Kirjahaku

For almost fifty years Joseph Howe was at or near the centre of public affairs, first in Nova Scotia and later in imperial relations and in the earliest years of the new Dominion. He was his province's most articulate spokesman as well as its leading politician and publicist and was pre-eminent in the struggle for responsible government, the introduction of railroads, opposition to Confederation, and in a quixotic advocacy of imperial federation. Drawing on a variety of records including Howe's private papers and the vigourous provincial press of his day, Beck places Howe firmly in the political, social, and intellectual life of colonial Nova Scotia, assessing his contributions to that society and revealing the breadth of both his vision and his influence.

Professor Beck shows how, in Churchillian fashion, the final resolution was preceded by a series of setbacks and disappointments in Howe's public life. These were the result of a bold colonization scheme encompassing an inter-colonial railway between Halifax and Quebec; a quixotic mission of recruitment in the United States for the British armies in the Crimea; the embattled leasdership of an unstable provincial administration in the early 1860s; and the hard-fought campaign to prevent passage of the British North America Act. Disillusioned by the indifference of British politician to his long-standing advocacy of a refurbished British Empire in whose government colonial leaders could share, Howe turned his energies to making the new Canadian federation work. A whole-hearted supporter of Confederation in his later years, Howe displayed an irrepressible vitality that Professor Beck sees as the trademark of the man.