peopled the
beautiful county of Lunenburg. A handful of emigrants from Yorkshire
gave animation to the county of Cumberland. The vale of Colchester has
been made to blossom as the rose by the industry of a few adventurers
from the north of Ireland. Half a century ago a few poor but pious
Lowland Scotsmen penetrated into Pictou. They were followed by a few
hundreds of Highlanders, many of them "evicted" from the Duchess of
Sutherland's estates. Look at Pictou now, with its beautiful river
slopes and fertile mountain settlements, its one hundred schools, its
numerous churches and decent congregations, its productive mines and
thirty thousand inhabitants, living in comfort and abundance. The
picture rises like magic before the eye, and yet every cheerful tint
and feature has been supplied by emigration. At the last election it
was said that two hundred and seventy Frasers voted in that county--all
of them heads of families and proprietors of land. I doubt if as many
of the same name {6} can be found in all Scotland who own real
estate.'[1]

Thus the little settlements gradually expanded into prosperous fishing
and farming communities, on the statistics of whose steadily growing
exports and imports Howe loved to dwell. But they long lacked a common
consciousness, and no man did so much to knit them together as Howe.
Germans of Lunenburg, New Englanders of Annapolis and Cornwallis,
Loyalists of Shelburne, Scottish Presbyterians of Pictou, Scottish
Roman Catholics of Antigonish, French of Tracadie and Cheticamp, and
Irish of Halifax, all learned from him to be Nova Scotians and to 'brag
of their country.' The chief influences making for union were the
growth of roads, the growth of political discussion, and the growth of
newspapers; and to all three Howe contributed. Both as politician and
as editor he toured the province from end to end, walked, drove, or
rode along the country lanes, and in learning to love its every nook
and cranny taught its people their duty to one another and to the
province. In those days when there were few highways, and bridle-paths
were dignified with the name of roads; {7} when the fishermen and
farmers along the coast did their business with Halifax by semi-annual
visits in their boats or smacks; when the postmen carried Her Majesty's
mail to Annapolis in a queer little gig that could accommodate one
passenger; when the mail to Pictou and the Gulf of St Lawrence was
stowed away in on