ays. Meanwhile, by the use of
railways the United States altered her whole economic life and outlook.
In 1830 she had twenty-three miles of railway, five years later over a
thousand, and by 1840 twenty-eight hundred miles; and thereafter till
1860 she almost doubled her mileage every five years.

{92}

In the meantime Canada lagged behind, though in no other country were
the steel bands eventually to play so important a part in creating
national unity. The vision of Lord Durham first saw what the railway
might do for the unification of British North America. 'The formation
of a railroad from Halifax to Quebec,' he wrote in 1839, 'would
entirely alter some of the distinguishing characteristics of the
Canadas.' Even before this, young Joseph Howe had seen what the
steam-engine might do for his native province, and in 1835 he had
advocated, in a series of articles in the _Nova Scotian_, a railway
from Halifax to Windsor. Judge Haliburton was an early convert; and in
1837 he makes 'Sam Slick' harp again and again on the necessity of
railways. 'A railroad from Halifax to the Bay of Fundy' is the burden
of many of Sam's conversations, and its advantages are urged in his
most racy dialect. But the world laughed at Haliburton's jokes and
neglected his wisdom. Though in 1844 the British government directed
the survey of a military road to unite Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and
Quebec, and though in 1846 the three provinces joined to pay the
expenses of such a survey, which was completed in 1848, British {93}
North America was for the ten years which followed Lord Durham's Report
too busy assimilating his remedy of Responsible Government to have much
energy left for practical affairs. But in 1848, along with the triumph
of the Reformers alike in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia,
railways succeeded Responsible Government as the burning political
question, and to no man did their nation-building power appeal with
greater force than to Howe.

Already he had witnessed one proof of the power of steam. In 1838, in
company with Haliburton, he was on his way to England on the _Tyrian_,
one of the old ten-gun brigs which carried the mails, slow and
uncomfortable at the best, unseaworthy death-traps in a storm. As she
lay rolling in a flat calm with flapping sails, a few hundred miles
from England, a smear appeared on the western horizon. The smear grew
to a smudge, the smudge to a shape, and soon there steamed up