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His Deposition.

On October 15, 1877, he had announced his acceptance of the Premiership. On October 15 (a fateful day with him!), 1879 he declared: "I stand here as an outcast among men—first of all, deposed from those benches, and, secondly, having abandoned the position I held as the leader of a great party." What had happened? His followers had informed him that they would no longer submit to his high-handed ways or obey that tyrannical will. He had not "abandoned" the leadership of the Opposition; it had abandoned him. The verdict of his contemporaries was, and apparently the judgment of historians is, that his defects of character and faults of temper—his arrogance and his irascibility—ruined his Ministry, defeated his policy, and made his leadership impossible. Let this be admitted to the full, and his failure as a leader is not thus completely accounted for. He was in advance of his time. Almost all the measures he proposed were right in themselves and were ultimately carried; they were only premature.

His mood, in adversity, was not conciliatory. Like Gladstone, he was more imperious in Opposition than on the Ministerial bench. "I will drag them (the Ministers) as my slaves," he haughtily cried, "at the wheels of my chariot. They shall pass those measures" of his, which they had thwarted. "Though they hate me, they shall not go into the lobby against me,'' he declared.

He was a true prophet. The Electoral Representation Bill, enacting manhood suffrage, passed by his immediate successors in office, was his own bill—not the one he had last brought forward, but an earlier one; and it was made law by the aid of four Auckland members, belonging to Sir George Grey's party, who agreed to support the Government only on condition that it carried out Grey's policy.^* Not till 1889, though he strove for it in every session, did he succeed in excising the freehold qualification then enacted and passing a bill restricting each citizen to the exercise of a single vote. His Triennial page 191Parliaments Bill was likewise passed into law by the opposite party, which, like Peel, ''found the Liberals bathing and stole their clothes." Grey continued his self-assumed tasks. In pursuance of his own early policy, now forty years old, in 1883 Grey carried through both Houses an Annexation and Confederation Act, authorising New Zealand to annex any islands in the Pacific Ocean not claimed by foreign powers. The Act never received the royal assent. In 1886 he introduced a Land Settlement Bill, empowering the Government to acquire landed property for settlement, either by amicable purchase or by compulsory appropriation. Such lands were to be retained by the Government and leased on a quit-rent, though Grey must have been aware that quitrents had not been a success in South Africa. The funds for purchasing them were to be raised by means of landbonds. His plan was superseded by the simpler system proposed in the same session by Mr. Ballance and ultimately carried out by Sir John McKenzie. On several lines Grey was the true founder of the policy applied, expanded, and developed by the Ministries that have been in office since the accession to power of the so-called Liberal party in 1891.