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

The Growth of the Radical

The Growth of the Radical.

''He was no democrat,'' they asserted. ''He had never been a lover of the populace. The fineness of his organization, his distinguished manners, his personal habits, his culture, and his aristocratic pride, all marked him as claiming to belong to an exclusive class. When in England, he associated, or endeavoured to associate, page 197largely with the aristocracy. It was only in the last year of his residence there that, neglected by them, he allied himself with the extreme Radicals. When he returned to New Zealand, he lived for five years in haughty isolation. Delivered up to the Furies in the shape of his own angry passions, he plotted revenge. Opportunities offering, he instituted a systematic vendêtta against the Imperial Government and the great landowners. Again thwarted, he made the same volte-face in the State as the great or grandiose Lamennais had, forty years before, made in the Church. He threw himself into the arms of the democracy. Aristo crate par goût, he became tribun par calcul. And thus the man who, so late as the last year of his second term as Governor of New Zealand, was spoken of as an 'aristocrat of the aristocrats,' ended his public life as a democrat enragé.''

That a man should become a Radical in his old age was a metamorphosis that puzzled Goethe in his coeval, Bentham. It does not surprise us, who have seen Gladstone blossom into Radicalism in his last decades. Sir George Grey was never the man described. His early sympathies appear to have been with the Whigs. He prevented the endowment of State churches in South Australia, Otago, and Canterbury. He cheapened land in New Zealand, and opened up the country to the "free selector." The constitution he drafted for that Colony was acknowledged in the House of Commons to abound in liberal provisions. Animated by an ultra-republican passion, he treated the Maoris as the equals of the settlers and the Fingo levies as the equals of the English troops. Evidently, his Radicalism was no recantation of Toryism.

It had a physical basis. It was in Bentham, as in Gladstone, an effluence of youth; Bentham, like Bonstetten, was a boy to the last. Gladstone seemed to grow younger in mind as he grew older in years, and advanced, as Swedenborg says the angels do, "continually towards the springtide of his youth." So it was with Grey. None of his faculties showed signs of decay. At seventy, at eighty, he had the sanguine optimism of youth. At page 198seventy-one he adopted the doctrine of the nationalisation of the land. At seventy-seven he took up with Socialism. At eighty-three he thrilled an audience of English legislators with his glowing vision of the federation of peoples. "Age did not wither" him. In his last years he still had youthfulness of mind enough to adopt a new philosophy, a new religion, a new political cause, and he could have preached a crusade on its behalf. If we were to seek for the first striking manifestation of his Eadicalism, we might find it in the passion for exploration that brought him out to Australia in order to discover wide landed tracts on which the landless and starving masses of Britain might find homes.

Its subdued manifestations during his Governorships we have already seen. Not till thirty years later did it come to a head. An exile from England till 1868, he then found the country swept by a wave of advanced Liberalism, with the intellectual leaders of the day and all "young England" on the crest. The author of a oncepopular book, Ginx's Baby, brought home to him afresh, what he had observed thirty years before, the condition of the very poor. These things were the soil of the new growth. But this much having been admitted and the continuity having been shown, the advocatus Diaboli must have his place. The germinating impulse came from without. Estrangement from the governing class was its motive. It was a Radicalism of revolt. The rebellious passions—outraged pride, hatred, revenge, thwarted ambition—supplied its nutriment. And never since Burke, Byron, or Lamennais has passion armed reason with such splendid powers. Eloquence unknown to himself as to others, dormant sympathies evoked, visions of the future, propagandist enthusiasm, all came at call. And they reacted on the man. No one who ever heard him speak in public could doubt his sincerity. There are men, such as Benjamin Constant or Byron, who are hard or cynical in conversation, but whose imagination takes wing when they enter the "tribune," the professor's chair, or the pulpit, or sit down to write. In which are they the truer to themselves—the superficial page 199scepticism or the underlying fanaticism? We have traced the rebellious spirit throughout Grey's career, and are not likely to underestimate its power, but deep below all its manifestations burned unquenchably the pure flame of faith in God and hope for man. One move after another may have been mere disloyalty or revenge in its inception, but as it grew it became a nobler loyalty. Or, if that be too much to grant, it was at least recommended by considerations so exalted that it might have ''deceived the elect.''