ublic letters, he took advantage of the
opportunity to send presentation copies, with long letters, to Lord
John Russell, Lord Derby, Sir E. B. Lytton, Mr Merivale, the permanent
under-secretary of the Colonial Office, and to several other men of
influence. To the colonial secretary he complained bitterly that 'our
system denies to a colonist, so trained, the distinctions which others
of less experience, with no knowledge of the provinces they are sent to
govern, and intellectually not my superiors, readily obtain.' Lord
Derby was an English gentleman, and he replied in what Howe himself
called 'a very handsome letter,' {127} saying that as he could not
interfere with the patronage of the Colonial Office, he had therefore
left the matter to Sir E. B. Lytton. 'I regret to find by your letter
that you think that you have cause to complain of the conduct of the
Colonial Office, in reference to position in the public service. . . .
I am unable to express any opinion upon the subject, except a very
confident one that Sir E. Lytton cannot have any disposition to
underrate public services, the value of which must be known to all who
within the last twenty years have been connected with the North
American Colonies.'

Howe's hopes were high. 'I suppose they will now do something with or
for me,' he wrote to a friend. But the governorship of British
Columbia was not for him. Nor indeed could it be, richly though he had
deserved that or any other governorship. The chief interest in the new
province was that of the Hudson's Bay Company; for twenty years this
company's interests and those of Great Britain had been protected on
the Pacific by Sir James Douglas, to whom the governorship rightly fell.

In 1859 Howe made a last appeal to the Duke of Newcastle, with a like
result.

{128}

It is a sad spectacle, that of the great man knocking at preferment's
door, and knocking in vain. Howe was a statesman, with his head full
of ideas of Imperial consolidation. His was a great wild heart, deeply
touched indeed with ambition, 'the last infirmity of noble minds,' but
deeply conscious also of great powers, emotional and intellectual.
Small wonder that he raged as he felt that to reach his goal he had to
crawl through so narrow a portal, had to abase himself before
well-meaning mediocrities like Labouchere or Newcastle.

He could not do it. In none of his letters do we find the real tone of
the office-seeker. The man who so h