page 204

Chapter XXVII.
Australia Revisited.

A quasi-triumphal winding-up of his colonial career was staged for him in Australia. He was appointed or elected a delegate from New Zealand to the conference on Australian federation held in Sydney in the autumn of 1891. From one point of view he was not very suitably chosen. He had long been firmly opposed to the federation of New Zealand with Australia. He believed that the employment of coloured labour would be necessitated in Australia by the semi-tropical climate of its northern States, and he professed to dread the reaction on New Zealand of the establishment of virtual slavery. This foregone conclusion did not preclude his acceptance of the nomination, and of course he was a prominent personage at the conference. He made one great speech and one notable proposal.

In the speech he deftly interwove his reminiscences of the eminent men with whom he had been associated in public life, and it is said that the face of the next-most distinguished member of the Conference, who had a similar weakness, was a study while Grey unwound his beadroll of remarkable names. Among his tales of bygone days he did not fail—in conversation he never failed—to tell of the visit of Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) to New Zealand in 1852, and of their long rambles by the sea-shore in Wellington, revolving many things, like Achilles. Nor did he forget Sir John Gorst and Ms commissionership in the Waikato, though one may doubt whether he related its tragi-comic dénouement with the gusto and the unsuppressed merriment of the same narrative when privately told.

His notable proposal was that the Governor-General of the Commonwealth and the Governors of the component page 205States should be elected by the people of the Commonwealth and the States. It was an old notion of his. Session after Session, for a dozen years, he moved the reading of a bill providing that the Governor of the Colony should be elected by the colonists, not appointed by the Colonial Office. Whether or not members believed him to be actuated by vindictive motives, his persevering efforts met with no success. He had now an opportunity of proposing the same innovation on a larger scale. He made a long and impressive speech. Judged by results, it was a total failure. Out of over half-a-hundred delegates only two supported the motion—that Radical stalwart, C. C. Kingston, and, less from conviction than from compassion, we may suspect, Dr. (now Sir John) Cockburn. Grey was not spared. On the larger as on the smaller arena he was openly accused of perversity, of impracticability, and even of disloyalty.

Having flung his gage of battle in the face of the Conference, he went on a tour through Australia. He had been summoned from South Australia to govern New Zealand, but he expected to return to it when his work there was done. He now returned after forty-five years —two-thirds of the space of a long lifetime. He reentered Adelaide on his seventy-ninth (or rather his eightieth) birthday, and in the afternoon he was welcomed at the Town Hall, but, after attempting to speak, he was too deeply affected to continue. He was banqueted in the evening, and his genuine gratification overflowed in memorable words.''Old age is a crown of thorns," he might have cited from the Talmud, but to him, he said, it was "a period of the greatest happiness he had ever known.'' On the following day he addressed his proper audience, the Adelaide democracy, and the more select circles of Adelaide, as thenceforth of all Australia, perceiving his late-born affinities, held aloof from him. He proceeded to democratic Broken Hill, and then ensued a long procession of receptions and speeches at a chain of towns across the Continent. On one day, May 23, the almost-octogenarian delivered no fewer than page 206five speeches. His reception in Sydney crowned the tour. Twice at least he spoke in the provincial metropolis to enthusiastic audiences—once in the Centennial Hall, when an immense audience made the event, it was said, '' more than magnificent." And the tour was wound up, as the veteran sailed back to New Zealand, with one of those cordial send-offs which Australia gives to those whom it delights to honour. Yet, with all its warmth, the tour fell far below the quasi-royal progress of Mr. Seddon, who, fifteen years later, passed from province to province like their sceptred sovereign. As was afterwards the case in London, Grey was only a spectacle; Seddon was a power.

Grey's last days in New Zealand were the beginning of a somewhat prolonged euthanasia. Hankering to return to the arena of active life, he weakly agreed to be re-elected for a division of Auckland, but, saying that, if he went to Wellington, he believed he should die there, he never reappeared in the halls of the Legislature. Three years more he lingered in scenes once loved, and then he suddenly took his departure.