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

Chapter XXIII. — In the Desert

page 167

Chapter XXIII.
In the Desert.

The gates were doubly barred against his return to office as a colonial Governor. In 1867, at the instance of Disraeli, always allured by the show of things, and this time imitating an innovation that had been made by the Spaniards in South America, a new principle was introduced into the selection of colonial Governors. It was required that the Governor of a self-governing colony "should be born in the purple,'' as the Byzantine emperors were born in the purple chamber. Grey plumed himself on his aristocratic connections. They were not recognised. His alleged descent from Huguenot nobles and his visit to the abodes of his mother's ancestors in Normandy did not avail him. He had not been "born in the purple.'' His pride was cut to the quick, and his democratic partialities were heightened almost to madness—"that worst madness which wears a reasoning show."

A Fresh Rebuff.

Yet he did not despair of recovering the favour of the Colonial Office. When troubles were brewing in South Africa in the late seventies, he sat sullen in his island, waiting for a summons. Just so had Lord Melbourne, who had sworn himself out of office, as out of men's respect, sat "waiting to be sent for." The summons did not arrive, and Mahomet went to the mountain that refused to come to him. He applied to be sent to South Africa. The application was refused. Ten or twelve years afterwards Froude was sympathetic. "South Africa is moving again," he wrote to him in 1889; "you might set all straight, but the Office, I suppose, would as soon invite the help of the King of Darkness." Lord page 168Carnarvon was then ruler at "the Office," and he was neither a Satan nor his ally, but he was implacably convinced that Grey "was a dangerous man," who would wreck any colonial government to which he might be appointed.

Spurned by the Colonial Office and by the governing powers, he was for the first time in nearly thirty years a free man. He no longer owed loyalty to any department of State, and both political parties having employed and promoted him, he owed none to either of the great parties in particular. He was still in his prime, with thirty years of life and twenty years of administrative and legislative activity ahead of him. The world lay all before him. What path of activity should he choose?

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.

Advocates Immigration.

He had a cause as well as a weapon. According to his own account, he had gone to explore West Australia in the hope of finding some extensive tracts of country where the English and (still more) the Irish proletariat, whose sufferings he had seen in the thirties, might be successfully settled. There he realised his hope by discovering, as he imagined, tracts suitable for the settlement of emigrants from the crowded Motherland, and his imagination was fired by the thought that in future years cities with teeming populations of prosperous citizens would flourish on those wastes. Thirty years afterwards he resumed the theme. He made in England and Scotland the first of his oratorical tours and addressed large audiences. He spoke with unequalled knowledge of some of the most desirable fields of emigration in the British Empire or in the world. He had not only explored both the tropical and the sub-tropical parts of Western Australia; he had resided in its temperate south-west, so well suited to agriculture. As Governor, he had resided in South Australia, for two long terms in New Zealand, and for two shorter terms in South Africa. He had penetrated some distance into South Australia. He had visited almost every part of New Zealand, much of it on foot. He had ridden all over Cape page 171Colony, Kafraria, Natal, and into the Orange State. He had watched young and already robust communities grow up in such countries. He had a glowing imagination and much descriptive power. Who so well fitted to paint the aesthetic attractions or the real advantages of emigration to such lands? He at once took a high point of view. In those days emigration was looked upon in England as little better than transportation, doubtless because it was often ''assisted,'' because emigrants were often drawn from the lower strata of society, and again because they were going out to countries that were believed to be still in a state of semi-savagery. In the early eighties the sentiment had not passed away, and those who then went out to New Zealand were regarded as just objects of compassion. So recently as the end of 1907 a young woman who had been brought out to New South Wales as a domestic servant vigorously objected to being described as an 'emigrant.'

Grey set himself to eradicate the prejudice. He described the Australasian colonies in particular as possessing many attractions—great natural beauty, a virgin soil, and a glorious climate, where life was worth living for its own sake, where manual labour was light, abundant, and highly remunerated, where taxation was not burdensome, poverty unknown, workhouses nonexistent, gaols empty. Above all, he lauded the political condition of these happy countries. There reigned perfect equality. There aspiring young men might enter any profession and hope to rise to any eminence, that of Governor alone excepted. There working-men might become Premiers and cabinet ministers, chief justices and judges, heads of departments, inspectors-general of police, editors of influential journals, and so forth. Did not the hearts of his audience burn within them as they listened to Aladdin and saw the transformation-scenes revealed by his wonderful lamp? Well might the eloquent speaker assure them that the colonies were not places of exile, but "a home and a heritage for the people of England.''

He had a definite policy of emigration. He proposed that it should be conducted by the agency of parishes page 172and municipalities, which would select and send out emigrants, bearing or assisting in bearing the cost of emigration, and ever after retaining a maternal interest in such bodies. These would be placed in special settlements, where they would perpetuate the traditions of the towns and parishes whence they had come. They would be organically connected with their metropolitan source. And as aid had flowed out from the municipality or parish to the colonial settlement, so would it flow back to the parish or municipality and bring out fresh emigrants. Spiritual children of the old communities would these young communities be.

It was a hopeful scheme—far more practicable than many such schemes that have been seriously tried, and it deserved a better fate than silence or extinction. But the time was unfavourable. The political energies of public men were absorbed by the Irish and other questions, and the country had neither time nor attention to spare for such a topic.

It was doubtless in connection with this subject that Grey came into contact with Carlyle. The Latter-day Pamphleteer had long had a strong belief in emigration as likely to relieve the distress existing in England and open out new vistas of hope for the poor. He was therefore greatly attracted by a man of the ruler or hero type who had set himself to preach the same panacea for English woes, and who was furnished with a definite scheme for carrying it out. He encouraged Grey to continue his propaganda. "The question of emigration is the most important of all questions for this nation," he wrote, "and you, of all men," he told Grey, "are the man to urge and guide it to a successful issue." He talked with Lord Derby about Grey and his plan and found him sympathetic. He introduced Grey to his lordship, half apologising for performing what might be a superfluous act. Grey certainly impressed him as a true worker in a good cause.

When a grander arena than the platform opened up to Grey, Carlyle naturally took a deep interest in his candidature for Newark. He wrote a letter which he page 173obviously designed to aid it, and, with the same object, his niece copied out the passages in his writings that bore on emigration. He averred that he "took more interest in that single candidature than in all the other remaining 657." Edward Jenkins, author of a now-forgotten, but once popular pamphlet-story, Ginx's Baby, was Grey's most strenuous supporter. The election never came off, or at least Grey withdrew from the contest. The Liberal Ministry of the day was far from anxious to enlist a "supporter" who might have exhausted the forms of Parliament, but would never have exhausted the resources of an ever-scheming brain, in making the lives of the occupants of the Ministerial front bench a burden to them. Gladstone himself intervened. He desired to find a seat for a general officer, Sir Henry Storks, whose aid was wanted by the Government in the House of Commons. He brought pressure on Grey to induce him to retire. Seeing that, opposed by the Government, he would have small chance of being elected, or that, by dividing the party, he might let a Tory get in, Grey yielded to pressure, and was thus jockeyed out of a seat in the House of Commons. He himself used to say that he was jockeyed out of a second seat. The two events were flung in his face by a judge of the Supreme Court in New Zealand, who said, in a brief but pungent letter to the Spectator, that two English constituencies had shown their opinion of his discretion by refusing to return him to Parliament. In neither case had the constituency, in all probability, anything to do with the result.

Still another sphere was open to him. He might endeavour to mould public opinion by appealing to it through the press.

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.

His Retreat.

That hour of triumph lay far in the distance, and meanwhile he was informed that the Liberal leaders were embarrassed by his persistent advocacy of a cause then much in advance of their designs. Told by them that page 176lie was compromising the party and conscious that he was compromising himself by association with certain Radical irreconcilables, he resolved on a great sacrifice. As Salinguerra, in Browning's epic, banished himself to Padua, so that—

" Said he, my presence, judged the single bar To permanent tranquillity, may jar No longer——"

Grey impulsively decidedly to leave England. It was an irreparable mistake. Had he chosen to bide his time, no power under heaven could have kept him out of Parliament. As a legislator, he would have been only at his second-best, for he had no mastery of detail. But he had a large grasp of principles, a gift of luminous exposition, and a zeal for propaganda that would have found in the Legislature or on the platform their fitting sphere. He might eventually have done much to organize a national system of colonisation. He might have become standing colonial adviser to the House, or the voluntary spokesman of the Australasian colonies. It would have been interesting to observe how he confronted the great leader of the Liberal party, whose rooted distrust he reciprocated with lifelong dislike, and how these two haughty spirits, like Michael and Lucifer in Byron's most splendid poem, comported themselves in the shock of inevitable battle. All such chances, useful and ornamental, were for ever thrown away by the rash decision. He had only to bid adieu to the distinguished men of letters and science with whom he had consorted.

His Scientific and Literary Associates.

For at all times he cultivated the society of men of letters and science. In the first years of his residence in New Zealand a letter addressed by Darwin to Captain Stokes, who had censured Grey's surveys of West Australia and condemned the recommendations based on them, was by a singular accident enclosed in a copy of a book sent out to Grey. How it contrived to find its way there never transpired; surely, "an enemy had done this page 177thing.'' The letter was sympathetic with Stokes and condemnatory of Grey, but it elicited a magnanimous reply from the high-minded man, which initiated an amicable correspondence between the naturalist and the Governor, who were both rising into fame. The correspondence led to further intercourse, and in after-years, when Grey happened to be temporarily resident in London, the two (according to Grey's account) often walked the streets at night, discussing many things. Those who have walked the streets with Grey at night will remember the animation of the old man, his interminable flow of talk, and the apparently inexhaustible physical strength of the septuagenarian; and they will easily imagine what noctes, if not coenasque, deorum those walks and talks must have been. During his intermittent visits to the metropolis Grey also made the acquaintance of Mill, with whom (he was wont to relate) he discussed the uses and abuses of the waste lands of the colonies, and in conjunction with whom (he veraciously affirmed) he devised the economic doctrine of "the unearned increment." He met with Spencer at the Athenæum. Huxley was then president of the Ethnological Society, and, having caught such a very big fish, he was eager to serve him up as often as he could and as highly sauced as possible. Grey had apparently figured to advantage at a meeting of the Society, and Huxley desired to arrange for another soirée to be devoted to the ethnology of Polynesia, at which Grey was to read a paper on Maori sagas. He would himself, he afterwards intimated, open the ball; Grey would come next; and a bishop would wind up. Grey would thus, he playfully said, be sandwiched between science and religion.

At the Athenæum he met Lecky, to whom he claimed to have suggested the striking passage in the History of European Morals where the eloquent Irish historian makes the apology of the prostitute, who vicariously sacrifices her womanhood to shield the purity of the family and secure the matron "in the pride of her untempted chastity." Carlyle he saw at Chelsea; page 178and Carlyle wrote of him, with some exaggeration: "he is born of the Tetragonidæ, built four-square, solid, as one fitted to strongly meet the winds of heaven and the waves of fate." To a veracious New Zealand humorist he confessed that he could not make out whether Grey was a man of genius or a humbug; but on learning that Grey, who had smoked a pipe with him, was no smoker, he concluded that he was a humbug. We may be sure that Grey did not jest, practically or theoretically, with so serious a reformer as John Morley, but found himself in close affinity with the then republican. Rhoda Broughton he knew, as he also well knew her model guardsman and ideal man, who was long a member of the Legislative Council of New Zealand. Grey associated by preference with men who had some literary cultivation, and though his native sphere was action, he seemed always glad to escape from the mud-bath of politics into the ether of poetical imagination or philosophical speculation.