Two Autocrats.

He had made friends with "the mammon of unrighteousness" by christening Mount Stephen in Western Australia after the permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and Stephen stood his friend as long as he remained at the Colonial Office. Stephen was one of two notable personalities who then ruled the great department. Sir Henry Taylor was known to cultured readers as a distinguished dramatic poet (he was the author of Philip van Artevelde and The Virgin Widow) and a political philosopher whose natural sagacity had been instructed page 19by his conversance with great affairs, and embedded in a volume that was rather ambitious than pretentious called The Statesman; he was known to fashionable society as consummate man of the world; and to a very few he was known as one of the high officers of the Colonial Office. Taylor virtually governed the "sugar-colonies," and how powerful a mere clerk in the department, bearing no specific designation, could be, may be learnt from his Autobiography, which contains many revelations. Still more interesting would have proved, had it ever been written, the autobiography of his colleague, Sir James Stephen, the real ruler of the future self-governing colonies from 1835 to 1847.^* He is best known in literature as the author of Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which are remarkable equally for their evangelical fervour and their sonorous diction, smelling of the State paper and the despatch-writer. Carlyle, conversing with Gavan Duffy, doubted their sincerity, alleging that Stephen had no thought of leading such a life as he there described, and at the same time etching a vivid portrait of the writer as an official. Each successive Secretary of State came into office, resolving that he would shake off the thraldom of the permanent heads of the Department, especially Stephen's, and very imperious they all were at the start. The wily Stephen apparently fell in with all they proposed, and in a smooth, silken manner expressed his assent. The unsophisticated Minister imagined that everything would be carried out as he desired, but it was always found that everything was done as Stephen decided, and the Minister ended by cheerfully accepting the yoke he had tried to throw off. Let anyone compare the despatches written from the Colonial Office in the thirties and forties with the Essays, and he will come to the conclusion that the writer of both was one and the same individual. Such was the man to whose favour or discernment Grey undoubtedly owed page 20his appointment. He it was who "entertained" "the high opinion" of Grey's "ability and energy" which induced Lord John Russell to propose him for the Governorship of South Australia.

Though still slight in importance to what it was to become, it was a high appointment for a young man of twenty-eight. Grey reflected that he was the youngest man ever appointed to a colonial Governorship—at least, he should have added, in a British colony, and he feared that youth and inexperience disqualified him for holding so responsible an office. Twenty-five years later the professor of Moral Philosophy in an ancient Scottish university similarly recalled that in entering on his labours he was only twenty-eight years old and might well shrink from them. It would be hard to determine which position was the more onerous. To instil the principles of Ethics into the minds of successive generations of future teachers is a function so high that even the government of a nascent society and the moulding of a commonwealth are scarcely more exacting in their required qualifications.