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Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

The True Actor

The True Actor.

It is little to add that Mr. Rees, by his own confession, was unable to discover that any fitting recognition of Sir George Grey's signal services on this historic occasion had ever been made. What he really means is that he can find no evidence that things had happened as Grey said they did. All who follow him in the same track will be in equal perplexity. One is surprised, on looking through the histories of the Mutiny, to observe how indefinite are all the statements made about the incident. Even in the book that ought to have contained an authorised narrative there are only the haziest references to it. The unpretending volume, indeed, might have been more luminously compiled. Elucidative notes or illustrative words, such as Carlyle appended or prefixed to Cromwell's letters or intermingled with his speeches; Lord Elgin's meagre accounts filled out from authoritative histories; above all, some glimpses of a striking personality, would have greatly added to its historical value. The Earl of Elgin was no ordinary man. Driven by inherited financial embarrassment to seek a remunerative career by honourable public service abroad, he exercised a wise despotism over Jamaica in his early manhood, brought constitutional government in Canada into successful working in his maturity, and when the snows of age had prematurely whitened the finely shaped head he went forth to rule the great dependency he had saved. The writer well remembers listening with all the reverence of boyhood to the address he gave in the town hall of the city near his seat at Broomhall on the eve of his departure for India. An Anglican rector who had been his contemporary at Oxford said that he was there the finest elocutionist of his time, and all who page 121heard him at Dunfermline in the early sixties must have felt the solemnity of the occasion. A slight tremor shook his voice as he spoke of the unlikelihood of his return from the sphere of his new labours, but true eloquence was lacking to match the polished enunciation and the finished elocution. He never returned, and, dying tragically at his post, he unwittingly bequeathed to his son both the reversion of the viceroyalty and a seat in the present Cabinet.

He was lying at Singapore, impatiently waiting for the arrival of the troops that were to support his mission in China. Instead of them came a messenger, grim and terrible, to tell of the rising of the Sepoys in Central India, and with it an appeal to his generosity and patriotism. So far from its being the case, as Grey always alleged, that Lord Canning underestimated the danger and asked only that some horses and other trifling reinforcements should be sent him, it is stated in the Letters that Canning urgently entreated Lord Elgin to send him troops—the troops, namely, that were destined for the China Expedition. And "I have not a man" to send, he writes to his wife. His troops were still at sea. He did exactly what Grey claimed to have done. He despatched fast steamers to intercept the slow-sailing transports and divert them towards the Hoogly. After consulting with the local general, he had resolved on a great act of renunciation. He determined to sacrifice the China mission, and thus relinquish in advance all the glory he might have hoped to win. As it happened, he reaped the higher glory of renouncement, and he did not in the long run sacrifice the impurer fame of negotiating a questionable treaty.

Evidence is deficient on the one side and altogether lacking on the other. In a matter in which there ought to be thousands of witnesses, many of them still living, we are unable positively to say that the transports complied with the requests of Grey or obeyed the orders of Elgin. Grey's contention, which looks like the delusion of a distempered brain, is at least arguable. Whately's Historic Doubts about Napoleon might have a counterpart in Historic Doubts about Lord Elgin.