[bourinot] builders OF NOVA SCOTIA 77 



IV. Honourable James William Johnston. — It is quite jDrobable that 

 few persons in Canada, outside of the maritime provinces, are familiar 

 with the name of James William Johnston though he exercised in his Hfe- 

 time large influence in the legislative halls and in the law courts of Nova 

 Scotia. Indeed the ignorance that prevails in Ontario with respect to 

 our political history is surprising. To verify a fact or date, I have just 

 turned over the pages of the " American C^'clopadia of Biography," but 

 the name of this distinguished Nova Scotian does not appear though 

 space is devoted to vastly inferior men in the several provinces. The 

 portrait that recalls his memory in the Commons House of Nova Scotia, 

 where he was so long an honoured leader, delineates a face of great 

 intellectual power, with its finely cut features as if chiselled out of clear 

 Carrara marble, his prominent brow, over which some scanty white hairs 

 fall, his earnest, thoughtful expression, and his bending form, Avhich tells 

 of unwearied application to the many responsible and arduous duties 

 that devolved upon him in the course of a busy life as lawyer and 

 politician. The portrait 1 give presents him when age had 

 accentuated all the forces of his character and the cares of his life, in the 

 very expression and lineaments of his visage. He was, during his life, 

 the chosen friend and adviser of governors, during the most critical 

 period of the history of responsible government. He was a Tory and an 

 aristocrat by education and inclination, but the annals of the legislature 

 show he was not an obstinate opponent of reform, when he came to 

 believe conscientiously that the proposed change was really a reform. A 

 great lawyer in every sense of the term, an impassioned orator at times, a 

 master of invective, a man of strong and earnest convictions he exercised 

 necessarily a large power in political councils, and did much to mould 

 the legislation of the province. His speeches, however, were too often 

 the laboured efforts of the lawyer, determined to exhaust the argument on 

 his side — in this respect he resembled Edward Blake in these later days— 

 and he had none of the arts of Joseph Howe, whose eloquence had more 

 of nature and capacity to reach the hearts and sympathies of the people. 

 He had no deep sense of humour or ability to amuse an assembly — 

 qualities indispensable for a great popular leader, especially on the plat- 

 form. At rare times, however, he forgot the lawyer and gave full scope 

 to the pent-up fires of a man in whose veins flowed the hot blood of the 

 tropics, for he was not a Nova Scotian, but a West Indian by birth. It 

 is an interesting fact that, while a Tory by education and aspiration, he 

 was more than once an advocate of most liberal and even radical 

 measures, one of which, simultaneous polling at elections — or the holding 

 of elections on one and the same day — he himself carried ten years even 

 before it was thought of in the Canadian provinces. To him more than 

 any other does Nova Scotia owe the relief from the monopoly of the coal 

 mines, long held by an English company under a roj^al charter given to a 



