the champion of the essentially Conservative
policy of protection.

But the most notable example of the truth of Holton's words and the
soundness of his advice was Joseph Howe. Howe was in Nova Scotia "the
foremost defender of the rights of people, the foremost champion of
the privileges of free parliaments." He had opposed the inclusion of
Nova Scotia on the solid ground that it was accomplished by arbitrary
means. At length he bowed to the inevitable. In ceasing to encourage a
useless and dangerous agitation he stood on patriotic ground. But in
an evil hour he was persuaded to seal his submission by joining the
Macdonald government, and thenceforth his influence was at an end. His
biographer says that Howe's four years in Sir John Macdonald's cabinet
are the least glorious of his whole career. "Howe had been accustomed
all his life to lead and control events. He found himself a member of
a government of which Sir John Macdonald was the supreme head, and of
a cast of mind totally different from his own. Sir John Macdonald was
a shrewd political manager, an opportunist whose unfailing judgment
led him unerringly to pursue the course most likely to succeed each
hour, each day, each year. Howe had the genius of a bold Reformer, a
courageous and creative type of mind, who thought in continents,
dreamed dreams and conceived great ideas. Sir John Macdonald busied
himself with what concerned the immediate interests of the hour in
which he was then living, and yet Sir John Macdonald was a leader who
permitted no insubordination. Sir Georges Cartier, a man not to be
named in the same breath with Howe as a statesman, was, nevertheless,
a thousand times of more moment and concern with his band of Bleu
followers in the House of Commons, than a dozen Howes, and the
consequence is that we find for four years the great old man playing
second fiddle to his inferiors, and cutting a far from heroic figure
in the arena."[18] What Holton said by way of warning to Brown was
realized in the case of Howe. He was "the noblest victim of them all."

From the point of view of Liberalism and of his influence as a public
man, Brown did not leave the ministry a moment too soon; and there is
much to be said in favour of Mackenzie's view that he ought to have
refused to enter the coalition at all, and confined himself to giving
his general support to confederation. By this means he would not have
been responsible for the methods by which the new co