom we are not ashamed. We are sometimes told that small countries produce small men, but John Young, Robie, Fairbanks, Bliss, Doyle, Huntington, Uniacke, Bell, in breadth of view, brilliancy and knowledge were the equals of the best that Canada ever produced. Which of these men would have sold Nova Scotia, or delivered her over, bound hand and foot, without the consent of her people to the government of strangers? There is not one whose picture would not start from the wall, whose bones would not rattle in the grave, at the very suspicion.

Sir, there is one name, that of S. G. W. Archibald, that among this fine fraternity is invested with a rare lustre in comparison with the recent achievement of one who has earned unenviable notoriety. When the rights and powers of our Parliament were menaced he defended them, and even though the immediate matter in dispute was but 4d. a gallon upon brandy, like the ship-money of old, it involved a principle, and Archibald defended the rights of the House, and the independent action in all matters of revenue and supply of the people of Nova Scotia. Gratefully is the act remembered, and now that we have seen all our revenues and the united power of taxation transferred to strangers, is it surprising that we should wish that the person who has perpetrated this outrage should have found another name?

The old men who sit around me, and the men of middle age who hear my voice, know that thirty years ago we engaged in a series of struggles which the growth of population, wealth and intelligence rendered inevitable. For what did we contend? Chiefly for the right of self-government. We won it from Downing Street after many a manly struggle, and we exercised and never abused it for a quarter of a century. Where is it now? Gone from us, and certain persons in Canada are now to exercise over us powers more arbitrary and excessive than any the Colonial Secretaries ever claimed. Our Executive and Legislative Councillors were formerly selected in Downing Street. For more than twenty years we have appointed them ourselves. But the right has been bartered away by those who have betrayed us, and now we must be content with those our Canadian masters give. The batch already announced shows the principles which are to govern the selection.

For many years the Colonial Secretary dispensed our casual and territorial revenues. The sum rarely exceeded £12,000 sterling, but the money was ours, and yielding at last to common sense and rational argument, our claims were allowed. But what do we see now? Almost all our revenues—not twelve thousand but hundreds of thousands—are to be swept away and handed over to the custody and the administration of strangers.

The old men here remember when we had no control over our trade, and when Halifax was the only free port. By slow degrees we pressed for a better system, till, under the enlightened commercial policy of England, we were left untrammelled to levy what duties we pleased and to regulate our trade. Its marvellous development under our independent action astonishes ourselves, and is the wonder of strangers.

We have fifty seaports carrying on foreign trade. Our shipyards are full of life and our flag floats on every sea. All this is changed: we can regulate our own trade no longer. We must submit to the dictation of those who live above the tide, and who will know little of and care less for our interests or our experience.

The right of self-taxation, the power of the purse, is in every country the true security for freedom. We had it. It is gone, and the Canadians have been invested by this precious batch of worthies, who are now seeking your suffrages, with the right to strip us “by any and every mode or system of taxation.”

We struggled for years for the control of our Post Office. At that time rates were high, the system contracted; offices had only been established in the shire towns and in the more populous settlements. We gained the control, the rates were lowered and rendered uniform over the Provinces, newspapers were carried free, offices were established in all the thriving settlements and way offices on every road, but now all this comes to an end. Our Post Offices are to be regulated by a distant authority. Every post-master and every way office keeper is to be appointed and controlled by the Canadians.

Since the necessity for a better organization of the militia became apparent, our young men have shown a laudable spirit of emulation and have volunteered cheerfully, formed naval brigades, and shown a desire to acquire discipline and the use of arms. I have viewed these efforts with special interest. There is no period in the history of England when the great body of the people were better fed, better treated, or enjoyed more of the substantial comforts of life, than when every man was trained to the use of arms, and had his long-bow or his cross-bow in his house.

The rifle is the modern weapon, and our people have not been slow to learn the use of it. Organized by their own Government, commanded by their friends and neighbours, 50,000 men have been embodied and partially drilled for self-defence. But now strangers are to control this force—to appoint the officers and to direct its movements; and while our own shores may be undefended, the artillery company that trains upon the hills before us may be ordered away to any point of the Canadian frontier.

By the precious instrument by which we are hereafter to be bound, the Canadians are to fix the “salaries” of our principal public officers. We are to pay, but they can fix the amount, and who doubts but that our money will be squandered to reward the traitors who have betrayed us? Our “navigation and shipping” pass from our control, and the Canadians, who have not one ship to our three, are already boasting that they are the third maritime power in the world. Our “sea-coast and inland fisheries” are no longer ours. The shore fisheries have been handed over to the Yankees, and the Canadians can sell or lease tomorrow the fisheries of the Margaree, the Musquodoboit or the La Have.

Our “currency,” also, is to be regulated by the Canadians, and how they will regulate it we shrewdly suspect. Many of us remember when Nova Scotia was flooded with irresponsible paper, and have not forgotten the commercial crisis that ensued. In one summer thousands of people fled from the country, half the shops in Water Street, Halifax, were closed, and the grass almost grew in the Market Square. The paper was driven in. The banks were restricted to five-pound notes. All paper, under severe penalties, was made convertible. British coins were adopted as the standard of value, and silver has been ever since paid from hand to hand in all the smaller transactions of life.

For a quarter of a century we have had free trade in banking, and the soundest currency in the world. Last spring Mr. Galt could not meet the obligations of Canada, and he could only borrow money at ruinous rates of interest. He seized upon the circulation, and partially adopted the greenback system of the United States. The country is now flooded with paper; only, if I am rightly informed, convertible in two places—Toronto and Montreal. The system will soon be extended to Nova Scotia, and the country will presently be flooded with “shin-plasters,” and the sound specie currency we now use will be driven out.

Our “savings banks” are also to be handed over. Hitherto the confidence of the people in these banks has been universal. We had the security of our own Government, watched by our own vigilance, and controlled by our own votes, for the sacred care of deposits. What are we to have now? Nobody knows, but we do know that the savings of the poor and the industrious are to be handed over to the Canadians. They also are to regulate the interest of money. The usury laws have never been repealed in Nova Scotia, and yet capital could always be commanded here at six, and often at five per cent. In Canada the rate of interest ranges from eight to ten per cent, and is often much higher. With confederation will come these higher rates of interest, grinding the faces of the poor.

But it is said, why should we complain? we are still to manage our local affairs. I have shown you that self-government, in all that gives dignity and – security to a free state, is to be swept away. The Canadians are to appoint our governors, judges and senators. They are to “tax us by any and every mode” and spend the money. They are to regulate our trade, control our Post Offices, command the militia, fix the salaries, do what they like with our shipping and navigation, with our sea-coast and river fisheries, regulate the currency and the rate of interest, and seize upon our savings banks.

What remains? Listen, and be comforted. You are to have the privilege of “imposing direct taxation, within the Province, in order to the raising of revenue for Provincial purposes.” Why do you not go down on your knees and be thankful for this crowning mercy when fifty per cent has been added to your ad valorem duties, and the money has been all swept away to dig canals or fortify Montreal. You are to be kindly permitted to keep up your spirits and internal improvements by direct taxation.

Who does not remember, some years ago, when I proposed to pledge the public revenues of the Province to build our railroads, how Tupper went screaming all over the Province that we should be ruined by the expenditure, and that “direct taxation” would be the result. He threw me out of my seat in Cumberland by this and other unprincipled war-cries. Well, the roads have been built, and not only were we never compelled to resort to direct taxation, but so great has been the prosperity resulting from those public works that, with the lowest tariff in the world, we have trebled our revenue in ten years, and with a hundred and fifty miles of railroad completed, and nearly as much more under contract, we have had an overflowing treasury, and money enough to meet all our obligations, without having been compelled, like the Canadians, to borrow money at eight per cent, and to manufacture greenbacks.

But if we had been compelled to pay direct taxes for a few years to create a railroad system that by-and-by would be self-sustaining, and that would have been a great blessing in the meantime, the object would have been worth the sacrifice. But we never paid a farthing. What then? The falsehood did its work. Tupper won the seat, and now, after giving our railroads away, and all our general revenues besides, the doctor, after being rejected by Halifax, is trying to make the people of Cumberland believe that to pay “direct taxes” for all sorts of services is a pleasant and profitable pastime. Cumberland may believe and trust him again, but if it does, the people are not so shrewd or so patriotic as I think they are.

But listen, you have another great privilege. What do you think it is? You are allowed “to borrow money.” But will anybody lend it? Most people find that they can borrow money easiest when they do not want it, but where is it to be got? The general government, who can tax you “by any and every mode,” and override your legislation as they please, have also power to borrow. If I know anything of the men who now rule the roost in Canada, they will screw every dollar out of you that you are able to pay, and borrow while there is a pound to be raised at home or abroad. Thus fleeced, and with the credit of the Dominion thus exhausted, who will lend you a sixpence should you happen to want it? Nobody who is not a fool. There is not a delegate among the lot who would lend £100 upon such security.



But you have other great privileges. Listen again. You are generously permitted to maintain “the poor,” and to provide for your “hospitals, prisons and lunatic asylums.” We have it on divine authority that the poor “will be always with us,” and come what may we must provide for them. What I fear is that, under confederation, the number will be largely increased, and that when the country is taxed and drained of its circulation, the rich will be poorer and the industrious classes severely straitened. The lunatic asylum of course we must keep up, because Archibald may want it by-and-by to put Tupper and Henry into at the close of the elections.



Keep cool, my friends. This precious instrument confers upon you other high powers and privileges. You are permitted to establish local courts, and to “fine and imprison” each other. And this brings me to the key to this whole “mystery of iniquity.” Local courts you may establish. The Supreme Court is to be transferred to the general government, which is to appoint the judges and fix the salaries. Our judges now receive £700 or £800 currency per annum. The judges in Canada get £1000 or £1250 currency. The delegation which represented Nova Scotia in Canada and England was composed of five lawyers and a doctor. What the doctor is to get we may see by-and-by, but the five lawyers expect to be judges. John A. Macdonald knew this very well, and when he opened his confederation mouse-trap he did not bait it with toasted cheese. Judgeships, with these high salaries, was the bait that he dangled before their noses. They were caught, and though they hated each other, and had spoken a good deal of severe truth of each other before they went to Quebec, the bait produced a marvellous effect upon them, and, like a happy family, they have lived in brotherly love ever since, wagging their tails just whenever Mr. Macdonald told them.



But this bait was intended to have effect outside the mere delegation—to influence judges and lawyers in all the provinces. The confederates tell us that in this Province all the judges and lawyers are in favour of this scheme. If it were so, we should perhaps not be much surprised. All the carpenters would be in favour of it if you could convince them that their wages would be doubled. Let us hope that this assertion is but a scandal.

The bar, certainly, is not all in favour of the scheme. Many high-spirited men in the profession loathe the very name of confederation. As respects the judges, whatever may be their opinions, let us hope that they have never expressed them. Among the other inestimable blessings which we have had in Nova Scotia has been a pure administration of justice—a spotless ermine, worn by men above suspicion of political bias or corruption. Let us hope that this distinction may be ours while our old constitution lasts. “Shadows, clouds and darkness” rest upon the future, and nobody can tell what we are to have next.

Hitherto we have been a self-governed and independent community, our allegiance to the Queen, who rarely vetoed a law, being the only restraint upon our action. We appointed every officer but the Governor. How were the 1867 high powers exercised? Less than a century and a quarter ago, the moose and the bear roamed unmolested where we stand. Within that time the country has been cleared—society organized. The Province has been intersected with free roads—the streams have been bridged—the coasts lighted— the people educated, and all the modern facilities afforded by cheap postage, telegraphs, and railroads were rapidly being brought to every man’s door, and the growth of our mercantile marine evinced the enterprise and indomitable spirit of the people. A few years since there were eleven “captain cards” upon the Noel shore.

Some time ago I went into a house in the township of Yarmouth. There was a frame hanging over the mantelpiece with seven photographs in it. “Who are these?” I asked, and the matron replied, smiling, “These are my seven sailor boys.” “But these are not boys, they are stout powerful men, Mrs. Hatfield.” “Yes,” said the mother, with the faintest possible exhibition of maternal pride, “they all command fine ships, and have all been round Cape Horn.” It is thus that our country grew and throve while we governed it ourselves, and the spirit of adventure and of self-reliance was admirable. But now, “with bated breath and whispering humbleness,” we are told to acknowledge our masters, and, if we wish to ensure their favour, we must elect the very scamps by whom we have been betrayed and sold.



But we are told that we ought to be reconciled to all this because we are to have the Intercolonial Railroad, and because, financially, the delegates have made so good a bargain. If you will bear with me a few moments I will dissipate this delusion. I am speaking from memory, and my figures may not be strictly accurate. But in the main they will be found correct, and the argument based upon them is irresistible.

When I went into the Legislature in 1837 our revenue was about £60,000. It only doubled in seventeen years, before we commenced building our railroads. In 1854 we passed our railroad laws, and in 1855 Tupper went screaming all over Cumberland, prophesying ruin and decay. In ten years since then our revenues have trebled, and last year amounted to £400,000. We have built the road to Truro, the road to Windsor, the extension to Pictou; and before this precious bargain and sale of all our resources was consummated we had the Northern road to New Brunswick, all of the Intercolonial within our borders, and the road to Annapolis under contract.

We had money enough to pay for all these roads without being under any compliment to the Canadians or the British Government either; and in ten years more, without financial embarrassment, could have extended our system to Yarmouth on the one side, and to Sydney on the other. At this moment it was—with my railroad policy so successful—the country, that Tupper swore I had ruined, so prosperous—the treasury, which he declared was milked dry, overflowing year by year, under the tariff we bequeathed to him, and our debentures two or three per cent above the bonds of Canada—that we were sold like sheep. This was the moment for these delegates to step in and trade us away, our rights and revenues, to Canada. God help us, and enable us “to possess our souls in patience.” No such deed as this was ever done or attempted where death was not the penalty.



I cannot help smiling when I hear Tupper crowing about the railroads he has built. He ought to be ashamed of vain boasting. We all know, and he knows, that had his warning voice been heeded, there never would have been a mile of railroad built in Nova Scotia up to this hour. The roads to Windsor and to Truro were built upon the policy inaugurated by myself, and with the money borrowed by me in England. What had he to do with it? Just this— that the Government having changed, he and his colleagues paid away about £40,000 of your money to a parcel of contractors who set up irregular claims. All the roads made since have been made on my policy of pledging the public credit to make them, which Tupper declared would be ruinous. There has been, however, an important difference in the mode of dealing with contracts and expending the money, which ought to be held up to indignant reprobation.



When I was at the head of the Railway Board I was surrounded by six business men, an accountant, and an engineer. Every mile of road was thrown open to competition by tender and contract. When tenders were sent in they were placed in custody of the accountant till the time expired, and the whole board assembled. I never looked at one of them till they were opened in presence of all the commissioners, the accountant, and engineer. The lowest tender, if the party produced good security, took the contract, without reference to politics, to country, or to creed. Look at the new system inaugurated by Dr. Tupper. Take the Pictou line as an illustration. A number of our own people tendered for the work. If kindly treated, some of them might have pulled through. If they did not, their bondsmen were liable. By a system of dealing, instead of the work being put up to tender again, the whole was handed over to the engineer by private bargain, a system most unfair to the whole people, and open to suspicion of gross favouritism and corruption. Instead of offering the northern and western lines to fair competition, the Government took powers to hand them over, by private bargain, to whomever they chose to select. I do not say, because I cannot prove, that any of the members of the Government were sleeping partners, or profited by these contracts. But I do say that the system was most perilous to the public interests, and open to grave objections. We pray to be “kept out of temptation,” but these gentlemen, with profitable contracts to dispose of, amounting to nearly a million and a half of money, exposed themselves to temptations hard to resist, and laid themselves open to suspicions widely entertained. I left the Railway Board as poor as I went into it. I bought or built no property then or since. I hope those who succeeded to the administration have left with hands as clean.



Let me turn your attention, now, to the bargain that has been made with Canada. We give them the roads already completed, which have cost nearly a million and a half. We give them the roads under contract, which may cost another million. We give them revenue enough to cover the interest upon these roads, till they pay, when they will get them for nothing, and have the revenue besides. Our whole revenue now amounts to £400,000. It has trebled in ten years. If it only doubles in the next ten we will have £800,000. By that time our old roads will pay, and the new ones yield half the interest. Out of this sum we are to get back of our own money £133,000, a sum utterly inadequate to provide for Provincial services now, and by that time deplorably insufficient. We can only provide for those services by direct taxation. The Canadians get all the rest.

Hitherto I have reasoned upon a ten per cent. tariff, which would have provided for all our wants, and given a fund for railway extension to the extremities of the Province, east and west. But we know that under confederation our tariff will be raised to fifteen per cent. If the revenue is collected, taking our Customs duties at $1,231,902, the additional taxation will take out of our pockets $500,000 the very first year. The interest on the £3,000,000 required for the Intercolonial road is £120,000 sterling. The road will take four years to construct. The Canadians will only pay interest as the work goes on, yet from the start they will take out of our pockets by increased duties, to say nothing of the general revenues surrendered, £100,000 sterling, a sum nearly sufficient to pay the interest on the whole three millions. This is the profitable bargain they have made, and they have the audacity to suppose that Nova Scotians are such idiots that they can cover up the transaction with every species of falsehood and mystification. They shall not do this. It shall be presented to the people everywhere in its naked deformity and injustice, and when it is they will pronounce universal condemnation. You have been told that Mr. Annand, Mr. McDonald, and I opposed the Intercolonial Railroad. Why, if the bargain had been a good one, we would have flung the road to the winds to save the independence of the Province, but being what it is, a fraud upon the revenues and an insult to the common sense of Nova Scotia, we did our best to defeat it.



But confederation will bring with it other blessings. Stamp duties, hitherto unknown, will soon be imposed, and toll-bars will become ornaments of the scenery. We have but two toll bridges in the Province, and all our roads are free. In Canada you can hardly travel five miles without being stopped by a toll-bar, and compelled to pay for the use of the road. Our newspapers now go free, but they will soon be taxed as they are in Canada. For all these mercies should we not be thankful to the delegates? Yes, as thankful as men are for the plague or the smallpox.

But we are told when we complain of this fraudulent conveyance of our independence—of this reckless sacrifice of our dearest interests, that we are disloyal—that we are annexationists, Fenians, and dangerous persons. Are we indeed?



A year ago there was no annexationist in Nova Scotia. If there are any now, we have to thank those who have overthrown our institutions, and treated the population with contempt. This old cry of disloyalty does not terrify me. It has been raised by some interested faction at every crisis of our Provincial history. I met it at the outset of my public life, and trampled the accusation under my feet in the old trial with the magistrates of Halifax. I met it again at the outbreak of the Canadian rebellion, and put the enemy to shame by the publication of my letter to Chapman. The records are here, and he who runs may read.

[Holding up a volume of speeches.] Surrounded by the élite of Massachusetts, all the Yankees eminent in station and distinguished by talent, I have vindicated the institutions and upheld the honour of Great Britain. You know—these wretched slanderers know—how at Detroit, before the commercial representatives of the Provinces and of the Northern States, I won the respect of our neighbours by the triumphant vindication of British interests; and won what, perhaps, I valued as much, the thanks of my Sovereign, conveyed to me by the Secretary of State. But Dr. Tupper accuses me of disloyalty, does he, and sets his newspapers, subsidized with public plunder, to asperse better men than himself?



Let me contrast his conduct with my own. During the Crimean war our army was decimated by the great battles of the Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman. Surrounded by hordes of Russians, and suffering for supplies, there was some risk that they might be driven into the sea. Reinforcements were urgently required, and a Foreign Enlistment Act was passed. To assist in carrying out that Act I risked my life for two months in the United States, surrounded by Russian agents, American sympathisers, and Fenians. Mr. Gibson, now in this room, was in New York at the time, and knew the state of feeling, and urged me to quit the service and not risk imprisonment or personal violence. I persevered, rarely sleeping twice in the same bed till recalled; and this I did for England in her hour of peril, and never received a pound for my services, or asked one.”

Now, what was Dr. Tupper doing at this time? He was scouring the county of Cumberland while I was absent on the service of the Crown, meanly endeavouring to deprive me of my seat. He slandered me in every part of the county—he invented stories that I was imprisoned and would not be back. I only got back a few days before the election, too late for any canvass or efficient organization, and was defeated, of course. In this dishonourable mode he won the seat he now holds, and certainly illustrated his devotion to his Sovereign after a mode that ought to be remembered. At a later period, in 1862, when, foreseeing the dangers which have since threatened these Provinces, my Government revived the militia law and increased the annual grant for defence, did not this very loyal gentleman endeavour to reduce the Governor’s salary, to deprive him of the vote for a secretary, and to strike out $8000 of the grant for the militia upon the ground that the Province was so poor that it could not afford the expense?



I pass by this “retrenchment scheme” as utterly beneath contempt. I pass by the wretched jobs by which his administration has been distinguished – from its commencement to its close. Let me waste a few words on the cry that “we ought to send the best men”—by which, of course, these precious delegates mean themselves. The best men of this lot, bad is the best. Now the best men to send are not scheming lawyers, who would dig up and sell their fathers’ bones for money or preferment, but honest men in whom the people of this country have entire confidence. Dr. Tupper has already chosen his twelve senators, and now he wants to be allowed to choose the people’s representatives. Why should he not? You were too stupid to pass an opinion upon confederation. Are you sure that you have sense enough to choose a representative?

The “best men”!—let us see how he has chosen. In the first place he has taken six senators from one county, leaving eleven counties entirely unrepresented. Then he has taken three men who were open and avowed anti-confederates; who ratted, sold themselves, and were purchased by the distinction. A friend came in and told me last spring that he was afraid Bill was being tampered with, as he saw Tupper taking him up to Government House that morning. I discredited the story, because I did not believe that the Queen’s representative would degrade his office by canvassing and tampering with members of the House. I think so still. No doubt the visit was one of mere form, but Caleb’s name appears in the list of Ottawa senators, and who doubts how his sudden conversion was effected? Compare him with McHeffy, who is in gentlemanly manners, intelligence and sturdy independence, out of sight his superior. Yet the best man is left behind because he would not sell his country. Who does not remember Miller denouncing the confederation scheme on the platform in Temperance Hall, and there and everywhere declaring that it ought to be sent to the hustings. But he was a convert, and the price must be paid, even though Mather Almon, who in experience and weight of character was his superior in every quality required for a legislator, should be left behind.



Of the candidates who have presented themselves for the representation of this county on the other side, it is enough to say that they are on that side, and are not the men for Galway. I would vote against my own brother if he had a hand in these transactions, or if he attempted to justify the mode in which the people of Nova Scotia have been treated. The very life and soul of any country are honour and good faith. We can never hold up our heads till we stamp out treachery, as we would the rinderpest if it came here. We would not let a plague spread among our cattle, and we must not allow our people to be contaminated with the example of these delegates. Such treason as theirs, in other countries, would earn for them the halter or axe. We may not even elevate them to the dignity of tar and feathers, but we can at least leave them on the stools of repentance to become wiser and better men.



Of the people’s candidates I need say but little. They are known to you all, as industrious, honest, business men, of shrewdness and intelligence. Mr. Cochrane and Mr. Power are universally respected by the body to which they belong, and enjoy the confidence of the community. Mr. Jones and Mr. Northup are men to whom you can safely entrust your interests at home and abroad. Mr. Balcom I have known for twenty years. I have slept beneath his roof, and know that in his domestic relations and in his commercial activity he is a fitting representative of the sturdy class of men who are enlivening the sea-coast by their industry. None of these men care for public distinctions. They would retire tomorrow, if by so doing they could serve their country. They can serve her best by fighting her battles out, and I hope to see the whole five triumphantly returned.

Howe, Joseph. Annand, William. Chisholm, Joseph Andrew. “The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe” Halifax, Canada: The Chronicle publishing company, 1909. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007688708

Speech on Elective Councils (Senate)

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On moving the eleventh resolution, on the 3rd of March (1837), Mr. Howe made a speech that is worth preserving, for various reasons. Those who defended the old system of government assumed, first, that the institutions of the United States had failed to secure liberty and happiness, and that by yielding responsible government, republican institutions would be at once introduced. Mr. Howe combated both these arguments. While he did justice to our neighbours, and ascribed to the practical working of their purely elective institutions the great prosperity and freedom which they enjoyed, he showed that responsible government was not republicanism, but a purely British mode of conducting public affairs, which British Americans might claim without any impeachment of their loyalty:

“In rising to move the last resolution, while I congratulate the House on having got so nearly through the series, I must also thank them for the patient attention with which I have been favoured, and which, as a very young member, I had no right to expect I feel myself relieved from a weight of responsibility by the sanction that has been given, after grave deliberation, to so many of my opinions. Where gentlemen have differed with me I feel they have exercised an undoubted right; and the address, whenever it may be framed, will speak not the language of any individual, but of a large majority of the representatives of the people. In bringing under review the last, but by no means the least important, of these resolutions, I must beg of the members to discharge from their minds all needless horror of innovation, all undue prejudice in favour of the mere framework, rather than the spirit, of established institutions. I trust that gentlemen will be disposed to examine the change which it demands, with reference to its probable utility, not by its inapplicability to the parent state. In pressing it on the attention of the House, I should have felt much less disposed to occupy time, had it not been for the eloquent and ingenious speech delivered on a former day by the learned member from Cumberland, and which was so well calculated to arouse prejudices in many minds against the elective principle. That gentleman drew a vivid contrast between the institutions of America and those of the mother country ; and while he did but justice to the latter, the former were held up to ridicule, as being based upon unsubstantial theory, and incapable of securing life, liberty, and property when reduced to practice. He is opposed to this resolution, because, judging from the elective principle in the United States, he believes that if an elective Council were created here, it would be followed by annual Parliaments, and the election by the people of our judges and governors. That one violent change would be followed by another, produced by an insatiable spirit of excitement and innovation, until this Province was brought to the same deplorable condition to which our neighbours are reduced in the dis- tempered imagination of my honourable and learned friend.

Sir, I trust that those who hear me will be disposed to ask themselves, not what exists in England, under circumstances very different from ours not what exists in republican America, created out of a state of things which is not likely to be forced on us but what is required by the Province of Nova Scotia, under the circumstances in which we are placed; what form should her institutions assume, in order, by preserving the responsibility of all branches of the government to the Commons, to secure her prosperity and advancement. But, sir, when I hear it asserted in this Assembly that there is nothing practical in the institutions of our neighbours that they are based on mere speculation that beneath their shade neither life, liberty, nor property are secure a sense of justice of what is due to the absent would compel me to say something even in an enemy’s defence. Sir, when the learned gentleman thus asperses the institutions of our neighbours, when he tells us that there is nothing practical in republican America, I point to that great nation, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Bay of Fundy, and I ask him, excepting the British Isles, to show me where, upon the wide surface of the globe, within the same extent of territory, an equal amount of freedom, prosperity and happiness are enjoyed? Nothing practical! When I see a people who numbered but three millions and a half at the time of the Revolution who owed then seventy-five million dollars and who, though they purchased Florida with five millions, and Louisiana with fifteen, and owed one hundred and twenty-three million dollars at the close of the last war, are now not only free of debt, but have an over-flowing treasury, the fertilizing streams from which, rolling through every state in that vast Union, give life and energy to every species of internal improvement I ask my learned friend, is there nothing practical in all this ? When I see fifteen millions of people governed by the aid of six thousand troops less by nine thousand than are necessary to keep the peace in Ireland, scarcely one-third more than are stationed in the colonies shall I be told that there is nothing practical in the government under which they live? When I survey their industry, their enterprise, their resources, their commerce whitening every sea, their factories, propelled by a thousand streams, their agriculture, with its cattle on ten thousand hills, their forty noble rivers flowing to the ocean, covered with steamboats crowded with human beings again, I ask, shall it be said that even the republican institutions of America have produced no practical result? When I behold, upon the great lakes scarcely rivaled by the Caspian and the Baltic animated scenes of inland traffic, when I look to her five hundred banks, with their two hundred millions of capital, her extended lines of railroad and canal, her splendid packets, glancing like birds athwart the Atlantic, her noble penitentiaries, her excellent hotels, her fifty colleges, her admirable common schools, I cannot but feel that even if such dreadful evils as these were to come upon us from making our Council elective, we ought not to be deterred from asking for a change. And when I think of her acute diplomacy, her able Presidents, from Washington to Jackson, her orators, from Henry and Quincy to Wirt and Everett and Webster, her philosophers, from Franklin to Fulton, her patriots, from Warren to Clinton, her poets (and sweet ones they are), her Bryants, and Percivals, and Sigourneys, I am bound to assert that the great nation which the learned gentleman maligned presents an aspect of political prosperity and grandeur, of moral sublimity and high intellectual and social cultivation, that ought to have made him ashamed of the unseemly picture which he drew and I tell him boldly, that these are practical results that should challenge his admiration rather than excite his contempt.

But, forsooth, all these are to go for nothing, because there are mobs in America; because the people of Charlestown burnt a convent, and some of the rioters were permitted to escape. Did my learned friend never hear of Lord George Gordon’s mob, that took lawless possession of the very capital of that mighty empire to which he is so proud to belong? Does he not know that an infuriated multitude rioted for days uncontrolled in the city of Bristol? Would he like to have these instances of temporary misrule, of the unbridled sway of human passion, brought forward to prove that there is nothing practical in British institutions ; that there is no security for life and property in England? They would prove as little in the one case as in the other. Mobs will spring up occasionally in towns; but, if they sometimes disgrace those of America, who ever hears of them in her agricultural districts? Yet, in Britain, not only do we hear of combinations to destroy machinery in the cities, but the burning of stacks in the country; and therefore it is, that when I am cautioned against preferring unjust imputations against the body in the other end of the building, who have their defenders here, I advise them to look at home, and not to send abroad unfounded charges against a neighbouring nation, on the presumption that no one will have the manliness to say a word in its defence. I might turn gentlemen’s attention to scenes which have occurred at home, under the shadow of that constitution and those laws which they consider perfect, ten thousand times more disgraceful than any that have occurred in America. I might point to “red Rathcormac,” and the other scenes of tithe butchery in Ireland; and while you sickened at the blood flowing from the wounds inflicted by a brutal soldiery, I might show you the avaricious priests and the besotted Tories those who drink from the pure stream of political wisdom, described on a former day by the learned gentleman from Windsor busily goading them on. But as these would prove nothing against the general working of British institutions, the vast amount of protection and happiness they secure, neither should those of our neighbours be assailed upon equally untenable grounds.

But I am told that slavery exists in the United States. It does; and I will admit that if there is a stain upon their escutcheon, a blot upon their fair fame, it is that slavery has been suffered to exist in any part of the Union so long. But, did not slavery exist in the British dominions until within two or three years? And when I am told of the violent proceedings of the Southern planters to protect their own system, I remind my learned friend of the butcheries, and burnings of chapels, in the West India Islands. Slavery is a great curse; and wherever it exists, it will be marked by great evils, arising out of the fears of the oppressor and the struggles of the oppressed. But let us never forget, that while slavery was forced upon the old colonies by the operation of British laws, nine out of the thirteen States that originally formed the federation have wiped away the stain, have emancipated their bondsmen, have broken the shackles of the slave. If, then, I wished to justify this resolution by the practical effects which the elective institutions of America have produced, I feel that, notwithstanding the eloquence of my learned friend, I should be entitled to your support. Upon the facts to which I have referred, and hundreds of others like them, I might confidently ask for a solemn adjudication.

But, thank God, there is no need to look to republican America for examples. Throughout these discussions I have turned, and I seek again to turn, your minds to that great country from which we have all sprung, to which we owe allegiance, and to whose institutions it is my pride to look for models for 1837 imitation. Though, in replying to my learned friend’s misrepresentations, I have but done an act of justice, I ask you to throw aside every argument that can be drawn from republican America, to cast a veil over her institutions and her prosperity, and, looking across the Atlantic, to gather support to the resolution before you from the example of England. I should not have proposed it, I should not stand here today to press it upon your attention, did I not feel that it could commend itself to your minds by the practical working of her institutions. Were you to tell an Englishman that you, the Commons of the country, had no effectual control over the other branches of your government, that here there exists no check which ensures responsibility to the people, what opinion would he form of the degree of freedom you enjoy? Were you to propose that half the House of Lords should be chosen from two family connections, and the other half should be made up of public officers and directors of the Bank of England, he would laugh you to scorn; he would tell you he would not tolerate such an upper branch for a single hour. Sir, it is because I feel that the institutions we have are not English, that they are such as would never be suffered to exist at home, and ought never to be sanctioned by the descendants of Britons in the colonies, that I desire a change; and, because it proposes a remedy, because it holds out a prospect of reformation, that I ask the House, not rashly to adopt, but gravely and calmly to consider, the resolution before them.

I have already said, and I repeat again, that the excellence of the British Constitution is to be found, not in the mere structure of the various branches of the Government, but in that all-pervading responsibility to the people which gives life and vigour to the whole. That Constitution is not a thing held sacred from change, not susceptible of improvement, but a form of government subject to continual revision and renovation, whenever it is found that the great principle of responsibility is in danger. To preserve this principle the prerogatives of the Crown were curtailed ; to preserve this principle the House of Commons was reformed; and even now, a struggle is going on to reduce the power of the Lords. Shall we, then, be blamed for seeking to preserve it, by remodelling our provincial institutions? When gentlemen raise the cry of innovation, I ask if the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was not an innovation if the destruction of the rotten boroughs was not a great constitutional change? And while the Government at home is subjected to constant modifications, required by the increasing intelligence of the people, is it to be said that ours should remain unimproved that the reforming ministers of England will deny to the colonists the right to imitate their own examples f Sir, I have often felt, and now in my heart believe, that if the people of England really understood the questions which often agitate the colonies, if the Government was accurately informed, instead of being, as it constantly is, misled by interested parties on this side the Atlantic, we should rarely have any very irreconcilable differences of opinion. What earthly interest has John Bull in denying his brethren justice?

The argument urged about the denial of an elective Council was partially answered on a former day ; but gentlemen may not be aware that the last motion made by Mr. Roebuck on the subject was withdrawn, under an implied pledge that Government would fairly consider the question. Let gentlemen review the ‘present system of creating the second branch. Can anything be more intolerable? I referred, on a former day, to the old Council of Maine, composed of a single family. The same evil has prevailed to a great extent in every one of which we have any knowledge; they have either been com- posed of such connections, or have been ruled by little combinations, always distasteful and often injurious to the people. How can it be otherwise, while the whole branch is created on the recommendation of one or two individuals in the colonies, more intent on preserving their own influence than fairly distributing the royal favour.” It is a fatal error,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “in the rulers of a country to despise the people; its safety, honour, and strength are best preserved by consulting their wishes and feelings. The Government of Quebec, despising these considerations, has been long engaged in a scuffle with the people, and has thought hard words and hard blows not inconsistent with its dignity. I observe that twenty-one bills were passed by the Lower House of Assembly in 1827, most of them reformatory. Of those twenty-one bills, not one was approved of by the Upper House. Is the Governor responsible for this? I answer he is. The Council is nothing better than the tool of Government. It is not a fair and constitutional check between the popular Assembly and the Governor.” I did not think it necessary to accumulate evidence on this point, or I might have had abundance: indeed I feel that it is painful to intrude even what has been said upon the House, after the long discussions in which we have been engaged. It has been said that elective Councils are a new invention ; but let it be remembered that they existed in some of the old colonies until their charters were withdrawn, and were found to work well. And if the Government would but take an enlarged view of the subject, it would, notwithstanding the national and religious divisions which certainly do present some difficulties, grant an elective Council to Lower Canada, for these plain reasons; a vast majority of the people, and nearly the whole of their representatives, require it. To refuse, is to perpetuate agitation; to grant it, is to try a great experiment for the restoration of peace; and if it be necessary to resort to force, to reconquer the country again, it can be done as well after as before the upper branch is rendered elective.

But, it is said, the Councils would in that case be filled with persons of low estate; with farmers, and mechanics, who know nothing of legislation. Let me upon this point quote the answer which an intelligent American gives to Captain Hall. He says: “From Canada, Captain Hall passes into New York. Delighted with a Governor robbing the public chest (and pleading an otherwise unavoidable subversion of the government as an excuse), and with a Council, composed of the ‘Governor’s creatures,’ negativing every bill from the other House, Captain Hall is of course disgusted with the Legislature of New York, as composed of men ‘who had come to the Legislature straight from the plough, from behind the counter, from chopping down trees, or from the bar,’ wholly unacquainted with public business or the duty of the legislator. But we dislike this eternal drawing of inferences, instead of citing facts. We wish Captain Hall would point out the great practical evils perpetrated by this Legislature, or that he would name a deliberative body in the world that can show more work, better done, than may be shown by this very Legislature of New York. Look at the institutions of that State; her various endowed charities; her penitentiaries, which our traveller describes with great but not exaggerated praise; the rapid colonization of her own wide domain, with a population greater than that which Parliament, at a profuse expense of public money, has been able to rear up in all the British North American dominions; her munificent endowment of her colleges; her princely school fund; her more than imperial works of internal communication. These are the doings of Captain Hall’s wood-choppers and plough-joggers, but not all of them. If there be a government, popular or arbitrary, which, in nearly the same space of time, and with the same command of means, has done more for the advancement of civilization, the arts, and the public welfare and prosperity, we have yet to learn in what part of the world it is to be found.” I give the same kind of answer to my learned friends on the other side. Suppose that a new Council is to be created tomorrow; how is it to be done? Two or three persons furnish lists to the Governor, who sends them to England. Now, this is the power that I would not entrust to any two or three men, however wise or patriotic they may be; yet, if they are the reverse, how incalculable is the mischief produced. But, suppose a member of Council is required for Cape Breton, and by the aid of the elective principle the five gentlemen who now represent the Island are returned; if the Governor is compelled to select one of these, though he may not take the best, he must, at all events, choose one whom the people themselves have pressed upon his notice; one in whom they have confidence, and one who is more likely to be of service than a person whom they never saw. Perhaps he may now find one among them that would be selected; but I know that there are other counties whose representatives would go a begging for a seat in the Council before it was obtained. In nine cases out of ten it will be found that the men most loved and trusted by the people are the last to obtain the confidence of the local government Why should this be? In England, the King himself cannot exclude from his Cabinet commanding talent, backed by the support and confidence of the nation. How often have we seen the British monarchs compelled by the country to place the reins of government in the hands of those from whom they would gladly have been withheld. Can such an instance be quoted in colonial history? No, sir; and therefore it is that I seek for change; that I desire a more responsible system. I acquit the maternal Government; I acquit the people of England of any wish to deny to us the advantage of principles of which they have proved the value. There is something too fair and noble in the structure of the Briton’s mind, to permit him to deny to others the blessings and the forms of freedom: and particularly to those who speak his language, and have sprung directly from his loins. Why should Britons on this side of the Atlantic be denied those checks and guards which are considered so essential at home? There they have indeed a Constitution practically useful. I can participate in the glowing picture which the learned member from Cumberland drew; I can survey with delight the spectacle which England presents to the world. That great country is free; but here, the blessings she enjoys do not exist. I trust, therefore, that this proposition for an elective Council will not be considered so rash and heedless a one as some gentlemen are disposed to imagine. The measure is one that I believe will be satisfactory to the people; and can there be any danger in its adoption? Shall we be more closely united to the mother country if these twelve men are selected by the Colonial Secretary, or somebody for him, than if they are chosen by ourselves?

If it be said that this is too important a change to adopt on the recommendation of an individual, I will read to you the deliberate opinions of the present Master of the Rolls, whose sentiments on this subject, from his talents and high standing, are entitled to respect. In a debate which arose in a former Assembly, Mr. Fairbanks observed, “That on all hands the composition of the Council was acknowledged to be defective; rejecting the principle of election, it would, perhaps, be easy to make additions, but would it be easy to make such as would please the people? A new Governor would, perhaps, come here, and before he has had time to acquaint himself with the situation and the leading men of the country, two or three persons who chanced to get into his confidence would make all the new appointments; was it to be supposed the people would not make better selections themselves? If they could trace the secret history of all the appointments that had been made for years, they would not hesitate to change the mode. The learned Solicitor-General went on to explain how he thought, if the principle of election was not introduced, some advantage might be gained by having a member of the Council to act as member of each county, whether chosen from it or not. If so designated, and if it were understood that they were expected to watch over the interests of particular districts, as members of the Assembly now do, there would be a bond of union between them and the people they were chosen to represent, and much of the narrow and metropolitan character of the present Council would be removed. He differed entirely from the learned member from Cumberland about the propriety of allowing either the Chief-Justice or the Master of the Rolls to remain in either Council. His studies had taught him that the exercise either of legislative or executive powers was incompatible with the due administration of justice. The energies and the intellect of this country had grown beyond the feelings and interests and prejudices of the present Council. He was afraid, however, that merely asking for an addition of six, to be chosen as they were at present, would be nothing at all. He wished that, while they were about it, they should really effect a reform, and not merely an unimportant alteration; and on a subsequent day he remarked, “That to tell him the principle of election was at variance with the Constitution was to tell him what reading and reflection and experience disproved. The Constitution was founded upon this grand principle, that everything must conduce to the good of the people.” These are the opinions of a man who held a Crown office at the time.

In conclusion, I beg you, gentlemen, to look around all the colonies, and ask yourselves, have these selected Councils conduced to the public good? Turn to the resolutions you have passed to-day for proof of their operation here. I regret that upon this question I shall have to encounter the opposition of some that I would fain have carried with me in this measure. As we have stood together on other questions, I shall be sorry if we part on this. They will bear in mind that I am not contending for an ultra and uncontrolled exercise of the elective principle; I seek only such a fair infusion of it as will preserve a constitutional balance of power. Insinuations have been thrown out about a delegation to England. As I said on a former day, I say again, that this is an extreme step which I do not contemplate one only to be taken as a last resort. Those who know me but imperfectly may assert and insinuate that I am anxious to stir up strife, that I have ulterior views that do not now appear. I hope to live down such aspersions. Sir, when I go to England, when I realise that dream of my youth, if I can help it, it shall not be with a budget of grievances in my hand. I shall go to survey the home of my fathers with the veneration it is calculated to inspire; to tread on those spots which the study of her history has made classic ground to me; where Hampden and Sydney struggled for the freedom she enjoys; where her orators and statesmen have thundered in defence of the liberties of mankind. And I trust in God that when that day comes I shall not be compelled to look back with sorrow and degradation to the country I have left behind; that I shall not be forced to confess that though here the British name exists, and her language is preserved, we have but a mockery of British institutions; that when I clasp the hand of an Englishman on the shores of my fatherland, he shall not thrill with the conviction that his descendant is little better than a slave.”

With some modifications, Mr. Howe’s twelve resolutions were passed, the most of them by handsome majorities, and on the 4th of March he moved for a committee to throw them into the form of an Address to the Crown.

Howe, Joseph, 1804-1873, William Annand, and Joseph Andrew Chisholm. “The Speeches And Public Letters of Joseph Howe: (Based Upon Mr. Annand’s Edition of 1858)” New and complete ed., revised and edited by Joseph Andrew Chisholm. Halifax, Canada: The Chronicle publishing company, 1909. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t87h1hh71

“At some hazard of giving offense”

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“It is sometimes said, the mother country has its great charter, its Bill of Rights, and why should we not have a charter, or some such written guarantee for our liberties. Those who reason thus forget that these great securities of Britons are ours also; that we have besides, the whole body of parliamentary precedents accumulated by the practice of the Imperial legislature. We have more; we have our colonial precedents since 1840; the resolutions recorded on the journals of Canada and Nova Scotia, and other authoritative declarations, made with the sanction of the Imperial government, and which cannot be withdrawn.”

Didn’t quite work out like that, Joe.

Howe (1835), Dixon (1920) and McLachlan (1923): Comparative Perspectives on the Legal History of Sedition

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This paper recounts three trials for seditious libel in Nova Scotia, drawing parallels between Joseph Howe’s trial in 1835, F.J. Dixon’s trial in 1920, and J.B. McLachlan’s trial in 1923. Howe’s trial, though acquitted, established him as a folk hero due to his successful self-defense. Dixon, emulating Howe’s defense, was also acquitted, while McLachlan’s trial, marked by government manipulation and interference, resulted in his conviction and imprisonment.

McLachlan’s case, unlike Howe and Dixon’s, exemplifies a miscarriage of justice, orchestrated to suppress the working-class. Despite legal efforts inspired by Howe’s defense, McLachlan’s trial failed to challenge the unjust system. The analysis emphasizes the significance of these trials in Nova Scotia’s legal and political history, showcasing struggles against state oppression and the impact of legal and political maneuvering on outcomes.


“Then there is Howe, who was prosecuted by the corrupt magistrates whom he exposed in his day. By the way, he successfully defended himself, and I hope to perhaps follow his glorious example. He is now proclaimed as Nova Scotia’s noblest son.” — FJ. Dixon, 1920

“When they tried Joseph Howe for sedition, they erected a monument to him in the shadow of the County jail [sic: Province House yard].” — J.B. McLachlan, 1924

“I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I tell you that what happened to Howe will happen to McLachlan.” — J.S. Woodsworth, 1924

In Halifax, in 1835, Joseph Howe, a newspaper proprietor and editor, was tried for seditious libel for publishing the second of two pseudonymous letters critical of local government. In Winnipeg, in 1920, F J. (Fred) Dixon, an independent labour member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, was tried for seditious libel for publishing in the strike bulletin which he briefly edited during the General Strike of 1919, articles critical of the strike’s suppression. In Halifax, in 1923, J.B. McLachlan, communist secretary of United Mine Workers of America District, was tried for seditious libel for having written an official letter critical of the violent actions of the provincial police in Sydney. These three “state trials” document the important historical conflicts out of which they arose, reflect the politico-legal contexts in which they occurred and illustrate the meaning of the “misrule of law” as it developed through the repressive exercise of state power during both the colonial and the national periods.”

“Ironically, the industrial action which led to the prosecution of McLachlan did not originate with the Cape Breton coalminers. In June 1923, Sydney steelworkers struck again for recognition of their union. When mounted provincial police, who had been summoned at the behest of the British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco), made a bloody charge against the Sunday evening crowd on Victoria Road in Sydney on July 1, McLachlan, in his capacity as secretary of District 26, authorized a wildcat strike. “This was a fateful decision,” writes David Frank, quoting McLachlan’s official letter (sea Appendix 1), one that brought down the wrath first of the provincial government and then of the international union. For his call to arms McLachlan was charged with seditious libel and subsequently sentenced to two years in jail. For his violation of international union polity in calling the sympathetic strike he was removed from office by John L. Lewis [president] of the United Mine Workers. McLachlan was prosecuted because he was the leader of an illegal sympathetic strike. The seditious libel for which he was convicted was an official letter signed and ordered circulated by McLachlan in his capacity as secretary of District 26 of the UMWA.”

“The parallels to Howe rest with Fred Dixon, who was acquitted after defending himself in a great forensic address purposely modelled on Howe’s. McLachlan, on the other hand, was dissuaded from defending himself, did not testify on his own behalf and was perfunctorily convicted. “[C]ivil libertarians, then and since,” according to Howe’s biographer, Murray Beck, “have excoriated the [McLachlan] trial for its alleged unfairness.” Yet, Beck too refuses to acknowledge any parallels between Howe and McLachlan. He forbears describing Howe as “seditious libel,” a technical term he uses in relation to McLachlan, and does not confront the suspicion that chief counsel for the defence, Gordon Sidney Harrington K.C., (in David Frank’s words) “deliberately exploited the case to promote the fortunes of the Conservative Party and prove the iniquity of the Liberal government.” Beck also fails to identify “McLachlan’s lawyers” as two politically ambitious Conservative barristers — the other was Halifax labour lawyer, John Archibald Walker — both of whom were elected to the Assembly in the Conservative sweep of 1925 and appointed to the cabinet. Harrington, a former mayor of Glace Bay, which was also home town to McLachlan and headquarters of District 26 of the UMWA, was counsel to the union.”

“McLachlan — unlike Howe and Dixon — was a gross miscarriage of justice, in which the accused was “framed”, charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned for having published a seditious libel when in neither the legal nor the ordinary sense of the word had he published anything at all. Before the “fixed” publication, the Crown did not have even a prima facie case against the accused. The obvious motive for the government’s conniving at newspaper publication was not only to lay the basis for the charge of seditious libel, but also to give some reason for McLachlan’s incarceration and transportation to Halifax, which Attorney-General O’Hearn was later to characterize as “a neutral [safe?] county.” The very possibility of contesting the legal repression – by achieving a counter-hegemonic success à la Howe and Dixon — was precluded by the careful manner in which the government stage-managed the proceedings against McLachlan from beginning to end. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the McLachlan prosecution was the result of a conspiracy involving the Red-baiting provincial Liberal government, the management of Besco and the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle — the only Halifax newspaper in which McLachlan’s official letter was published. The District circular appeared verbatim on the front page of the edition of 6 July 1923 — a mere two days after it was issued — under the incendiary sub-headline, “McLachlan’s War Whoop.” Publication in Halifax had been arranged by Andrew Merkel, Maritime superintendent of The Canadian Press, whose vice-president, George Frederick Pearson, was also hereditary president of the Chronicle Publishing Company Limited. A lawyer and highly influential political insider — Beck describes him as “long a mastermind of the Liberal Party” — G. Fred Pearson was also Besco’s solicitor. Though McLachlan’s conviction for publication in Halifax was eventually struck down on appeal, at the time of the trial even the strongest legal defence would have been ineffectual against a government partial to Besco, a mass-circulation morning newspaper complicitously toeing the government’s line, an “anti-Bolshevik” Attorney-General prosecuting in person, a manipulable jury altogether unacquainted with labour-management relations in industrial Cape Breton, and an highly interested judge. Presiding over McLachlan was Justice Humphrey Mellish, a corporate lawyer and former solicitor for the Dominion Coal Company — who was elevated to the bench in 1918, so that he could more effectively protect the interests of his former corporate clients. The fact that Mellish’s law firm, Mclnnes Jenks Lovett & Macdonald [now Mclnnes Cooper & Robertson], was in Besco’s pocket — the senior partner, Hector Mclnnes, was a director of the corporation — was sharply emphasized by J.S. Woodsworth MP in House of Commons debate in March 1924, following the announcement of the government’s decision to parole McLachlan. Woodsworth, who toured Nova Scotia in January 1924 at the invitation of the Nova Scotia Workers Defence Committee, enquired “concerning the judges of the supreme court, and… was told that the corporation influence on the bench was so strong that the court is looked upon by labour as a company department.” Charges of seditious libel against Woodsworth, a former editor of Winnipeg’s Strike Bulletin, were indefinitely stayed when Fred Dixon was acquitted of the same charge. Woodsworth read into Hansard the words uttered by Joseph Howe before the jury while introducing his discussion of The Libel Act 1792: It is ninety years since in Nova Scotia a man was tried for sedition. Then a man was haled before the courts and accused of being “a wicked seditious and ill-disposed person, a person of most wicked and malicious temper and disposition.” That man is now regarded as one of Canada’s greatest sons, Joseph Howe. But he was able to say at that time, in connection with his trial: “And here I may be permitted to thank heaven and our ancestors, that I do not stand before a corrupt and venal court and a packed and predetermined jury.’,

Joseph Howe’s trial for seditious libel, eighty-eight years before McLachlan’s, has never been excoriated for unfairness by civil libertarians or anyone else, because Howe was tried by an impartial, disinterested judge — Chief Justice Brenton Halliburton — and acquitted by an enlightened jury. Indeed the canonical, politico-biographical interpretation of Howe does not consider the possibility that this too was a trial for sedition, lest it be compared with the trial of the politically persona non grata working-class radical, J.B. McLachlan. Repeated ad nauseam is the canard that Howe was tried for “criminal” libel, suggesting that the dual character of defamation as crime and tort could disprove the self-evident truth that Howe too was tried for seditious libel. Indeed the very success of Howe’s self-defence accounts for this misunderstanding of his trial, which resulted in an acquittal despite the fact that the truth of a libel was not pleadable except as a defence to an action, and that neither truth nor public benefit could be pleaded in justification of a seditious libel.”

“Joseph Howe — it needs to be said — was neither arrested nor jailed, though he expected to be and arranged for bail to be posted by his friends, while McLachlan and Livingstone were not only arrested, transported to Halifax and imprisoned, but were initially denied bail at the instance of the Crown. Nor was Howe’s venue changed from Halifax to Sydney, to be tried by a jury of coalminers, who had as little understanding of abuses in the administration of local government in the District of Halifax as the jury of Halifax petit-bourgeois who convicted McLachlan had of labour relations in industrial Cape Breton. The Crown failed to make its case in Howe and Dixon and would have failed to do so in McLachlan had he too been tried by a jury of his peers. Howe — tried and acquitted by sympathetic friends and neighbours and readers of his reformist newspaper, the Novascotian — was thought by the Halifax bar, who to a man refused his retainer, to be foredoomed. Conversely, McLachlan’s lawyer, seeing in his client a latter-day Howe, was overconfident of victory.”

“In preparing his defence of McLachlan, Harrington, like Dixon, availed himself of The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe, a new and complete edition of which had been produced in 1909 in a commendably bipartisan manner. The publisher was the Halifax Chronicle, the Liberal Party organ founded in 1844 and once edited by Joseph Howe, while the reviser was the prominent Conservative lawyer and municipal politician, Joseph Andrew Chisholm K.C. Chisholm, who in 1916 acceded to a puisne judgeship, played a significant collateral role in the proceedings against McLachlan. In June 1923, he presided at the criminal assizes in Sydney, when, according to Attorney-General O’Hearn, “in the neighbourhood of twenty-odd bills of indictment against strikers for their criminal activities in February 1923, were thrown out” by the grand jury for lack of witnesses willing to testify. Chisholm was also, according to J.S. Woodsworth, one of only two of seven judges of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia who had had no “known relations” with Besco or its constituent operating companies.”

“What mattered were the changes in Canada between 1919 and 1923. By the latter date, sedition law was being used systematically against working-class radicals in general and strike leaders in particular, regardless of their lack of socialist credentials — a tendency strikingly illustrated by the prosecution of Fred Dixon MLA. Not only had new repressive state security laws been introduced, but also the state’s determination to repress working-class radicalism had been renewed since 1919 and the range of potential uses of existing sedition law accordingly broadened. If the significance of Howe for McLachlan relates more to the forensic use of history than to the forensic use of law, then McLachlan is an object lesson in the failure of legal history as legal argument. It is not a question of the uses or sources of law, however, because Howe, as a jury trial resulting in an acquittal did not form a legal precedent. Howe in relation to McLachlan concerns the historical uses of law versus the juridical uses of history, and in either respect depends upon a mutually agreed, authoritative and analytically sound reconstruction of the leading case. When the Crown denied the existence of any previous trials for sedition in Nova Scotia, the defence attempted unsuccessfully to adduce Howe as a precedent.”

“G.S. Harrington, who had never practised in Halifax and was far from being the “noted barrister” of John Mellor’s rose-coloured romance, was facing one of the leading criminal counsel of the Halifax bar in Attorney-General O’Hearn. Harrington nevertheless aimed to achieve, without any help from his client, whom he did not call to testify in his own defence, what Howe and Dixon had achieved by unassisted advocateship. The upshot was that Howe immediately became a “folk hero,” and ultimately a figure of Olympian myth. His trial became the defining moment in the political history of the province. Dixon was overwhelmingly re-elected to the Manitoba legislature in the general election held four months after his acquittal. McLachlan, however, remained a working-class anti-hero, whose trial and unsuccessful appeal, in David Frank’s words, “passed on into the untapped obscurity of legal history.” Scholars of Howe have failed to acknowledge the resemblance of the McLachlan sedition trial to the Howe sedition trial. They seem unaware that seditious libel at common law is sedition not libel, and that Howe was not on trial for defamation, but for a crime against the state. The politically and socially dangerous implication for the historiography is that Howe, the petit-bourgeois “conservative reformer,” would be coloured by association with McLachlan, the working-class radical and Bolshevik pariah. Yet, at the time of his own sedition trial Howe did not consider himself, nor did his friends or enemies consider him to be conservative in any sense of the word. That Howe stood four-square in the English radical whig tradition is clear from a close, impartial reading of the stenographic report of his courtroom address in his own defence.”

“In that sense, J.B. McLachlan no less than Fred Dixon was a legatee of Joseph Howe, as well as the provider of a legacy of working-class political radicalism — and his forerunners were the radical reformers of a century earlier. Excepting only McLachlan, the study of sedition in Nova Scotia has been obfuscated by the “criminal libel” misnomer such that the seditious libel prosecutions of William Wilkie in 1820 and Joseph Howe in 1835 are not seen for what they undoubtedly were: show trials staged by the ruling class to counter the perceived threat to the established order posed by ancillary crimes against the state. Just as Howe implicitly compared himself to the English radicals of the period of extreme Tory reaction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — many of whom were tried and convicted of seditious libel — so the comparison with Howe was advocated by McLachlan’s senior counsel, the Conservative lawyer-politician Harrington. If the radical pamphleteer William Wilkie — tried and convicted of seditious libel in 1820 after an unsuccessful self-defence conducted along the same lines as Howe’s fifteen years later — was a forerunner of Joseph Howe, then Howe was a forerunner of J.B. McLachlan, who assumes a place of honour within the century-old tradition of political protest and trials for sedition in Nova Scotia. McLachlan, writes David Frank, “was a political trial, part of a Canadian tradition we have found it all too easy to forget. These kinds of trials, such as Joseph Howe’s in 1835, had long pitted the forces of change against the forces of continuity.””

“Clearly a line of defence which did not result in a verdict of not guilty was “an ineffectual one”; however, to criticize it as incoherent, as David Frank does, is ex post facto rationalization. Just as scholars of Howe have disposed of some archetypal myths — such as that the verdict established freedom of the press — only to replace them with others, so students of McLachlan fail to recognize that one of the lessons of that case is that criminal law and criminal justice history are not necessarily combinable in the context of legal proceedings. Political trials, however significant they may be in other respects, are not necessarily significant sources of law. Frank, for example, argues that counsel for the defence in McLachlan “probably unreasonably, accepted the argument that truth was no defence in a case of seditious libel.” Harrington’s acceptance of what had long been a settled principle of the common law can hardly be considered unreasonable for a lawyer pleading in a criminal court. Moreover, Harrington’s failure to recognize that one of the lessons of Howe was that the restriction on truth as a defence “could be easily evaded in the process of clarifying the defendant’s intentions” is fully consistent with his argument on appeal that seditious libel law was unaffected by the passage of The Libel Act 1792. There the jury’s right to “find” intention as a matter of fact was explicitly affirmed. The problem with Harrington’s defence was not incoherence but error of law. The Libel Act 1792 was the very statute which enabled Howe to evade this common law restriction on defence pleading in the course of clarifying his innocent intentions.

As John Mellor correctly states, Harrington “had based his whole case on the famous Joseph Howe and his acquittal on a similar charge of seditious libel.” Harrington either did not understand or failed to elucidate the legal justification for Howe’s acquittal. He not only misunderstood the implications of The Libel Act 1792 for sedition law, but also mistook the legal heart of Howe’s defence. Harrington nevertheless believed that he could defend McLachlan in the same manner and with the same success as Howe had defended himself. Despite the fact that McLachlan was not defending himself, and that Howe had called no witnesses, there seemed to Harrington little point in putting the accused in the witness-box, to be exposed to a withering, ideologically perverse cross-examination by the Attorney-General. “It was generally believed,” according to Mellor’s hearsay: that if Harrington had arranged for defence witnesses to give evidence for McLachlan at the trial, he could quite possibly have won an acquittal, but instead, Harrington had based his whole defence on drawing an analogy between the famous Joseph Howe case, which had ended in acquittal, and the McLachlan case with its communist overtones. This is an aspect in which McLachlan and Dixon differ; Dixon was a non-socialist, while McLachlan was a revolutionary socialist who could scarcely have been permitted to speak candidly in his own defence in open court.”

Just as the legal argument from analogy failed to obtain an acquittal for McLachlan, so the argument from legal history has failed to obtain recognition of McLachlan as a case which merits judicial reconsideration. As recently as 1990, the authors of an essay on the historiography and sources for the study of Russell could claim that “[t]he legal history of the Winnipeg General Strike trials has yet to be written.” The same may be said for the legal history of working-class radicalism in Nova Scotia.”

Cahill, Barry. “Howe (1835), Dixon (1920) and McLachlan (1923): Comparative perspectives on the legal history of sedition.” University of New Brunswick Law Journal, vol. 45, 1996, journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/unblj/article/view/29601

Dr. Tupper’s Letter

CONFEDERATION
(To the Editor of the Star).
SIR,-Although I have not yet seen the pamphlet published by Mr. Howe, in opposition to the proposed confederation of the British North American Provinces, you will, I hope, permit me to correct several misstatements of facts into which you have inadvertently been betrayed, by the perusal of Mr. Howe’s brochure, in your article in the “Star” of the 21st inst., upon a question involving the most important consequences, both to British North America and the Parent State.

A scheme of confederation, providing for the Union of the British North American provinces under one Government and Legislature, was arranged at Quebec in 1864, by delegates representing all sections and parties in the Colonies, appointed by the Governor-General and the Lieutenant-Governors of the Provinces. Both Houses of the Parliament of Canada carried by very large majorities an address to Her Majesty the Queen, praying that an Act of the Imperial Parliament might be passed by which the proposed union should be consumated.

The Legislators of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have also authorized the Lieutenant-Governors of those provinces to appoint delegates, clothed with plenary powers, to arrange with delegates from Canada and with Her Majesty’s Government here a plan of union to be submitted to the Imperial Parliament. The co-operation of the Island of Newfoundland and Prince Edward, although desirable, is by no means essential as to render the Union of Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – possessing an area of 400,000 square miles, and a population of nearly four millions under a United Government “a lame and impotent conclusion.”

You will, I think, scarcely regard the statement as accurate that “by extreme pressure on the part of the Executive the Legislatures of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick agreed to send delegates to a conference to be held in London,” when the fact is stated that in New Brunswick an appeal to the electors upon this question resulted in the return of thirty-three members, pledged to support Confederation, while but eight members opposed to that policy could obtain seats in the Legislative Assembly; that in the Legislative Council in that province the Confederation Policy was affirmed by a majority of thirteen to five, and that in Nova Scotia the motion to authorize the appointment of delegates with plenary powers to settle the question of union was carried by a majority of thirty to eighteen and in the Legislative Council by a majority of thirteen to five.

As the leader of the Government of Nova Scotia I can confidently assert that no executive pressure was attempted, and that both branches of the legislature will represent the education, intelligence, property and industry of the colony. The statement that the Hon. Joseph Howe is “a distinguished member of the Legislature of Nova Scotia” is inaccurate. Mr. Howe, as leader of the Government, sustained an overwhelming defeat at the last general election in that Province in 1863. But thirteen members out of a house of fifty-five were returned to support his Government. The constituency to whom he offered his services rejected him by a majority of over five hundred. And Mr. Howe has not since obtained a seat in the Legislature.

The readers of the “star” will be surprised to learn that Mr. Howe denies the right of the Legislature of the colony to change the constitution of the country with the concurrence of the Imperial Government, when they are told that the last act of the Government was to introduce a measure to disenfranchise more than one quarter of the electors who had elected the Parliament in which he was then sitting. You will probably be equally astonished when you are informed that “serious are are the geographical difficulties of a Confederation as put by Mr. Howe,” and “certain to infuse new elements of discord into the already seething chaos of Canadian politics,” as he now asserts, that gentleman, when leader of the Government of Nova Scotia in 1861, proposed to the Legislature a resolution, which was carried unanimously, declaring that “many advantages may be secured by such a union” of the British North American provinces, and authorizing the appointment of delegates to promote that object.

Notwithstanding the inaccuracies in your leader to which I have ventured to call your attention I do not know that I would have troubled you with any remarks but the following passage:-“The intimacy and inclination of the maritime provinces is not towards Canada, but towards Maine and Massachusetts; and though the men of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are proud of their independence they would probably prefer annexation to the United States if it could be peaceably effected to any Confederation scheme”.

Although I am quite ready to admit that a number of interested bankers and political agitators have excited a great deal of prejudice against the proposed Confederation, I am bold to assert that a more unfounded imputation upon the loyalty of the people of the maritime provinces of all classes could not be published than is contained in the paragraph just quoted. That there are individual traitors in the pay and interest of American annexationists, endeavoring to subvert British institutions in the maritime provinces, is quite possible; but that even an insignificant portion of any class of the people could be induced to prefer connection to the United States to a union of British America I most emphatically deny.

The mischievous influence of such a misconception of the sentiments of the British colonists at the present moment cannot be overrated. The annexationists in the United States who are endeavoring to accomplish the acquisition of British America by political means are stimulated by such statements to persevere in the policy which has already caused the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty, while to the same cause may be traced the mad designs of the Fenians upon the British Provinces. Can you then, sir, wonder that I should feel indignant at the publication of an unfounded imputation upon the loyalty of my countrymen, especially when it is calculated to encourage the ravages of invasion and waste the blood and treasure both of British America and the parent State?

Feeling assured that you will willingly give insertion to these corrections of statements calculated to produce very erroneous impressions upon an important question, I remain, sir, your obedient servant,

CHARLES TUPPER
Prime Minister of Nova Scotia
Alexandria Hotel, Sept. 22

The Newfoundlander – Oct 22, 1866https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KHU1AAAAIBAJ&sjid=fiYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5589%2C468061

Dartmouth Business Directory, 1864

dart-business-directory-1856

BUSINESS DIRECTORY FOR DARTMOUTH.
OFFICIALS

Hon. J.W. Johnston, Judge in Equity
Hon. Joseph Howe, Commissioner of Fisheries
Lawrence Hartshorne, City Treasurer
Col. Sinclair, A.G.M.
James H. Thorne, Dep. Prov. Sec. and Chief Clerk

MINISTERS
Rev. John B. Woods, St. Peter’s Church
Rev. O. M. Grindon, English Church

BARRISTERS
J.W. Johnston, Junr, Office, Halifax
Alexander James, Office, Halifax
J. G. Foster, Office, Halifax

PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS
T.B. Des Brisay, M.D., corner of King and Quarrel sts
R.S. Campbell, M.D., {Dealer in Patent Medicines, Paints, Oils, &c.
L.E. Van Buskirk, M.D.
W.H. Weeks, King Street

MERCHANTS
Allan, J.W, Grocer and Dealer in Lumber
Brown, J.C, {General Dealer in Groceries and Liquors, &c.
Bettinsen, J, Groceries and Boarding House
Elliott, J.B., & Co, Dealers in Dry Goods
Elliot, Wm, {Soap and Candle Manufactory, and General Dealer in Groceries and Country Produce
Elliott, J, & Son, {Dealers in all kinds of Building Materials; and. Carpenters and Builders Plans and Estimates furníshed
Farrell, D, Dealer in Groceries and Lumber
Fuller, J.A, {Of the firm of J. B. Eliott & Co., Granville street, Halifax, Dealers in Dry Goods
Hyde, T.A., {General Dealer in Groceries and Country Produce
Mott, J.P., {Manufacturer and Dealer in Soap and Spices
Russell, N., & Co.. Tinsmiths and Stove Dealers
Richards, E, General Grocer
Symonds, W. S., & Co., Dartmouth Iron Foundry
Sterns, Luther, {Dealer in Dry Goods, Boots, Shoes, Clothing, &c.
Silver, W. & C., {Dealers in Dry Goods, Granville street, Halifax
Tapper, J.R., Groceries and Liquor Store
Walker, E.M., {General Dealer in Groceries and Country Produce
Ross, Mrs. C., General Dealer in Groceries, Liquors, &c.

BLACKSMITHS, CARPENTERS, AND WHEELWRIGHTS
Bradey, J., Carpenter
Bell, Charles, Blacksmith at Starr’s Factory
Fultz, F., House Joiner and Carriage Builder
Graham, G., Ship and House Carpenter
Gates, J.M., Carpenter
Innes, R., House Carpenter
Kingston, G.C., Wheelwright and Carriage Builder
Low, James, Ship Carpenter
Murray, H., Wheelwright and Carriage Builder
Ormon, J.R., Carpenter
Readdy, T., House Carpenter
Richard, E., Carpenter
Sawler, W., Wheelwright
Sawler, G.,Wheelwright
Vienow, E., Carpenter
Warner, E., Shipwright
York, Stephen, Coachmaker
Young, F., Shipbuilder and Repairer
Adams, George {Machinist; Machinery made and repaired
Mumford, F. {Manufacturer of Edge and Mining Tools, &c.

BOOT AND SHOEMAKERS
Allan, Frazier, Shoemaker
Gammon, W.A., Shoemaker
Grey, Robert, Shoemaker
Miller, E.H., Shoemaker
Yetter, H., Shoemaker

FARMERS
Bell, G., Farmer
Bissett, Farmer
Bowes, Farmer, Entrance Harbour
Bissett, J.G., Farmer
Beck, C.W., Farmer
Brennan, S.J., Farmer
Bell, Alexander, Farmer
Cooper, James, Farmer
Chittick, S., Farmer
Clifford H., Farmer
Conrod, J., Farmer (Cole Harbor)
Conrod, George, Farmer and Fisherman
Donovan, J, Farmer
Eisner, D., Farmer and Miller
Eisner, E., Farmer and Lumberman
Fisher, T., Farmer
Farquharson, A.J.P., Farmer
Farquharson, J., Farmer
Farquharson, P., Farmer
Gaston, J., Farmer
Green, W., Farmer
Hoskin, J. Farmer
Jones, I.C., Farmer
Kuhn, A., Farmer
Kennedy, P., Farmer
Mott, H.G. “J.P.”, Farmer
Manley, J., Farmer
Morash, H., Farmer
Morash, L., Farmer
McIntosh, W., Farmer
McNab, P., Junr., Farmer
O’Connor, J. Junr., Farmer
Osborne, J, Farmer, Red Head
Ritchie, T., Farmer
Ross, J., Farmer
Settle, R., Farmer
Smith, A.W., Farmer
Short, T., Farmer
Tulloch, A., Farmer
Wilson, J., Farmer
Whynock, B., Farmer and Fisherman
Wright, Henry, Farmer

MISCELLANEOUS
Allen, R.A., {Tanner and Currier, and Dresser of Belting and Lacing
Adams, G., Machinist; Machinery made and repaired
Belcher, C.H., Water Street
Campbell, J.S., Boat Builder
Crosse, Captain , th Regt
Connors, George, Boat Builder
Crichton, G.A.S.
Dickson, R.D., Engineer, Hospital for Insane
Dart, C., Mason
Falconer, D.
Frazer, H.R., Engineer, Marine Railway
Faulkner, R., Machinist and Nailer
Fish, William
Fultz, Mrs. C.R.
Forbes, J., Superintendent at Starr’s Factory
Graham, J.R., Meat Market (Steamboat Hill)
Glendinning, H.W., {Soda Water, Ginger Beer, Lemonade Manufacturer, and Dealer in Ice
Gillard, John, Mason and Builder
Harvey, H.E., Quarrell street
Kimball, D.D, Foreman in Symonds’ Iron Foundry
Keating, W., House Builder
Laidlaw, Peter, Dealer in Ice, Canal road
Mackenzie, G. H., Steamboat Agent
Mott, T., Brickmaker and Dealer in Spices
McKinnea, Shipbuilder
Mumford, F., {Manutacturer of Edge and Mining Tools and General Blacksmith work
Mclnnes, A., Ticket Office Steamboat Company
McBain, J.C. Porto Bello
Major, Mrs. C.
Manning, Captain
Marshall, Mrs. J., Porto Bello House, Lake William
Major, Montague
McGilvrey, J., Montague
McLean, D., Town Clerk
Murray, W., Tinsmith (firm of N. Russell & Co.)
Nowling, E, Innkeeper and Dealer in Liquors
Parker, J., Painter and Glazier
Runt, J, Ballastman
Ross, Mrs, C., General Dealer in Groceries, Liquors, &c.
Rouselle, J.K., Teacher
Teas, W., Teacher
Tufts, Henry, Waterman, Tuft’s Cove
Thickens, George, Montague
Turner, J.W., Tanner
Whitley, J., Butcher
Whidden, J., Sashmaker and Grocer
Warner, R., Employed at the Marine Railway
Western, E.S., Superintendent of Marine Railway
Walker, W. G., Innkeeper, Little Salmon River
Young, George, Shipbuilder

From: Topographical township map of Halifax County, Nova Scotia / from actual surveys made, drawn, & engraved by and under the direction of H.F. Walling. Map of Nova Scotia and adjacent provinces, Creator: Walling, Henry Francis, 1825-1888, Publication Date: 1864, Map Publisher: A.F. Church and Co.

https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/14725/rec/1

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