[4091 
Transactions of The Royal Society of Canada 
SECTION II 


SERIES III MARCH 1917 Vor:X 

Joseph Howe and the Anti-Confederation League. 
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY BY 
LAWRENCE J. BURPEE. 
INTRODUCTION. 
Shortly before his death Sir Robert Weatherbe wrote the present 
writer that he had in his possession a series of letters addressed by 
Joseph Howe to William J. Stairs, relating to the Anti-Confederation 
Movement. He thought of editing these letters, and asked advice 
as to the most suitable means of publication. It was suggested that 
they might be submitted as a paper to The Royal Society, and pub- 
lished in the Transactions. Unfortunately Sir Robert Weatherbe 
did not live to carry out his idea. As one who had been Joint Secre- 
tary of the League of the Maritime Provinces, of which Howe was 
President and Stairs one of the Vice-Presidents, and who had been on 
terms of intimacy with all the principal actors in the Anti-Confedera- 
tion Movement, he would have been an ideal editor of such a series 
of letters. The present writer, with Lady Weatherbe’s consent, 
undertook the task. Although conscious enough that at best he could 
offer only a very poor substitute for the paper Sir Robert Weatherbe 
would have produced, he felt that these letters of Joseph Howe were 
too important to remain in obscurity, particularly at a time when 
Canadians were preparing to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 
birth of the Dominion. In the notes appended to the letters an effort 
has been made to identify names and incidents that were more familiar 
to Howe’s contemporaries than they are to Canadians of the present 
generation. 
So far as the life of Joseph Howe is concerned, nothing need be 
said here that does not relate to his connection with the movement in 
Nova Scotia to defeat the Confederation project, at least so far as that 
province was concerned. Nothing approaching a complete biography 
of the great Nova Scotian has yet been written; but the main facts 
of his life, and at least some ideas as to his complex character, may be 
