r be retained. Three of the places so vacated
were given {65} to Uniacke, Howe, and a third Liberal, and it was agreed
that other Liberals should be brought into the Executive Council as
vacancies occurred.

This account gives but a poor idea of the excitement in Halifax during
these years. In so small a community, where every one knew every one
else, personal, social, and political questions became hopelessly
intertwined. The fighting was bitter. 'Forced into a cleft stick, there
was nothing left for us but to break it,' was Howe's pithy way of putting
the case. Naturally enough, the stick objected to being broken. And as
in every war, for one man killed in battle five or six die from other
causes connected with the war--bad boots, bad food, bad rum, wet clothes,
the trenches for beds, hospital fever, and such like--so the open
opposition of debate was the least that Howe had to fear. That, as one
of the finest peasantry in the world said of Donnybrook, 'was enjoyment.'
Howe was once asked by an old sportsman, with whom he had gone fishing
for salmon, how he liked that sport. 'Pretty well,' was the answer;
'but, after all, it's not half so exciting as a fortnight's debate in the
Legislature, and a doubt as to the division.' The personal {66} slanders
in private circles--and he could not afford to be wholly indifferent to
them; the misrepresentation not only of motives, but of the actual
objects sought to be attained, which circulate from mouth to mouth till
they become the established 'they say' of society; those ceaseless petty
annoyances and meannesses of persecution which Thackeray declares only
women are capable of inflicting; these were showered about and on him
like a rain of small-shot, and they _do_ gall, no matter how smilingly a
man may bear himself. After all, these people did as most of us would
probably have done. They were taught, and they believed easily, that the
printer Howe was bad, that he spoke evil of dignitaries, that he was a
red republican, and a great many other things equally low. The
dignitaries could not control themselves when they had to refer to him;
to take him down to the end of a wharf and blow him away from a cannon's
mouth into space was the only thing that would satisfy their ideas of the
fitness of things. Their women, if they saw him passing along the
street, would run from the windows shrieking as if he were a monster
whose look was pollution. Their sons talked of ho