made strenuous efforts to detach Mr. MacNab, Mr. Uniacke and
other Liberals from Mr. Howe, and induce them to enter the government,
but all to no purpose. He now gave up writing letters to the press, and
attacked his opponents in official communications addressed to the
colonial office, which supported him, as it did Lord Metcalfe, under
analogous circumstances. These despatches were laid without delay on
the tables of the houses, to be used far and wide against the
recalcitrant Liberals. Mr. Howe had again renewed his connection with
the press, which he had left on becoming speaker and councillor, and had
become editor of the _Nova Scotian_, and the _Morning Chronicle_, of
which Mr. Annand was the proprietor. In these influential organs of the
Liberal party--papers still in existence--Mr. Howe attacked Lord
Falkland, both in bitter prose and sarcastic verse. All this while the
governor and his council contrived to control the assembly, sometimes by
two or three votes, sometimes by a prorogation when it was necessary to
dispose summarily of a troublesome question. Public opinion began to set
in steadily against the government. The controversy between Lord
Falkland and Mr. Howe reached its climax on the 21st February, 1846,
when a despatch was brought down to the house, referring to the speaker,
Mr. William Young, and his brother, George R. Young, as the associates
of "reckless" and "insolvent" men--the reference being to Mr. Howe and
his immediate political friends. When the despatch had been read, Mr.
Howe became greatly excited, and declared amid much disorder that if
"the infamous system" of libelling respectable colonists in despatches
sent to the colonial office was continued, "without their having any
means of redress ... some colonist would by-and-by, or he was much
mistaken, hire a black fellow to horsewhip a lieutenant-governor."

It was time that this unhappy conflict should end. The imperial
authorities wisely transferred Lord Falkland to Bombay, where he could
do no harm, and appointed Sir John Harvey to the government of Nova
Scotia. Like Lord Elgin in Canada, he was discreetly chosen by the
Reform ministry, as the sequel showed. He was at first in favour of a
coalition government like his predecessors, but he wisely dissolved the
assembly when he found that the leading Liberals positively refused to
go into an alliance with the members of the executive council, or any
other set of men, until the people had