Exciting a Spirit of Emulation Among the Tlodholes….pdfVIP

GRAEME WYNN Exciting a Spirit of Emulation Among the Tlodholes : Agricultural Reform in Pre-Confederation Nova Scotia* A COUNTRY IS WHAT ITS PEOPLE MAKE IT BE, wrote T.F. Knight in his 1862 prize essay Nova Scotia and her Resources. Full of mid-Victorian rhetoric about the importance of energy, intelligence, industry, and self-denial, Knights musings led him into many an extravagant claim : Nova Scotia had the healthiest climate under the sun, a generous soil, inexhaustible resources and every prospect of taking her place...in the advance car of the worlds progress as the 1 Great Britain of this Continent. Still, these were far from solitary enthusiasms . Celebrating the 113th anniversary of the settlement of Halifax in the same year, the exuberant Robert Grant Haliburton vowed that the agricultural capabili- ties of the province were unsurpassed, and that its long-productive Fundy marshlands were without a parallel in the history of agriculture.2 So to o Abraham Gesner compared the colonys always productive alluvial soils to the 3 Banks of the Nile. And many others — from the irrepressible Sam Slick, created by R.G . Haliburton s father Thoma s Chandler Haliburton in the 1830s, to visitors such as J.C . Myers in the late 1840s and J.F. W. Johnston in the 1850s — recorded their faith in the quality and abundance of the colonys natural endow- 4 ments. But — and this was the point of Knights emphasis on the creative power of people — potential was one thing , its realization another . For Knight, Nova Scotia was a field for exertion, still in the adolescence of development . For Sam Slick, Nova Scotians were either asleep or stone