It took the patient and courageous striving of many men to make this vision of a united country a reality. The roll of the Fathers of Confederation is a long and honored one. Yet on that roll there are some outstanding names, the names of men whose services were not merely devoted but indispensable. The first to bring the question within the field of practical politics was A. T. Galt, but when attempt after attempt in 1864 to organize a Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, it was George Brown who proposed that the party leaders should join hands in devising some form of federation. Macdonald had hitherto been a stout opponent of all change but, once converted, he threw himself into the struggle, with energy. He never appeared to better advantage than in the negotiations of the next few years, steering the ship of Confederation through the perilous shoals of personal and sectional jealousies. Few had a harder or a more important task than Cartier's-reconciling Canada East to a project under which it would be swamped, in the proposed federal House, by the representatives of four or five English-speaking provinces. McDougall, a Canada West Reformer, shared with Brown the credit for awakening Canadians to the value of the Far West and to the need of including it in their plans of expansion. D'Arcy McGee, more than any other, fired the imagination of the people with glowing pictures of the greatness and the limitless possibilities of the new nation. Charles Tupper, the head of a Nova Scotia Conservative Ministry which had overthrown the old tribune, Joseph Howe, had the hardest and seemingly most hopeless task of all; for his province appeared to be content with its separate existence and was inflamed against union by Howe's eloquent opposition; but to Tupper a hard fight was as the breath of his nostrils. In New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley, a man of less vigor but equal determination, led the struggle until Confederation was achieved.