Advocates Immigration.

He had a cause as well as a weapon. According to his own account, he had gone to explore West Australia in the hope of finding some extensive tracts of country where the English and (still more) the Irish proletariat, whose sufferings he had seen in the thirties, might be successfully settled. There he realised his hope by discovering, as he imagined, tracts suitable for the settlement of emigrants from the crowded Motherland, and his imagination was fired by the thought that in future years cities with teeming populations of prosperous citizens would flourish on those wastes. Thirty years afterwards he resumed the theme. He made in England and Scotland the first of his oratorical tours and addressed large audiences. He spoke with unequalled knowledge of some of the most desirable fields of emigration in the British Empire or in the world. He had not only explored both the tropical and the sub-tropical parts of Western Australia; he had resided in its temperate south-west, so well suited to agriculture. As Governor, he had resided in South Australia, for two long terms in New Zealand, and for two shorter terms in South Africa. He had penetrated some distance into South Australia. He had visited almost every part of New Zealand, much of it on foot. He had ridden all over Cape page 171Colony, Kafraria, Natal, and into the Orange State. He had watched young and already robust communities grow up in such countries. He had a glowing imagination and much descriptive power. Who so well fitted to paint the aesthetic attractions or the real advantages of emigration to such lands? He at once took a high point of view. In those days emigration was looked upon in England as little better than transportation, doubtless because it was often ''assisted,'' because emigrants were often drawn from the lower strata of society, and again because they were going out to countries that were believed to be still in a state of semi-savagery. In the early eighties the sentiment had not passed away, and those who then went out to New Zealand were regarded as just objects of compassion. So recently as the end of 1907 a young woman who had been brought out to New South Wales as a domestic servant vigorously objected to being described as an 'emigrant.'

Grey set himself to eradicate the prejudice. He described the Australasian colonies in particular as possessing many attractions—great natural beauty, a virgin soil, and a glorious climate, where life was worth living for its own sake, where manual labour was light, abundant, and highly remunerated, where taxation was not burdensome, poverty unknown, workhouses nonexistent, gaols empty. Above all, he lauded the political condition of these happy countries. There reigned perfect equality. There aspiring young men might enter any profession and hope to rise to any eminence, that of Governor alone excepted. There working-men might become Premiers and cabinet ministers, chief justices and judges, heads of departments, inspectors-general of police, editors of influential journals, and so forth. Did not the hearts of his audience burn within them as they listened to Aladdin and saw the transformation-scenes revealed by his wonderful lamp? Well might the eloquent speaker assure them that the colonies were not places of exile, but "a home and a heritage for the people of England.''

He had a definite policy of emigration. He proposed that it should be conducted by the agency of parishes page 172and municipalities, which would select and send out emigrants, bearing or assisting in bearing the cost of emigration, and ever after retaining a maternal interest in such bodies. These would be placed in special settlements, where they would perpetuate the traditions of the towns and parishes whence they had come. They would be organically connected with their metropolitan source. And as aid had flowed out from the municipality or parish to the colonial settlement, so would it flow back to the parish or municipality and bring out fresh emigrants. Spiritual children of the old communities would these young communities be.

It was a hopeful scheme—far more practicable than many such schemes that have been seriously tried, and it deserved a better fate than silence or extinction. But the time was unfavourable. The political energies of public men were absorbed by the Irish and other questions, and the country had neither time nor attention to spare for such a topic.

It was doubtless in connection with this subject that Grey came into contact with Carlyle. The Latter-day Pamphleteer had long had a strong belief in emigration as likely to relieve the distress existing in England and open out new vistas of hope for the poor. He was therefore greatly attracted by a man of the ruler or hero type who had set himself to preach the same panacea for English woes, and who was furnished with a definite scheme for carrying it out. He encouraged Grey to continue his propaganda. "The question of emigration is the most important of all questions for this nation," he wrote, "and you, of all men," he told Grey, "are the man to urge and guide it to a successful issue." He talked with Lord Derby about Grey and his plan and found him sympathetic. He introduced Grey to his lordship, half apologising for performing what might be a superfluous act. Grey certainly impressed him as a true worker in a good cause.

When a grander arena than the platform opened up to Grey, Carlyle naturally took a deep interest in his candidature for Newark. He wrote a letter which he page 173obviously designed to aid it, and, with the same object, his niece copied out the passages in his writings that bore on emigration. He averred that he "took more interest in that single candidature than in all the other remaining 657." Edward Jenkins, author of a now-forgotten, but once popular pamphlet-story, Ginx's Baby, was Grey's most strenuous supporter. The election never came off, or at least Grey withdrew from the contest. The Liberal Ministry of the day was far from anxious to enlist a "supporter" who might have exhausted the forms of Parliament, but would never have exhausted the resources of an ever-scheming brain, in making the lives of the occupants of the Ministerial front bench a burden to them. Gladstone himself intervened. He desired to find a seat for a general officer, Sir Henry Storks, whose aid was wanted by the Government in the House of Commons. He brought pressure on Grey to induce him to retire. Seeing that, opposed by the Government, he would have small chance of being elected, or that, by dividing the party, he might let a Tory get in, Grey yielded to pressure, and was thus jockeyed out of a seat in the House of Commons. He himself used to say that he was jockeyed out of a second seat. The two events were flung in his face by a judge of the Supreme Court in New Zealand, who said, in a brief but pungent letter to the Spectator, that two English constituencies had shown their opinion of his discretion by refusing to return him to Parliament. In neither case had the constituency, in all probability, anything to do with the result.

Still another sphere was open to him. He might endeavour to mould public opinion by appealing to it through the press.