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

A Platform Orator

A Platform Orator.

He had the prestige of a great name, which opened to him halls and platforms. He was now to create a new instrument, which would fill those halls and convert those platforms into arenas of triumph. He used to say that he had hardly ever spoken in public till he was past fifty. He doubtless referred to his first oratorical tour in England in 1868-9. He understated the facts. It would be nearer the truth to say that he had been speaking all his days. He must have delivered many speeches to the nominee bodies that formed his privy council in three successive colonies, but only two of them have been reported. Mr. Dutton gives the substance of a long speech made before the Legislative Council of South Australia about 1844, expounding his land policy. The Wellington Spectator reported a somewhat lengthy speech made in the Legislative Council of New Zealand in 1851, opposing the projected extension of the Canterbury block. Both speeches are transparent with the lucidity that never failed to shine through all his utterances, but they are naturally in a different tone to his later conciones ad populum or his impassioned harangues in the House of Representatives. There seems to be no record of any important public address before 1859. Then he lay under the transient shadow of a State disgrace, happily soon page 169lifted; but no cloud rested on him at Cambridge when the University honoured him by making him one of its adopted sons. The custom then was that each honorary graduate should deliver an address at the ceremony, and he heard of the rule at the last moment. He professed to have been alarmed at the prospect—he, an unpractised speaker, and without a theme. For once, he himself related, the most self-possessed of men lost his self-command. Providence came to his aid. Gladstone had not then forfeited the favour of the great universities, and he too was that day capped. Speaking before Grey, he furnished Grey with a topic. Following a line of thought more familiar to freethinkers than to believers in revealed religion, he recommended that philanthropists should concentrate their energies on the reclamation of the lapsed masses of England, in place of expending their surplus wealth and strength in the conversion of the heathen. The thesis was right in the teeth of Grey's life-work, which was mainly devoted to the realisation of that very end. For more than an hour this inexperienced orator held the attention of so choice an audience while he enlarged on the obligation and necessity of foreign missions. It was the contention of Max Müller in Westminster Abbey about 1874, when he showed that a religion—we might generalise and say, a people, an institution, a cause—is propagandist in exact proportion to its vitality. It was Grey's maiden speech, and it bore the pledge and promise of future oratorical successes.

He was to receive, if he had not already received, further training from the mouths of a race of natural orators. During his second term in New Zealand he had once especially (at Taupiri, in December, 1862), but doubtless more than once, occasion to address bands of assembled Maoris, chiefs and people. He then spoke— effectively, we may believe—in their own highly figurative manner. Was it without influence on his own later Par-liamentary and popular style? It was said of him that he modelled his electoral addresses and appeals on Napoleon's bulletins. He may have unconsciously page 170moulded his dramatic diction on the declamatory style of the Maori chieftains.

He had one-half of the physical basis of oratory—a fine presence; he lacked the other half—a sonorous organ of speech. His voice was light and lacked carrying power; it had no rich tones, small variety, little force (save when he was angry), and no weight. On the other hand, it was not soon used up, and he never grew hoarse. His effects were all produced by the things he said and the language he used; never by the manner of saying them. He could hardly have survived in that political state which he did his best to bring on, when stentorian oratory will be the chief mode of appeal, and a strong or a shrill voice will be an indispensable weapon.