OUR ISLAND STORY 135 Free Education, Free Lands and other blessings fought for in days of storm and struggle, before the Island became a province of the Confederation of Canada. According to the record, Mr. Whelan was born in the Cbunty Mayo , Ireland, in the year 1824. He obtained the rudiments of education there, and at an early age came to Halifax. It has been stated that the Hon. Joseph Howe went down on one of the Halifax wharves one fine morning on the arrival of an Irish emi¬ grant ship, and saw there a widow woman standing with a child in her arms, and a small bright boy at her side. Placing his hand on the boy's head, Mr. Howe made some enquiries of the mother whose son he was, and at the end of the conversation took the boy by the hand to his own home. It is, at all events, certain that this boy, Edward Whelan , was trained for his life's work in Mr. Howe's printing office. There he gave such proofs of his facility as a writer that he was, occasionally, in the absence of Mr. Howe , employed to write editorial articles for his patron's weekly news¬ paper. At the age of eighteen years he came to this Island. The Island was then under the dominance of . Its lands were owned, for the most part, by absentee proprietors. The few pounds that the early settlers, battling with the forest, could scrape together in the fall of the year, were sent away to England and elsewhere by the proprietors' agents. There were no common schools. Throughout the country those of the child¬ ren who learned to read and write were taught in their own homes by their parents or by itinerant schoolmasters. The people were, it is stated, "ruled by parties who governed as caprice or self- interest dictated." Mr. Whelan , of course, remarked these anomalous adverse conditions, and he at once proceeded to stir up an agitation for relief and improvement. He established the Palladium newspaper and addressed public meetings. The Liberal Party in this Island was then struggling into life. Mr. Whelan threw the whole weight of his influence into the struggle to obtain a practical recognition of the rights of the people. Unable to maintain the Palladium, he became for some time editor of the Morning News, of which Mr. E. L. Moody was proprietor. After Mr. Moody 's death he I ::