Thus his threat to appeal from Downing Street to parliament and people had won; but could he win before the people? On the 14th of January he faced a crowded meeting at Southampton, which grew more and more enthusiastic as he went on. Two days later he addressed another open letter to Lord Grey, the result of six weeks' hard labour, during which, he says, 'it seemed to me that I had read a cart-load and written a horse-load.' Three times was it copied before he had it to his satisfaction. The draft was carefully gone over by Lord Grey, who suggested certain excisions and additions. Both of his open letters and his Southampton speech were widely circulated, and attracted great attention. Howe's name was on every lip. His praises were sung by members of both parties in the House of Lords. After some delay, due to a reorganization of the government, on the 10th of March he received a formal letter from Mr Hawes, of which not only Lord Grey and himself but also the Cabinet had already seen and approved the draft, pledging the credit of the British government to the extent of seven million pounds to an intercolonial railway uniting Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Very few conditions were attached. As Howe said on his return to Nova Scotia: 'She virtually says to us by this offer, There are seven millions of sovereigns, at half the price that your neighbours pay in the markets of the world; construct your railways; people your waste lands; organize and improve the boundless territory beneath your feet; learn to rely upon and to defend yourselves, and God speed you in the formation of national character and national institutions.'[1]
What were the arguments by which Howe brought about this great reversal of policy? Though knowing Grey to be opposed to the general principle of public ownership, he began by singing its praises. The best road is the queen's highway. The toll-bar and the turn-pike are disappearing. 'All our roads in Nova Scotia, made by the industry and resources of the people, are free to the people at this hour.' The railway should be built with the same ideal. 'If our government had means sufficient to build railroads and carry the people free, we believe that would be sound policy.' This being impossible, government ownership would at least keep down the rates, and save the people from the private greed which was at the time so manifest in the conduct of English lines.
He then went on to show with a wealth of statistics that Nova Scotia was thoroughly solvent, and that the Imperial guarantee was almost certain never to be called on. This done, he turned gladly to the constitutional side. That the road would pay, he believed; but he advocated it not as a 'paying proposition,' but as a great link of Empire. British North America must be united, and must be given a place in the Empire. At present the colonial is doomed to a colonial existence. 'The North American provinces must,' he wrote to Grey, 'either:
Be incorporated into the Realm of England,
Join the American Confederacy,
Be formed into a nation.
If the first can be accomplished, the last may be postponed indefinitely, or until all parties are prepared for it. If it cannot, Annexation comes as a matter of course. To avert it is the duty of Englishmen, on both sides of the Atlantic.' It rests with Great Britain to say which road British North America is to take. 'The higher paths of ambition, on every hand inviting the ardent spirits of the Union, are closed to us. From equal participation in common right, from fair competition with them in the more elevated duties of government and the distribution of its prizes, our British brethren on the other side as carefully exclude us. The president of the United States is the son of a schoolmaster. There are more than one thousand schoolmasters teaching the rising youth of Nova Scotia with the depressing conviction upon their minds that no very elevated walks of ambition are open either to their pupils or their own children.… Suppose that, having done my best to draw attention to the claims of those I have the honour to represent, I return to them without hope; how long will high-spirited men endure a position in which their loyalty subjects their mines to monopoly, their fisheries to unnatural competition, and in which cold indifference to public improvement or national security is the only response they meet when they make to the Imperial authorities a proposition calculated to keep alive their national enthusiasm, while developing their internal resources?'[2] There is a balance of power in Europe which British diplomacy labours incessantly to maintain. Each possible transfer of a few acres of ground by some petty German princeling is carefully studied by the Foreign Office. Is the creation of a power in North America to balance the United States to be forever considered of no importance? Nova Scotia especially, whose praises he sings with lusty eloquence, has been unfairly treated. As the result of a rebellion which cost the mother country millions, Canada had been granted a large loan. Nova Scotia had kept loyal; had put every man and every dollar in the province at the service of her sister province of New Brunswick, when trouble with the United States over the boundary seemed near. Yet she had received no loan; instead, she had been burdened by the grant to an English company of the monopoly of her coal areas.
Then he turns to the subject of emigration, at the time much in the public eye, and shows how superior is British North America to Australia, then highly spoken of. He paints vividly the heart-rending poverty of the British lower classes, and the fertility of the acres waiting to receive them.
'Whence come Chartism, Socialism, O'Connor land-schemes, and all sorts of theoretic dangers to property, and prescriptions of new modes by which it may be acquired? From this condition of real estate. The great mass of the people in these three kingdoms own no part of the soil, have no bit of land, however small, no homestead for their families to cluster round, no certain provision for their children.
'A new aspect would be given to all the questions which arise out of this condition of property at home, if a wise appropriation were made of the virgin soil of the Empire. Give the Scotchman who has no land a piece of North America, purchased by the blood which stained the tartan on the Plains of Abraham. Let the Irishman or the Englishman whose kindred clubbed their muskets at Bloody Creek, or charged the enemy at Queenston,[3] have a bit of the land their fathers fought for. Let them have at least the option of ownership and occupation, and a bridge to convey them over. Such a policy would be conservative of the rights of property and permanently relieve the people. It would silence agrarian complaint and enlarge the number of proprietors.'[4]