aughtily wrote back to Molesworth
his opinion of the appointment of Hincks was not the man to commend
himself to an official superior. His very merits closed the door
against him. Government departments usually prefer to let sleeping
dogs lie, to be content with honest administration along existing
lines, and to distrust innovation. To bring a new idea into a
government department is little less dangerous than to bring a live
mouse into a sewing circle. A government department wishes for honest
and able men; but the kind of ability it {129} desires is the ability
which will run in harness, an unoriginative industry, a mind plastic to
the will of its superiors. The Colonial Office had no fancy for a
turbulent, great-hearted, idealistic Howe, with views on Imperial
consolidation, who avowedly wanted office as a means of influencing the
British public, and if possible of entrance into the Imperial
parliament. Colonial secretaries were little likely to choose as their
assistant the man who had taught Lord John Russell his business, who
had first forced Lord Grey to do violence to his cherished convictions,
and later on had accused his Lordship of lack of courtesy, if not of
honesty.

Moreover, the Colonial Office of the day was, as a rule, in the control
of men who thought the Empire was big enough, if not too big. Honestly
doing their duty in the station to which it had pleased God to call
them, they yet, most of them, had a half-formed thought that the
natural end for a colony was independence, and had no mind for Imperial
consolidation.

Howe knew all this; he knew that to them he was only a colonial, and
Nova Scotia only a detail; he knew that all his services counted for
less in their eyes than did the claims of {130} some 'sumph' whose
father or uncle could influence a vote on a division. He knew that for
the English statesman of the day, as for the Nova Scotian, charity
began at home. Unfortunately, his knowledge did not turn him to the
idea of building up a great Canada wherein a man could find
satisfaction for his utmost ambition; his larger loyalty had ever been
to England. It was eastwards and not westwards that the Nova Scotian
of his day turned for a career.

A man in this mood, with no job big enough to occupy his mind, full of
an almost open contempt for his Nova Scotian colleagues, was a very
doubtful asset to a government. Yet he could not be dispensed with,
for in or out of the provincial Ex