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

Chapter XXVI. — In Opposition

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Chapter XXVI.
In Opposition.

A Greek Gift.

I am in a position to affirm that in the early months of 1884, he was looking forward to entering into political office before the end of the year. He expected to defeat the Atkinson Ministry in the ensuing parliamentary session, and he was confident that, after fighting a general election, he would he appointed Premier. Alas, for the vanity of human expectations! Living in a fool's paradise, he was unaware that, months before, one of his particular political friends had joined another politician in an arrangement—it would be rude to call it, as hostile politicians called it, a conspiracy—that would for ever exclude him from office. They purposed to deal well by him. They offered to let him nominate, from the dwindling band of his followers, two members of the cabinet. What were they going to do with himself? They could not wish him to remain in the Assembly in order to thwart the measures of the Ministry from which he had been deliberately excluded. They proposed that he should become Chief Commissioner in the King Country. The proposal dazzled him for a space. Under certain conditions he might well have accepted it. It was just such a position as he had refused to Shepstone in South Africa, but Shepstone was Shepstone and Grey was Grey. It was not ill-advised. Had he been Ms old self, he might safely have been entrusted with a quasiabsolute rule over the Maoris. He (as he said of himself in relation to Tawhiao in 1863) would have "dug around" the King tribes "with good deeds" till their rebellion fell, and they returned to their allegiance. He would have sought to carry out the work of amalgamation between the two races. He might have arrested the decay of the page 193Maori race. He might have won them all back to Christianity, as indeed he aided in extinguishing Hauhauism. He would have introduced civilisation, letters, and the arts. But he could not be trusted. There was no saying what he would do. The new Ministry had no mind to commit itself to rash experiments or dangerous projects. In order to keep the Chief Commissioner in check, he was to be sandwiched between two Assistant Commissioners, who would have been controlled from Wellington. He would have seen himself outvoted by his own colleagues and thus reduced to impotence in his own court. He refused to accept the position, and he thenceforth acted as if he had been deliberately humiliated.

Parliamentary Intrigues

The Ministry that made him the offer was flung out, after an existence that lasted only a few days, and its defeat was followed by a maze of intrigues. The member who moved the defeating resolution was asked to form a cabinet, and the preposterous politician made the attempt. Calling on Sir George to invite him to accept a seat in the new Ministry, he was for a moment listened to with mock gravity, and then dramatically bowed out of the room, with an ironical "good morning, Mr. So-and-So!" Grey was himself sent for, and it was believed that he attempted the impossible task. His own incredible account of the matter was that he had been endeavouring to bring together the members of hostile parties. In truth, so little had he abandoned the expectation of entering upon office that, during the Ministerial crisis in 1887, he twice took steps with that object in view.

All intrigues were ended for a time by the return to office of the conspiring ex-Ministers. Grey was definitely left out in the cold, and towards the Ministry, with one of his own former colleagues at its head, he assumed an attitude of irreconcilable hostility. The first and chief weapon that he resorted to was to move a resolution of want of confidence, and during the session such resolutions followed in quick succession. They were resultless.

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Members quickly perceived that he was carrying on a vendetta against the Government, and they soon let it be understood, by both words and votes, that they would support no such motions. Grey did not therefore discontinue his assaults on the Ministry. To one of these the Premier of the day replied by a long-meditated and violently personal attack. The scene that ensued was so painful as to be unreportable. Next day Grey was in a pitiable state. From that hour he grew ever more embittered. His character seemed to deteriorate. Till then, under the severest disappointments, he had kept an inner sanctum secure against all assaults of the Evil One. Now the citadel of his spirit appeared to be taken and its holy of holies ravaged. He had been capable of brightness, of illuminating flashes, of sage and mellow wisdom. Now his very mirth was gruesome, and the dignity of bearing he had seldom lost before was shattered. The cloudy pillar had turned, and he henceforth pursued an ever-darkening path.

A Vendetta.

He set himself with an inexorable purpose to turn out of office the Ministry that had used him so ill. He refused to sit on the same Parliamentary committees with the Premier, and when the Premier rose to speak, Grey left the chamber. In the following session, of 1887, he enjoyed the gratification of seeing the Ministry decisively defeated in the House. A dissolution was obtained, and he saw his opportunity. For the third time he went on an electioneering tour through the Colony. He spoke at the chief cities and at some of the larger townships. He was listened to with curiosity, with respect, with admiration. He gained no followers, but he gained his end. The Ministry, by the confession of its head, had never a majority in the Assembly. We may add that it never possessed the confidence of the Colony. Grey had therefore an easy task. The Ministry suffered a decisive defeat. The Premier and several of his Ministers lost their seats. Their party was scattered to the winds. It was not a defeat. It was a rout.

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While he powerfully contributed to the result, Grey took no visible part in the débâcle. He had come back from his oratorical tour in a state of complete nervous prostration. For a week or more he lay between life and death. Then his inexhaustible vitality reasserted itself, and, after some weeks of confinement to the sickroom and the house, he emerged with his strength unimpaired. He enjoyed his convalescence and spoke of it as a luxurious sensation. He next played a pretty little comedy. While the elections were being fought out, he ostentatiously sat in the Parliamentary Library, in the building lately burnt to the ground, professedly pursuing from book to book a research on the ethnical relations between the Portuguese and the blacks of South Africa! "General elections!" "Contested seats!" He had not heard of them. "Happy or unfortunate results?" He took no interest in them. Of course, it was all a pretence. In reality, no one inwardly rejoiced more at the result, though his exultation was discreetly veiled. He had cause for lamentation as well. He had lost his last follower. The little band he had nominally led in the preceding Parliament vanished into space, and Grey realised his own political ideal of one-adult-one-vote. Complete desertion was the guerdon of the man who had twice governed the Colony through long and critical periods, rescued it from bankruptcy, given it a political and an ecclesiastical constitution, endowed it with its Provincial governments, subjugated and pacified the Native race, and whose mere residence in it reflected distinction on the Colony.

His revenge was not then consummated. The day came, in 1893, when there was to be a conflict for the Premiership between the ex-Premier referred to and the Minister who was acting as Premier. Grey threw all his weight into the scale of the Acting-Premier. When Mr. Seddon, whom no one had before suspected of lacking self-confidence, hesitated to accept the Premiership which the Governor almost thrust upon him, he appealed for counsel to Grey. Grey's advice was unqualified and almost peremptory. Once and again he urged page 196Seddon to accept the office; he assured him of his competence; he seemed afraid that Seddon would refuse. Just so had he pressed Seddon, fifteen years before, when Seddon had likewise been hesitant, to stand for a constituency. He became one of the '' Greyhounds," so loyal did he prove. Ever afterwards he leant on Grey and would seek counsel of him during the Parliamentary session. To Grey it was owing that Seddon did not stand aside in favour of his rival. Grey strenuously supported his nominee and follower. "I have never met with a manlier man,'' he said of him. And when Seddon went to London, Grey renewed acquaintance with him and thus gave him public countenance. Seddon, for his part, constantly associated himself with Grey and represented himself as the continuator of his policy.

Alone.

Did the strong man ever feel dispiritment, or the selfsufficing nature shiver in its loneliness? Close observers did discern traces of momentary weakness, but none were visible to the public eye. He did, indeed, sometimes desire wholly to transfer his activity from the wrangling arena of the Legislature to the public platform, and, becoming a true demagogos, or leader of the people, gain his ends by popular agitation; but for that a sparselysettled country was not ripe, and in the passionate persistent pursuit of his ends there was no relaxation. With scientific sap and mine he continued his assault on the classes and institutions that were obnoxious to him. What was it that sustained him? His enemies—and their name was legion—had a consistent account to give of Ms motives.

The Growth of the Radical.

''He was no democrat,'' they asserted. ''He had never been a lover of the populace. The fineness of his organization, his distinguished manners, his personal habits, his culture, and his aristocratic pride, all marked him as claiming to belong to an exclusive class. When in England, he associated, or endeavoured to associate, page 197largely with the aristocracy. It was only in the last year of his residence there that, neglected by them, he allied himself with the extreme Radicals. When he returned to New Zealand, he lived for five years in haughty isolation. Delivered up to the Furies in the shape of his own angry passions, he plotted revenge. Opportunities offering, he instituted a systematic vendêtta against the Imperial Government and the great landowners. Again thwarted, he made the same volte-face in the State as the great or grandiose Lamennais had, forty years before, made in the Church. He threw himself into the arms of the democracy. Aristo crate par goût, he became tribun par calcul. And thus the man who, so late as the last year of his second term as Governor of New Zealand, was spoken of as an 'aristocrat of the aristocrats,' ended his public life as a democrat enragé.''

That a man should become a Radical in his old age was a metamorphosis that puzzled Goethe in his coeval, Bentham. It does not surprise us, who have seen Gladstone blossom into Radicalism in his last decades. Sir George Grey was never the man described. His early sympathies appear to have been with the Whigs. He prevented the endowment of State churches in South Australia, Otago, and Canterbury. He cheapened land in New Zealand, and opened up the country to the "free selector." The constitution he drafted for that Colony was acknowledged in the House of Commons to abound in liberal provisions. Animated by an ultra-republican passion, he treated the Maoris as the equals of the settlers and the Fingo levies as the equals of the English troops. Evidently, his Radicalism was no recantation of Toryism.

It had a physical basis. It was in Bentham, as in Gladstone, an effluence of youth; Bentham, like Bonstetten, was a boy to the last. Gladstone seemed to grow younger in mind as he grew older in years, and advanced, as Swedenborg says the angels do, "continually towards the springtide of his youth." So it was with Grey. None of his faculties showed signs of decay. At seventy, at eighty, he had the sanguine optimism of youth. At page 198seventy-one he adopted the doctrine of the nationalisation of the land. At seventy-seven he took up with Socialism. At eighty-three he thrilled an audience of English legislators with his glowing vision of the federation of peoples. "Age did not wither" him. In his last years he still had youthfulness of mind enough to adopt a new philosophy, a new religion, a new political cause, and he could have preached a crusade on its behalf. If we were to seek for the first striking manifestation of his Eadicalism, we might find it in the passion for exploration that brought him out to Australia in order to discover wide landed tracts on which the landless and starving masses of Britain might find homes.

Its subdued manifestations during his Governorships we have already seen. Not till thirty years later did it come to a head. An exile from England till 1868, he then found the country swept by a wave of advanced Liberalism, with the intellectual leaders of the day and all "young England" on the crest. The author of a oncepopular book, Ginx's Baby, brought home to him afresh, what he had observed thirty years before, the condition of the very poor. These things were the soil of the new growth. But this much having been admitted and the continuity having been shown, the advocatus Diaboli must have his place. The germinating impulse came from without. Estrangement from the governing class was its motive. It was a Radicalism of revolt. The rebellious passions—outraged pride, hatred, revenge, thwarted ambition—supplied its nutriment. And never since Burke, Byron, or Lamennais has passion armed reason with such splendid powers. Eloquence unknown to himself as to others, dormant sympathies evoked, visions of the future, propagandist enthusiasm, all came at call. And they reacted on the man. No one who ever heard him speak in public could doubt his sincerity. There are men, such as Benjamin Constant or Byron, who are hard or cynical in conversation, but whose imagination takes wing when they enter the "tribune," the professor's chair, or the pulpit, or sit down to write. In which are they the truer to themselves—the superficial page 199scepticism or the underlying fanaticism? We have traced the rebellious spirit throughout Grey's career, and are not likely to underestimate its power, but deep below all its manifestations burned unquenchably the pure flame of faith in God and hope for man. One move after another may have been mere disloyalty or revenge in its inception, but as it grew it became a nobler loyalty. Or, if that be too much to grant, it was at least recommended by considerations so exalted that it might have ''deceived the elect.''

The Evolution of a Rebel.

The story of his career is the evolution of a rebel. We perceive the genesis of the rebel in his flight from school. He broke away from the army to head an exploring expedition. He started on a second journey of exploration without awaiting the sanction of the Secretary of State and consequently without knowing that it had been withdrawn. In South Australia the autocrat was maturing and the future rebel in training. There he drew bills on the Imperial Government after he knew that his predecessor's bills had been dishonoured. He incurred unauthorised expenditure there, though with a benevolent end—the improvement of the natives. During his first term in New Zealand, when he refused to give effect to the political constitution fashioned in the Colonial Office, the rebel flung his first bold, and yet in terms respectful, defiance. In South Africa, when he put the Fingoes and the German Legion on full pay against the instructions of the War Office, when he continued his enlightened administration of British Kafraria in spite of the reduction of the necessary English Parliamentary vote, when he diverted to Calcutta the British troops touching at the Cape, when he sent out troops, horses, and specie to India during the Mutiny, when he re-enrolled the German Legion and despatched it to Bombay, and when he promoted the federation of South Africa in a manner opposed to the instructions of the Colonial Office, his rebellion was full-blown. His second term of office in New Zealand was nobly humanitarian as regards the page 200Maoris, and his squabbles with his Ministers were in a good cause. But again he quarrelled violently with the Colonial Office, with the War Office, with the generals in command of the troops, with the Commissary-General, with his Ministers. At last, his rebellion rose to the point of defying the Colonial Office. The spirit that would neither obey nor brook disobedience had grown incorrigible.

Grey was thus a rebel all his days. Was he in error all his days? With Carlyle, we must distinguish. Was the law or the power he rebelled against that of the world, an earth-born force, a creature of error, where it was not an emanation of the Pit? Then Ms rebellion was justified. Was it "the eternal law of God Almighty in the universe?" Then were his revolt grave indeed, kindled by infernal fires, led astray by marsh-lights. During the early years of Grey's life, at least, it was in the main a justifiable rebellion, even if it was the rebellion of a would-be autocrat. During Ms later years it was the revolt of a defeated autocrat. He now burned what he had worshipped, and, being unable to govern, he rebelled against all government. But he was no vulgar rebel. His aims were, in a manner, Promethean. He was ever eager for the prosperity of the individuals he knew. His eloquence rose to its highest point when he painted the possible future of "the unborn millions." He resisted monopolies. He fought land-grabbers, lay and clerical, individually and in mass. He was valiant in defence of human rights. His war against corporate exelusiveness was lifelong. He would have thrown open the closed professions. He founded libraries and aided art-galleries to which all had free access. No human being should be shut out from the loftiest possibilities of our common nature. The lower races excited his compassion and engaged his sympathies: he seemed to see in them, not so much the wrecks of a fallen humanity, as the germs of a nascent civilisation. In the artizan he recognized an equal—to others; in the schoolboy he discovered the potentialities of future fame. If he was a rebel, he was therefore endowed with a rebel's nobler qualities. For, page 201we repeat it, this man was of heroic lineage and cast in imperial mould. If, instead of the mimic arena of a British colony, he had been given a kingdom or a continent for a theatre, he would have achieved lasting renown. He had been promised the Governor-Generalship of Canada and might have aspired to the Viceroyalty of India, where, at an earlier date, he might have been a Clive or a Hastings.

He had a rebel's fate. Whether it is at St. Helena, Friederiehsruh, or Kawau, inevitable defeat is his portion who sets his will against the nature of things. But in the lives of all there is an earlier period, when the recalcitrant will was in alliance with that same nature and was its organ, when alone that work was done which they were sent here to do. That fruitful period in Sir George Grey's life is to be found in his career as Governor of South Australia and New Zealand, before these colonies had been granted responsible government. It is different with his High Commissionership at the Cape. There again are two periods. Till 1858 he was still loyal to the Empire, if he was often enough disloyal to the department which controlled his relations with the Empire. Had he been placed in the position of a Roman dictator, he would have been acting legally and constitutionally. In 1858 his initiation of South African federation was undoubtedly, in the judgment of the Colonial Office, an act of disloyalty to the Empire. The attitude he then assumed was the attitude of a Cæsar to the Roman Senate. Had he possessed a military force, he was capable of attempting a South African Pharsalia. It was the rebellion of "the man who was born to be king." With his condemnation and recall began the down-grade movement and the return of the curve.

The rebellious temper thus matured unfitted him to be a constitutional Minister. The testimony of his colleagues is to the effect that there was no living with him. There have been constantly recurring specimens of that type. Burke, Chateaubriand, Brougham, and Fichte were all men whom a domineering spirit and an irascible temper made impracticable. All were, in consequence, page 202driven from the offices they held and stripped of the influence they should have exercised. Burke and Fichte, at all events, remained loyal. What thoughts seethed in Brougham's ill-balanced brain we do not know. Chateaubriand, the elder Comte d'Haussonville informs us, meditated an eighteenth of Brumaire. And Sir George Grey, at least in his wilder moods, schemed an Imperial revolution.

Speculative Mutiny.

On the eve of his second abdication Napoleon, walking with Lucien and afterwards with Benjamin Constant in the garden of the Elysée, heard the acclamations of the crowd, crying: "long live the Emperor!" and calling for arms. For a while the Emperor gazed at the surging masses in silence, pondering over the suggestion made to him by the tempter, Lucien, of heading the crowd, raising France, and sweeping away both legislature and nobles. To his everlasting honour he put the temptation from him, saying: "I will not be a mob-king. I did not come back from Elba to deluge France with blood." So did Frederick William, in 1848, refuse "a swine-crown" at the hands of the Parliament of Frankfort.

In his abandonment and implacable rage the old Governor, spurned by the Colonial Office and scouted by the colony he had so long ruled, harboured treasonable designs against the Imperial Government. On a memorable occasion, to a single auditor, on the midnight streets, with earnest accents that betrayed not a trace of insincerity, for a space of two hours, he propounded a project of a military rising, by means of which he would gain command of the British army and take possession of all the agencies of government. It would serve no end to detail his plans, which had evidently been carefully elaborated. At no time since the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 has a dynastic revolution in England had a ghost of a chance. At no time since the accession of Elizabeth could an adventurer or an insubordinate noble or official have succeeded in raising a revolt. The design was little better than midsummer madness. Had the narrative been page 203told about him in his lifetime, he would have answered as Bishop Blougram answered Mr. Gigadibs, "the literary man," who playfully threatened to expose the bishop's heresies. Grey would have disavowed the reporter as the victim of a practical joke, the sport of his mocking humour.

It can only be said that he seemed in deadly earnest. The scheme was so comprehensive and coherent, so minute and detailed, that it must have been a subject of thought with him through months and, perhaps, years. It was consistent with his public utterances. "Who is the Secretary for the Colonies?" he scornfully cried in the House of Representatives. "We know absolutely nothing of him; we care absolutely nothing for him,'' he rejoined, answering his own question. It was consistent with his public action. His bills for the election of future Governors of New Zealand, his proposal for the election of the Governor-General of the Commonwealth and the Governors of the States, had no other significance. It was the culmination of a long course of rebellious utterances and actions. Happily, it exhaled in words, and, in charity to his memory, it deserves oblivion. He seemed himself desirous to forget it. He never returned to the subject, and, in his lifetime, his solitary auditor respected the confidence (not given as such) with which he had been so strangely entrusted.