A Maker of Australasia.

Yet, after all, the limitations of his ethics and the defects of his personal character will, at the great assize, weigh but slightly in the balance against the real and great services Sir George Grey has rendered to particular colonies, to the Empire, and (may we not say?) to humanity at large. The private and personal element in his nature, charming or repellent, lofty and soaring, or tortuous and grovelling, as it may be held, is insignificant by the side of his altruist attributes and activities. He was what Emerson calls "a public soul,'' with all his doors and windows open to airs and breezes that came page 226from another world than that of the egoist life. It was interesting to observe, in conversing with him, to how small an extent his thoughts ran on the private affairs of himself or of others. Topics of colonial, imperial, or world-wide interest were the sole themes of his most intimate converse. Just so, as one remembers, did the eminent Grecian come home from a tour in old Hellas and have nothing to say abont the country of his predilection, save in relation to general ideas. Just so, as one also remembers, did the celebrated philosopher refuse to answer gossiping questioners; he, too, returning from Egypt with stores of ideas, but with nothing to tell in the way of personal adventure. Though Grey was exacting of due respect to himself, as he was in general careful to pay it to others, all his actions—and his feelings and thoughts almost always issued in action— had public ends.

So it had been with him all his days. In his youth he dreamt of gaining fame only through the rendering of great services, and his earliest achievements were designed to open up undiscovered countries for the relief of the poverty-stricken and the oppressed. Fortune led him to the Antipodes, where his career began, and where it ended. He was a maker of Australasia by discovering hills and mountain-chains, small or noble rivers, and fertile grassy plains in Western Australia where (as he believed) millions of agricultural settlers would one day dwell. He was a maker of Australasia when he checked South Australia in a course of political blundering that was fruitful of economic disaster; when he set himself to rescue and raise its aboriginals, and thus redeemed the colonists who had robbed them of their domains; when he devised there, as also in New Zealand, a policy of democratic landed settlement; and when he promoted a system of emigration that dowered the Colony with a valuable ethnical variety. In New Zealand he was less a maker of Australasia than he would have been its unmaker, when he endeavoured to amalgamate the Maoris and the colonists into a single hybrid race of page 227mingled blood and culture; but lie was really a maker of Australasia when he subjugated and then conciliated the Maoris and thus fitted the islands for the settlement of a new British community; when he clothed this community with the political and ecclesiastical organization of a federal free people; and he would have been the maker of a Greater Australasia, had his constructive ideas of a South Sea Islands federation been completely, as they have been partially, realised. He was a maker of South Africa by his sympathetic treatment of the Boers and his scheme of a South African federation—unfulfilled indeed, and still destined to bear abundant fruit in our own time. He was yet once more a maker of Australasia when he returned to the Legislature of his favourite colony and there sat as a legislator where once he had sat as a deputy of the Sovereign. For in those halls and throughout the Colony he fashioned the democracy that is now leading the policy of the world, and he laid the foundation stones of the structure that is being imitated in Australia and the Motherland. By all that he achieved, and hardly less by what he failed to accomplish he approved himself a famous maker of Australasia and a heroic builder of the British Empire.