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

The Irish Reformer

The Irish Reformer.

Grey seldom (perhaps only once in public) referred to his partially Irish origin. Probably moved less by a hereditary strain that might as well have been hostile as favourable to the repeal of the Union than by his sympathy with the pro-Irish Liberalism of the time, in 1869 he addressed a long letter to the then chief organ page 174of Liberalism in the London daily press, the Daily News. In this he claimed to have first proposed a solution of the Irish problem that would alike commend itself to the Irish Nationalists and at the same time appear to English Liberals less fraught with danger than the total repeal of the Union accompanied with Home Rule…. So I had written, remembering the account of his scheme as given to myself during a visit to Kawau in 1884. He then contemplated minimising the dangers of a single parliament in Ireland, with a single administration, by proposing that there should be four legislatures, with four administrations, answering to the four provinces; and the difficulty that was then perplexing him and exercising his ingenuity was homologous with that which is now puzzling Australian legislators—namely, where to plant the site of a federal capital, which could not be at Dublin. A similar scheme was actually broached some time in the seventies by an English barrister who is a member of the present English Ministry (1908), and I may be confounding the two. However that may be, no such scheme was projected by Grey in 1869. The one he then put forth simply proposed to grant to Ireland a single legislature which should possess powers similar to those of an American State legislature. There was, in the letters, no attempt to work out the scheme or surmount in theory the difficulties arising from conflicting jurisdictions. The Act of Parliament that he drafted consisted of a single clause, providing for the creation of a legislature for Ireland, As then elaborated, it was to consist of two elective houses, having the same legislative powers as a State legislature in the United States, and it was, as he then proposed, to sit in Dublin. Irish members were to remain at Westminster, as in the final (not in the earlier) form of Gladstone's scheme, but were no longer to intervene or vote on matters of purely English, Scottish, or Welsh concernment.

The project met with little notice when it was published; public opinion was not yet sufficiently advanced to give it a favourable reception. It had an unmistakable page 175reception from the Liberal chiefs. It threw a bomb-shell into the Liberal camp, where very different measures were being prepared, whose fate it might imperil or seal. The leaders hastened to repudiate an ally who might seriously compromise them. Earl Granville, only too well instructed in Grey's colonial career, and inheriting the distrust of him now entertained by the Colonial Office, violently attacked Grey in the House of Lords. Gladstone, not yet a convert to Home Rule, and Bright, who never became one, were strongly hostile. Grey actually believed that he had converted Carlyle to his views, but a very different measure would have been dealt out to the poor Irish by the biographer of Cromwell.

Seventeen or eighteen years later the letters were reprinted in a New Zealand journal. Home Eule was then in full blast. The bill of 1886 was in general instantly accepted by all but the more Conservative colonists. They sought to aid the movement. In 1887 a cablegram, signed by Grey in the name of many legislators, was addressed to Gladstone, who now plumed himself on the support of the man whom he had jockeyed out of the House of Commons, and whose action, eighteen years before, had threatened to embarrass him. It urged the illustrious statesman to be strong and of good courage; "faint not from age," it exhorted him. Grey cannot but have inwardly exulted at his triumph over the man who had once contemned him and now adopted his policy, but no word of unseemly or ignoble exultation escaped his lips. Unlike many a great thinker or great man in his old age—Carlyle or Tennyson, Ruskin or Spencer—he had the satisfaction of seeing the world going his way at last, and not the way that more famous advisers would have had it go.