llFE OF
Wmi^mmBJoS GREY
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THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THE MAKERS OF AUSTRALASIA
EDITED BY
JAMES HIGHT, M.A., Litt.D.,
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ECONOMICS CANTERBURY COLLEGE.
THE MAKERS OF AUSTRALASIA.
EARLY VOLUMES
(READY)
EXPLORERS OF THE EAST, CENTRE AND WEST OF AUSTRALIA, by ERNEST PavenC.
SIR GEORGE GREY— Governor, High Commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography, by J. COLLIER.
(IN PREPARATION) THE MAORIS OF NEW ZEALAND, by JAMES COWAN.
THE EARLY GOVERNORS OF AUSTRALIA, by Erank Bladen.
SiK George Grey.
Sir George Grey
GOVERNOR, HIGH COMMISSIONER, and PREMIER
AN HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY
BY
JAMES COLLIER,
FORMERLY ASSISTANT TO HERBERT SPENCER ;
JOINT- AUTHOR OF "DESCRIPTIVE SOCIOLOGY "—ENGLISH AND FRENCH;
AND AUTHOR OF "THE LITERATURE RELATING TO NEW
ZEALAND : A BIBLIOGRAPHY."
Chribtchurch, Wellington and Dunedin., N.Z.; Melbourne and London :
WHITCOMBE AND TOMBS LIMITED.
1909.
vD
5- s C^7
TO
JOHN MACMILLAN BROWN
AS A MEMORIAL OF A LONG FRIENDSHIP.
G73002
PREFACE.
It was once suggested to Sir George Grey that he should write his autobiography. "Pah!" he exclaimed, with a gesture of disgust at the thought of recalling many a passage in his past life that he would gladly shroud behind a veil of oblivion. None the less, the idea struck root in his mind, and, when his public career in New Zealand seemed to be brought to a close by his retirement from the Legislature, it germinated. He was too indolent to write about himself, but he was at all times eager to have things written about him. Who more worthy to write a biography of him that should be virtually an autobiography than the friend who had championed his cause in the press? When Sir William Fox, who had opposed Grey during a long public life, on the platform and at the Colonial Office, in the Legislature and in the press, perverted (as Grey deemed) the story of Grey's life, it was Mr. Rees whom Grey employed to state what he considered the true version of the facts. When, again, a military officer derided Grey's claim to have diverted to India the troops sent to China at the time of the Indian mutiny, it was the same valorous defender, who, at Grey's instance, vindicated the pretension of the old High Commis- sioner. Mr. Rees's relations with Sir George Grey in his later years were of the most intimate character. No one was more conversant with his affairs. No one better knew his mind on all subjects of a public nature. No one had rendered him so many services. Residing now in the same city with the old Governor. Mr. Rees enjoyed unequalled opportunities of hearing the whole story of his career, at least as it appeared to Grey. Through many a Sunday afternoon Grey used the privilege of old age and talked over the narrative of his life, as he had done to dozens of others.
Written by one of the ablest men in New Zealand, Mr. Rees's biography could not be otherwise than commendable. Coming fresh, in large part, from the lips of Sir George Grey, it has
Viii. PREFACE
an authority that no other work can rival. But even Mr. Rees would not claim that it is an impartial biography. He held a brief for Sir George Grey, and the advocate has been thoroughly loyal. It is Grey's presentation of his own case — with his facts, his sentiments, his vindication of himself. But if the work derives authority from its source, it also loses as much as it gains. An old senator said that if Grey ever wrote his autobiography, it would not be a truthful history. For the same reason Mr. Rees's biography is not perfectly veracious. Certain pictures are too highly coloured; the account of Grej^'s refusal to bring the first New Zealand constitution into opera- tion is, like other accounts, more graphic than correct. Certain facts are omitted. Thus, the various contentions between Grey and the Colonial Office in South Africa are clearly given, but many of the facts that tell against Grey have not been stated. Not all of the differences between Grey and his Ministers during his second New Zealand term have been described. Some, too, of the narratives enchased in it have a romantic colouring that must be derived from Sir George Grey's imagination. Let any reader compare the account of the Kafir rising in Rees with an account of it in a later work, and he will wonder whether he is reading about the same series of events.
The work just referred to — Professor Hendei-son's Life and Times of Sir George Grey — has none of the freshness that came to Mr. Rees from personal knowledge of and personal inter- course with Sir George Grey. Its judicial character gains by the drawback. Evidence of bias there is none. All the more weight therefore attaches to the author's unsparing judgment upon the Governor, the High Commissioner, the Premier, and the man. It is grounded on an abundant store of fresh materials. Professor Hendei'son was permitted to explore the archives of South Australia, and he made journeys to Western Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape expressly to examine the official documents in these colonies. He was permitted to read the private letters addressed to Grey and examine Grey's literary remains. He catechised Grey's contemporaries in South Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. He had opportuni- ties of reproducing illuminative maps. From these new sources fresh light emerges. The author states new facts. He
PREFACE IX.
completely vindicates Grey's right to spell his name as he did, and thus clears away a cloud that long lay on his reputation. Nothing was known of Grey's early schooling, and he never spoke of it. Professor Henderson supplies the lack, and further illuminates Grey's character in doing so. A South Australian resident himself, he gives a lucid and full account of Grey's dealings with the blacks in South Australia. The processes of retrenchment and reconstruction in South Aus- tralia, which Mr. Rees had reported from the only then-known source, Mr. Button's useful volume, are tirst clearly and comprehensively described. The author takes an independent view of controverted questions. He takes sides with Earl Grey, defends his action with regard to the uncultivated Maori lands, and supports his view that Grey's policy in breaking doAvn the authority of the tribal chiefs in both New Zealand and South Africa was a disastrous mistake. Not for the first time (for his disclosure was anticipated a few years ago by an English military officer) he tells the naked truth about the taking of Weraroa. He gives what appears to be a true narrative of the Kafir rising in 1858 in broad contrast to the romantic and utterly untrustworthy account of the series of events given by Mr. Rees, doubtless from Sir George Grey's version of the facts. It shows how distorting a medium Grey's memory had become, when prompted by a glorifying but falsifying imagination. Almost the most important chapters consist of the narrative of Grey's career as High Commissioner in South Africa. His faults and errors in South Africa were known before; indeed, Mr. Rees does not seek to disguise them; but never before have Grey's repeated acts of insubordination been so clearly brought out or so conclusively sheeted home to him.
Of equal rank with these, and in some respects possessing a higher authority, as history is higher than biography, Mr. G. W. Rusden's History of New Zealand is indispensable for the full understanding of the two long periods of Grey's governorships in New Zealand. It was characterised by a late Lord Derby as a model colonial history. If a model history should be impartial, the eulogy is ill deserved. The work is, indeed, a passionate plaidoyer on behalf of the Maori race, and while it exalts the philo-Maoris of New Zealand sometimes beyond their deserts, it does scant justice to those colonial Ministers who
X. PREFACE
deemed the rights of the natives secondary to the interests of the present and future white inhabitants of New Zealand. But if Mr. Rusden refuses to make himself the spokesman of the thirst of expansion in a conquering race, and sometimes leaves out of account views that deserve consideration, he can seldom be charged with perverting facts. He has many weapons in his armoury. One piece of work that has not been attempted by anyone else, even Professor Henderson, he did eminently well; he exhaustively examined the despatches in the Colonial Office, London, and he thus brought to light occurrences that, but for his scrutiny, would never have been publicly known. He also sought the acquaintance of men who had taken a large part in the events he described — especially of Grey, who obviously contributed many side-lights to the picture. Though in a distant colon}', the historian lived through the events he described, and his narrative bears the marks of the vivid realisation that belongs to a contemporary of more than ordinary imagination.
A fourth work is no less indispensable to the biographer of Grey. Mr. James Drummond's brilliant and copious biography of Mr. Seddon was assuredly not written with the object of glorifying Sir George Grey. On the contrary, it is conceived in a spirit of systematic disparagement of the Minister, if not of the man, who was the remote founder of the policy Mr. Seddon pursued and the organizer of the party he led. But it furnishes an animated narrative of Grey's career as Premier, and the student of the New Zealand Hansard through the whole period when Grey was a colonial legislator will acknowledge its fidelity to truth. It also throws welcome light on Grey's relations with Mr. Seddon after Seddon became Premier.
To all these works, but especially to the first three, the present volume is deeply indebted. Without the indispensable aid they afford it could not have been written as it is — ^portions of it, indeed, could not have been written at all. Critically used, they have the value and the authority of historical dociuiients.
The other materials for the biography or history of Grey are voluminous. In 1889 a Bibliography of New Zealand by the present writer was published at the Government Printing Office, Wellington. It contains an account of some 1200 books, portions of books, review and magazine articles, and pamphlets, in three languages, relating to New Zealand. Every one of these that
PREFACE XI.
was accessible was minutely examined and briefly described. Naturally, a large number of them relate to Grey, and they have been of use in throwing light on various parts of his career. To some of these the writer's attention was drawn by Sir George
Grey.
Of still greater utility have been found the impressions derived from personal intercourse with the illustrious Governor and the information about himself then personally communi- cated. He was a delightful companion, and during weeks of close daily association so long ago as 1884, or more intermittent relations, of a public as well as of a private nature, in after- years, he unbosomed as much of himself as so reticent a man was wont to do. For, with all his apparent communicativeness, he was, or was supposed to be, impenetrably reserved. The surface of his mind was spread out before you, but the depths were, it at first seemed, beyond your plummet's sounding. Just so was it with William of Orange. He who was so voluble in conversation, and always ready to converse, derived his sobriquet, not from his silence, but from his speech. That flowed out on all topics without baring his purposes respecting them, or even revealing his deepest views of them. Yet there almost always comes an hour when William the Silent or Grey the Inscrutable, who has refused to yield the secrets of his soul to the picklock or the eavesdropper, will surprise his interlocutor by voluntarily and unexpectedly, with a completeness that leaves nothing hidden, laying open the unsunned caverns and unsounded depths of his nature, as a sudden flash of lightning illumines a tract of darkness. He who had long been an enigma to his colonial contemporaries and a problem to his intimates had given up his secret. The heart of his mystery had been plucked out. The riddle of the scornful Sphinx had been read.
So, at least, it appeared to the writer. Seeing much of Grey afterwards, especially in public scenes, he found no difficulty in applying his discovery, and at its "open, Sesame!" the unbarred gates flew apart. Every utterance became significant, and every action charged with meaning. The following work, at all events, has been written from this point of view. If not always or often obtruded, it is ever>'where implied. It is the keynote of the book.
Xll. PREFACE
With many of the former friends of Grey the writer was also well acquainted. From them — his subordinates in the old days, his colleagues in later years — he learnt much about the Governor and the Premier, the legislator and the man.
The whole story of a life so full and so varied has been told by none of his biographers. This writer omits one part of his career; that writer ignores another. One slurs over his English residence in 1868-69 ; another hastily summarises his legislative and Ministerial activity from 1874 to 1890. Nor in the present volume will all be found narrated. His Superintendency of Auckland Province remains in obscurity because there are no very accessible records of it, and his colleagues in it apparently do not care to recall its tenor. His amateur science, on which he plumed himself, was too unscientific, supported though it was by Sir Oliver Lodge, and anticipated by an earlier savant, to be susceptible of exact statement. Even with these excrescences lopped off, it remains a very great career. By his energy and his wisdom, his originalities and his audacities, he rose, head and shoulders, above all other colonial Governors, before him or since. He will ever be one of the greatest figures in the colonial history of the Empire.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. His Early Life II. The Explorer
III. Governor of South Australia
IV. Go\-eenor of New Zealand : first Term.
The Subjugation of the Maoris ...
V. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : FIRST TERM {continued). The Missionaries
VI. Governor of New Zealand: First Term {continued). A Proposed Political Constitution
VII. Governor of New Zealand: first Term {cmtinued). Civilising the Maoris ...
VIII. Governor of New Zealand : First Term (continued,). The Mythologist
IX. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : FIRST TERM (cmitinued). Three Colonising Associations
X. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : FIRST TERM {continued). The New Constitution
XI. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : FIRST TERM {continued). The Churchman
XII. GO\'ERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : FIRST TERM {contimied). His Departure
XIII. AN Interlude
XIV. High Commissioner in south Africa.
His Native Policy
XV. HIGH Commissioner in south Africa {continued). The German Legion ...
XVI. HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA {continued). A South African Kingdom
XVII. HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA {continued). An Episode
XVIII. HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA {continued). South African Federation
XIX. HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA : SECOND TERM. On Sunium's Heights
PAGE
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7
18
30
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51 59 66 70
76
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90 94
96
lOG
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115
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XIV.
CONTENTS
CHAPTEB
XX. High Commissioner in South Africa : Second Term
(continued). The Library Founder
XXI. Governor op New Zealand : Second Term
XXII. an English Proxenos
XXIII. In the Desert
XXIV. AT KAWAU ...
XXV. Legislator and Premier
XXVI. In Opposition
XXVII. Australia Revisited ...
XXVIII. His Last Years
XXIX. The Man— Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Religious
PAGE
1.32 137 163 167 179 182 192 204 207
211
LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS.
Sir George Grey Henry Williams Bishop Selwyn Alfred Domett Sir Frederick Weld
Frontispiece
86 142 166
LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY.
Chapter I. HIS EARLY LIFE.
Few colonial governors have excited such enthusiastic admiration and ardent devotion as Sir George Grey ; few have, in an equal degree, aroused passionate hatred, stern disapproval, and even angry contempt. Now that these partial feelings have passed away, a historical interest must still be inspired by the spectacle of his governing force, the variety of the stages on which he played so considerable a part, the veiy magnitude of his errors, and the dramatic vicissitudes of his chequered career. To his contemporaries he was a myth; to his oldest acquaint- ances his character was a mystery. Like many a greater and many a lesser man, he was pronounced ''inscrut- able." Yet few have sought, to few have been given, more opportunities of self-disclosure. For over half-a- century he lived in the public eye. His acts were known to all the world. He was easy of approach and drove none away. His conversation was largely autobiographical. His addresses turned on his ego as on a pivot, and even his despatches have a personal flavour rare in State docu- ments. As if apprehensive of posthumous misconstruc- tion, he took care that the story of his life should be told from his own point of view. Sixteen years ago he authorised the publication of a skilfully composed biography, so evidently inspired by the subject of it that it may be accepted as his apologia pro vita sua. Due allowance being made for the distortions produced by the illusions of old age, the book must be the foundation of all study of his character. If, with this central blaze
B
2 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
and so many collateral lights, that character remains an enigma, the fault is surely our own. At all events, the problem is a challenge. We believe that it can be solved, and in the process of solution we shall be brought close to a remarkable personality, full at once of fascination, instruction, and warning.
His Ancestr*y.
George Grey was born at Lisbon on April 14, 1812. The place and the time were alike significant. His mother was one of a group of wives of English officers who tarried in the Portuguese capital while their husbands were in the field. Born out of England, George Grey was destined to spend almost all the years of his manhood and old age in distant lands. The place was prophetic. The time was no less notable. Genius often rises in constellations, and the year of the great governor's birth was that also of a great poet, Robert Browning, of a great chancellor. Lord Selborne, of a great humanist, Mark Pattison, of a great apostate, William George Ward, and of a great abolitionist, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, while it was also or nearly that of two great novelists, Thackeray and Dickens. If his claim to Huguenot descent through his mother was well-founded, he was a notable member of a remarkable group — the Newmans, the Martineaus, the Mialls, Herbert Spencer, and many others — through whom a foreign infusion enriched the public life and the culture of England. Whether a certain disloyalty of character of which we shall have more to say may be justly ascribed to the Huguenot strain in his blood, it would be hazardous to speculate. To his less problematical Irish extraction Grey probably owed the winning manner that made him liked by men and adored by women, and the eloquent tongue that led all hearts captive. The vindictive passions that played so large a part in his life may have had the same origin, or they may have been the natural outcome of the imperious temper that bore him to eminence and was also the source of all his reverses.
HIS EAKLY LIFE S
His Patronymic.
All through his public life he bore the name of Grey, but he was believed to have changed it from the common (and Irish) orthography, Gray. Many men have changed their names, with or without the royal license. Grey himself told (with evident consciousness) how the Duke of Wellington's family transformed the democratic Wes- ley into the aristocratic Wellesley. The eminent French Sinologue, Noel JuUien (already well-enough named, it might seem) surreptitiously assumed the name of a deceased elder brother and was ever afterwards known to the world as Stanislas Jullien. Others have pardonably substituted an unobjectionable or a distinguished for an offensive cognomen. Others still, like Richard Hengist Home, have interpolated an imaginary aggrandising name between their Christian and their surnames, or redeemed a too conmaon name by interposing a real but unused baptismal name. Many have completely changed the appearance of their names by turning an i into a y or appending an e. Grey would therefore have had abundant countenance for the innovation he is alleged to have made in the orthography of his patronymic. While he was Governor of New Zealand, he was openly charged with having so altered his surname as to suggest that he belonged to one of the most distinguished aristocratic Whig houses of last century. The charge exposed him to the insults of the scurrilous pamphleteer, who publicly addressed him as ''Sir George Gray." After he was in his grave, it was pitilessly revived. In a volume of reminiscences published three or four years ago Admiral Sir George Keppel brought it again to life. Some years earlier the Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, a Gray himself, who doubtless felt that Sir George had deserted the Irish clan and deprived it of its rightful share in its fame, repeated the accusation. It is not the least of Professor Henderson's services to the memory of a great man that to this malignant fiction he has dealt the deathblow. He has conclusively proved that Grey had every possible right to spell the name as he did. It was the orthography of his father's name. In a despatch of 1812 the Duke of Wellington laments the death at
4 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Badajoz of Lieutenant-Colonel Grey. In a letter of the year 1813 the Duke of York writes to Mrs. Grey of her late husband as ' ' Colonel George Grey. ' ' And the medal then sent to her by the Duke bears the name, Grey. There was therefore no need for the son to throw a false glamour over his personality by wearing a borrowed plume. In any case, it is false to assert that he did change it. All the records at the War Office show that, from his seventeenth year onwards, he was consistently gazetted under, and that he himself as consistently used, the orthography he ever afterwards retained. The reflection the whole matter suggests is that he must have borne much in silence. When he was falsely charged with a petty fraud, he might have produced his father's medal, or the Duke of York's letter, or pointed to the Duke of Wellington's despatch, or referred his traducers to the archives of the War Office. He spoke never a word, and he took no action. Was it pride or contempt ?
Of the Grey family his latest biographer states that it was descended from Lord Grey of Groby, and he adds that Sir George was a cousin to the present Earl of Stam- ford, who bears also the title of Lord Grey of Groby. Sir George Grey and he saw much of one another, when the future Lord Stamford visited New Zealand in 1886. At that time Sir George said that Mr. Grey (as he then was) claimed relationship with him, but he did not seem to claim it liimself , or at least he spoke lightly of it. The connection was possibly a Highland cousinship. In any case, he did not belong to the Irish Grays.
He was, however, of Irish blood, though not necessarily a Celt, on the maternal side. His mother was the daughter of an Irish clergyman in Westmeath, the Rev. John Vignoles, whose name betrays his French origin. A portrait of her adorns the last biography. It is a pleasing figure. A lady truly, handsome and refined in appearance, with the suggestion of much beauty of character. From her he must have inherited some of his superior qualities of mind and nature. The portrait of the father expresses native strength, as his life betrayed ardent courage. We have evidently got far on the way towards explaining the peculiar attributes of the son.
HIS EAELY LIFE
His Education.
He spoke little of his early education, and little is known of it. Five years after her husband's death, his mother had married again, this time an Irish baronet, Sir John Thomas, belonging to her father's parish — possibly an old lover; and she gave him a step-brother, Sir Godfrey Thomas, who afterwards lived with him in South Australia and New Zealand, and step-sisters, of whom he sometimes spoke. All that we know of his early schooling is that, in company with a schoolmate, he ran away from the school at Guildford, in Surrey, where he had been placed by his parents, and returned to their home at Bournemouth. It is apparently the habitual act of the rebel. Both Lamennais and Herbert Spencer fled from school; and was not Landor a rebel there? Impatience of restraint was in all four cases at the bottom of it, and in all four the boy, as thus revealed, was the father of the man. In Grey 's case the age is not given, but he must have been about thirteen years old. Herbert Spencer, on his flight, was of the same age.
As a consequence of his defective schooling, his educa- tion was not classical, and he thus missed the restraining influence that such an education often imparts. In later years, indeed, he professed to have some knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages, but it was probably slight, and he gave little evidence of being intimately acquainted with the Greek and Latin classics. Once, I remember, he read in Ammianus Marcellinus, with the object of ascertaining certain facts, and he contributed to a New Zealand journal in 1884 a humorous article, comparing Carlyle's account of his own and his wife's usage at the hands of the imperious Lady Ashburton with Lucian's account of the domestic philosophers whom great families in the Roman Empire retained as members of their households, as in the eighteenth century French noble families kept pet abbes. In both cases it was doubtless translations that he used.
Designed for his father's profession, he was enrolled at the military college at Sandhurst in his fifteenth year, and there he received all that he ever acquired of the
6 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
higher education. He remained there for three years, till 1829, when he entered the army. In 1833, after he had gained a lieutenancy, he returned to Sandhurst for three years more in order to complete his military studies. To this later period, perhaps, rather than to the earlier, belong his acquisitions in "the highest branches of mathematical science, ' ' when the Board of Examiners desired "to mark their sense of his superior merits and talents." Then, too, it probably was that he learnt the German language, and he used to relate that he and many of his brother cadets busied themselves in translating the poems of Schiller. At Sandhurst he seems to have received the literary and scientific bent that afterwards distinguished him. Plainly, he was no officer of the conventional type — ignorant, prejudiced, perhaps dissi- pated, lacking broad views and high ends. As we shall see, the purposes of a lifetime lay germinating in his mind.
His Profession.
At the end of his first period at Sandhurst, in 1829, Grey qualified to become an officer by passing the examinations with special distinction. Next year he was gazetted an ensign and was appointed to the 83rd regiment. He accompanied it to Glasgow and then to Dublin. In both cities he saw things that made an ineffaceable impression on his mind. Seven years he remained connected with the army, but, in those days of "the forty years' peace," without ever seeing active service. In 1833 he was made a lieutenant. In 1839 he was raised to the rank of captain, but rather as a compliment to the explorer than as a step upwards in military rank. At the end of the same year, having been appointed Governor of South Australia, he sold his commission, but his connection with the army had been virtually dissolved in 1837. A very different career was to be opened up to him. In that year he was appointed commander of an expedition sent out by the Colonial Office to explore the coasts of Western and North- Western Australia.
Chapter II.
IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
The Explorer.
The new appointment was no windfall. It is not the way of a Government department, and it was least of all the way of the Colonial Office as it was then managed, to make new departures. The undertaking was initiated in Adelaide, which, with a vast unoccupied territory behind it, should have needed no new worlds to conquer. By some chance that very wide-awake young man, Lieutenant George Grey, thirsting for adventure and fame to be reaped from it, heard of the proposal, and induced a brother lieutenant, belonging to the well-known Lushington family, to make a joint offer of their services as explorers to the Colonial Office. The Royal Geographi- cal Society gave weight to the proposal by earnestly commending it, and the Department decided to accept the offer. The chance of a lifetime had come, and the future Governor lay in embryo in that offer and its acceptance.
Grey was never a man to lie on his oars. Doubtless, he gave the authorities no rest till the expedition was under weigh. One omen was favourable. Sailing from Plymouth on July 5, 1837, the exploring party was carried to the Cape of Good Hope in one of the men-of-war, the Beagle, in which Darwin had made a remarkable voyage, when it was commanded by that Capt.FitzRoy, who was to be Grey's predecessor in governing New Zealand. It was a small party, as was the rule in those days, and only one of its members was acquainted with Australia. There was therefore a plentiful lack of experience, but there was no lack of enthusiasm or earnestness, of courage or energy, on the part of the leaders, or rather of the leader. For, whether from want of self-assertion on his part, or from the monopoly of the leadership claimed by Grey, Lieutenant Lushington early falls into the background. Grey was already, as he was to be through life, the king of his company.
8 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
The ostensible object of the journey was geographical. It was to ascertain whether a large river fell into the sea in the neighbourhood of Dampier's Archipelago. The secondary, but far the more important, object was to discover a tract of country where an agricultural colony might be settled. Disembarking from the Beagle at the Cape of Good Hope, Grey there hired a schooner, the Lynher, that took him direct to the scene of his future explorations. On December 3, 1837, the party landed at Hanover Bay, in the far north-west, which he had fixed upon as a base of operations.
There he lingered for a month. Then he advanced in a due southerly direction till, on March the 2nd, there burst on his sight '^a noble river," which he named the Glenelg, after the Secretary for the Colonies. Travelling up its right bank, he now struck eastwards; he next, following the course of the river, diverged to the south, where he was arrested, apparently close to the mouth of the Glenelg, by the want of provisions. Lieutenant Lushington, however, pushed on to a more southerly point, crossing many a stream by the way. He surpassed his leader, and was rewarded by being ignored.
Little more than three months later, after losing many of his ponies and some of his dogs, after an encounter with the natives that resulted in the spearing of the leader, after planting the seeds and letting loose the animals he had brought with him. Grey returned to his encampment in Hanover Bay. He had, indeed, discovered a large stream, but he had failed to discover any such great river as he believed must exist. He sailed in the Lynher for Mauritius, where he recruited, and then he returned to Western Australia in September, 1838, with the intention of resuming his quest.
Had he given the Secretary of State time to examine and acknowledge his despatch (a long time, it must be admitted, was required in those days). Grey would never have started on his second journey of exploration. Having read his narrative and fully considered his recommendations. Lord Glenelg had come to the conclu- sion that the tracts Grey had discovered were unsuited
IN WESTEBN" AUSTRALIA »
for colonisation, and as he evidently believed that no other suitable districts would be found in that country, he desired that Grey should discontinue his exploration. It was his first condemnation and virtually his first recall.
But it was too late. Plainly assuming that he had received carte blanche to pursue his researches, so long at least as the object of them was not gained, he left Fremantle early in the following year on a second exploring journey before he received Lord Glenelg's despatch. He was landed at Bernier Island on February 25, 1839. Less than two months later they reached Perth. We need not recite the vicissitudes of the short journey. They were those of all explorers. Forgetting that he was on the stormy west coast, Grey committed the imprudence of burying his stores within reach of the sea. They were destroyed by a storm. This error of judgment ruined the expedition. There was nothing for it but to return by the most direct route. They rowed down the coast, but were cast ashore and virtually wrecked at Gantheaume Bay, 300 miles distant from Perth. The story of the journey thither is one of the most ghastly in the annals of travel. Grey lost command of his followers, who refused to adhere to his plan of long journeys and few rests, necessitated by the almost total loss of their provisions. The small party split into two. Grey went on with one division of six men. All suffered intensely from hunger and thirst. They toiled on with blistered and bleeding feet and enfeebled frames. On April 21 they reached Perth. Grey presented himself to the Governor, who did not recognise him. Acquaintances who had seen him only two months before passed him on the street. We are reminded of Wordsworth's portrait of Coleridge, when he returned to his home at the Lakes after one of his moonstruck, opium-eating absences.
" Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this man When he came back to us a withered flower,— Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan."*
• Mr. F. W. Myors strangely sniiposcs Worclsworth'B linos to refer to the poet hlm- aell. See his volume on Wordsworth, p. 178.
10 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Of the five individuals composing the second division of the party one had died, and the others were found, by a relieving party from Perth, in the last stage of exhaustion.
It was in many ways a memorable journey. All the strength and all the resourcefulness of the leader were called into play. Hardships and dangers of every kind were faced. Death in many forms was encountered. The historian of Australian discovery, William Howitt, indeed says that perhaps no journeys of exploration "have exceeded it in amount of disaster and personal suffering"— surely with some exaggeration. It was not to be compared with Sturt's exploration of the Murrum- bidgee district, when the return voyage up the Murray occupied three months, and the leader, amid incredible exertions and privations, lost his ej^esight, and one of the party lost his reason. Nor will it compare in this respect with the expedition of Burke and Wills across the Continent.
The geographical results of the two journeys were more contestable. Grey himself claimed to have discovered eleven rivers, which Captain Stokes afterwards reduced by one, affirming that Grey had mistaken a river seen at two different places for two rivers; but none of them was of great magnitude. He also claimed to have discovered two extensive mountain ranges, which he judiciously named, after the permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies and the leading English geologist, the Stephen and the Lyell ranges. And, what was of far greater utility, he professed to have found three extensive tracts of good country. The Gascoyne district in Western Australia, as he named it after his friend Captain Gascoyne, was ''most fertile." The rich alluvial soil of the north-western tracts in the neighbourhood of the Glenelg was "well adapted for either agricultural or pastoral purposes, but especially for the growth of cotton and sugar." Carried away by his imagination, he saw in a vision thriving settlements and great cities arise on it. The fact that Grey and his party nearly died of starvation in or near that fertile district is nothing
IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA 11
against the truth of his description. Sturt almost perished of starvation in what afterwards proved to be one of the most fertile districts of New South Wales. To the last Grey maintained that it was well suited for colonisation, and it was chiefly to find such a tract that (he afterwards stated) he undertook the exploration of the country.
He had to undergo the humiliating experience of having his work reviewed by an expert within three years of its accomplishment. Doubting the truth of Grey's sanguine report on the district to the north of Perth, as Lord Glenelg had doubted the trustworthiness of his report on the Glenelg district in the far north, the authorities commissioned Captain Stokes of the Beagle to ascertain whether the country was really suited for the site of a projected settlement. Stokes's report was unsparing in its condemnation. The fertile tracts Grey described did not exist. Two of his rivers were only one. His maps were incorrectly drawn, and in general his report was grossly misleading. Stokes could hardly believe that anyone should be so reckless as to seek to induce emigrants to settle in a desert that was '^abso- lutely a mass of bare ironstone." It was wholly unfit for settlement, being deficient in building wood, in water, and in grass.
An official vindication of the young explorer was soon made. Ten years after Grey, Assistant Surveyor- General Gregory traversed that very district, lying between Shark's Bay and Perth, and reported favourably of it. Till then public opinion, moulded doubtless by Stokes, had been adverse to Grey. Many years later, in 1891, the special correspondent of a London journal wrote of the valleys described by Grey as ''the famous Greenough Flats, which the Agricultural Commission class among the richest agricultural land in all Aus- tralia." Still, we cannot help remembering that, after a lapse of seventy years, the cities ''teeming with ; inhabitants and produce" have not arisen or suspecting 1 that they will never arise. Almost fifty years after
12 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Grey's exploration was made, tlie best that another naval officer, Commodore Coghlan, can say for the territory is that ''Gascoyne is comparatively a flourishing place." It is a distributing and receiving centre for sheep stations, ''some of which are as far back as 400 miles from the coast." Steamers, too, call frequently, but we observe that the men and stores they carry are en route for the Kimberley goldfields. Much of the land (says a new writer) has been found to be adapted for pasture and agriculture, and the better portions of it have lately been sold at fairly high rates.
A recent account, given in November, 1907, by one who is evidently well acquainted with the northern country traversed in part by Grey, is not unfavourable. The valleys of the rivers he discovered and named are now occupied by squatters. Millions of grass-covered acres are now grazed over by millions of cattle and sheep, which are yearly encroaching on the preserves of the wallaby and the kangaroo. From Gascoyne and other ports Singapore boats carry thousands of skins, while sheep and cattle in thousands are sent to Fremantle. Sun-tanned teamsters cart bales of wool a hundred — perhaps hundreds of — miles, and ' ' the wiry brown-skinned Malays sweat freely as they transfer the wool to the waiting steamers." A mere handful of whites — squatters cramped in Victoria, overlanders from Queensland, and farmers from the banks of the Swan Eiver — commandeering the services of the blacks and the browns, wrought the transforma- tion. Between the tropic of Capricorn and the equator, the climate is too enervating for all but the most robust. The country will never be occupied by the crowded cities which the sanguine imagination of Grey foresaw in a vision.
The historian of exploration in Australia, Mr. Ernest Favenc, estimates that the geographical results of the two journeys were meagre, and the historian of colonisation will make a similar affirmation. In no sense were they epoch-making.
IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA 13
The Resident.
In a few months misfortunes had heaped themselves upon him, and he had come out of the ordeal with his powers of physical and moral endurance strengthened. Fortune still stood by him. As if publicly designating him for his future functions, she put it in the heart of the Governor of Western Australia to appoint him Eesident at King George's Sound in the South- Western division of the Colony. He there succeeded Captain (afterwards Admiral Sir) Eichard Spencer, whose daughter he was afterwards to marry, and probably the two events were connected as cause and consequence. It was at once the real start of his career as a colonial governor and the source of a lifelong subsequent grief; so closely do our joys and sorrows nestle together.
His duties in a still uncolonised district, concerned the government of the natives. Grey already held pronounced views on the subject. His sympathies with the so-called lower races were strong. During his journeys of exploration his humanity to the blacks had been conspicuous. He was now to carry his theories into practice. As a boy or, indeed, a man suffering from what physiologists term muscular irritability can be kept out of mischief only by being given something to do, so is it with savages, who are only '' children of a larger growth." Grey set his savages to work at road-making, and, paying them at (for savages) the high rate of eighteen pence a day, he seems to have got something like continuous labour out of them. Two things puzzle one. How long was he able to carry out an experiment that has failed in so many countries, where, as at the South African gold- diggings, the savage is afflicted with incurable indolence? At this day, in the very country which Grey explored, the blacks are so incapable of con- tinuous labour that they can hardly be got to work save at the crack of the whip, and most of the complaints that have excited the indignation of the humanitarians have arisen out of this inability. Next, what did Grey's blacks do with their eighteen pence? In North-Western Australia, at the present day, they
14 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
promptly part with their money for tobacco and gin, and the practice of paying them in coin has been disused. Grey claimed that the experiment was completely successful, and he made it the text of a special report to the Colonial Office on the method of dealing with uncivilised races. He was already occupied with the subjects that were to engross his attention in future years. We are reminded of Sir Arthur Wellesley who, when in military service in India, sent long reports to the East India Company in London on the government of its dependency.
In his report Grey laid down two principles, both notable in themselves and remarkable as having been carried out by Grey himself in South Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. First, the Australian blacks must be recognised and treated as British subjects in the fullest sense. District residents should be appointed, who should protect the blacks against their fellows and even against their own customs, which were to be superseded by British laws, wherever these could be applied. As afterwards in New Zealand, counsel should be retained by Government to defend them. Next, the blacks should be educated and trained in habits of regular industry. Grey was himself his own ideal resident and industrial captain.
The Philologist.
In pursuance of instructions received from the Colonial Office, Grey paid particular attention to the manners and custom of the natives and also to their language. While he resided in King George's Sound, he made a careful study of the dialect spoken by the aborigines of the South-Western district. He there compiled a brief vocabulary of it, which contains over 120 words, and he prefixed to it a synopsis of the grammar. The compiler of that small vocabulary and the author of that slight grammatical sketch had in him the makings of a philologist. His arguments for the unity of the tongues, as dialects of a single language, spoken in different parts of the country reveal a keen perception of linguistic
IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA 15
principles. In that vocabulary, too, we may trace his discovery of the existence of ancestor-worship among the Western Australians, as shown by the use of the word, djanga, spirits of the dead. He little knew the scope of the discovery, but he dimly realised the importance of another discovery in the use of the word, kohong, meaning the vegetable or animal totem of a clan. At two important points the young explorer had driven a wedge into the deepest mysteries of Anthropology. Of the tiny volume he says that the materials for it were collated in London by his friend, Captain Gascoyne. Yet he states that the first edition of the volume, which must have been seen through the press by himself, was published at Perth, in Western Australia, in 1839. AVhat other "collation" did it needf It was not his first essay in Philology. While tarrying at Teneriffe, on his way out to Western Australia, he is alleged, or he himself claimed, to have "collated" the vocabulary of the extinct Guanches. Had he really done as much, he would have emulated the achievement of Zeuss, in his Grammatica Celtica, at least in respect of a single language. Doubt- less, all that he did was to pick up a few obviously ancient words in the language spoken by the present inhabitants of the isle.
As Grey was not the first to compile a vocabulary of the Australian language, so was he followed almost immediately by a more thorough inquirer. Mr. George Fletcher Moore, judge-advocate and afterwards judge in Western Australia, states that his own vocabulary is founded on that of Captain Grey, but is in a much enlarged form and on a more comprehensive plan. There are hundreds of new words, and the significations are more copious. While Grey's extends over only a few tiny pages, Moore's corresponding part fills 84 octavo pages. He pays a deserved tribute to Grey's small vocabulary, and says that, without it, his own might never have been undertaken. It is no small compliment to Grey that he laid the foundations of West Australian philology. The second edition of Grey's book differs from the pamphlet-form of it by containing some words peculiar to the dialect of King George's Sound.
16 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE GEEY
The Anthropologist.
While he was still resident at Albany he must have commenced the record of his travels that was published in 1841 under the title of Journals of Discovery and Exploration in Western and North-Western Australia. It forms two substantial octavo volumes that rise much above ordinary works of travel in literary merit and still further transcend them in scientific importance. There are passages in it, such as the description of the flight of the albatross, that remain in the memory after twenty years. The style is at once simple and rhythmical, revealing a vein of poetry that lay deep in him. There is also much incidental matter that must have been novel. There is an account of a class new in history — the over- landers, or capitalist drovers, who took great herds of cattle across the Australian continent, founding settlements as they passed, their adventurous lives, the magnitude of their operations, and the fortunes they risked. There are striking reflections, that are almost in advance of his age, on "the laws of the progress of civilisation." This young man of twenty-nine, so long ago as 1841, had arrived at the conclusion that these sociological laws, as we now term them, are "as certain and as definite as those controlling the movements of the heavenly bodies," and can equally "be stated and reduced to order." He makes no attempt to state them, saying that the limits of his inquiry confine him to the conditions of a particular savage race.
In the second volume of the work he addresses himself largely to the theme. One-half of the volume (chs. ix-xviii) is occupied with the natural history of Western Australia and the social structure of the blacks. He describes the cave-paintings he discovered in the far north. He resumes and completes the inquiry into the identity of the various dialects. But by far the most remarkable part is that where he describes the marriage laws of the natives and their consequent complicated relationships. With no help from books, and only naked savages to question, the sagacity of the young explorer seized, as it were, instinctively the two main characteristics of the
IN" WESTERN AUSTRALIA 17
primitive family on which McLennan has built up the one department of Sociology that has attained scientific rank: — 1. Children take the family name of their mother. 2. A man cannot marry a woman of his own family name. He very justly compares these marriage laws with those in use among the North American Indians and among the ancient Hebrews. Grey seems to have been the first, in England at all events, to signalise these two great laws. They were nothing less than discoveries, and they deserve to rank with discoveries in the physical sciences. He himself claimed that they were the beginning of all the speculation and research that has since been lavished on these problems. Those interesting volumes may have been little read by the sociologists who as yet hardly existed. But these prime features of savage life were doubtless singled out by the reviewers who then, like Southey, threw themselves upon every fresh work of importance, and they may have dropped their seed into the minds of inquirers. The theme was, at all events, taken up by John McLennan, whose speculations can be directly connected with the lines so clearly and precisely laid down by Grey. All subsequent research on this subject descends from McLennan. Grey is therefore, as he claimed, the originator of the inquiry.
The chief results of his explorations in Western Australia and his official residence in South- Western Australia were personal to himself. There he served his apprenticeship to a long and distinguished career. There he first gave promise of the high qualities — courage, resource, endurance — he was afterwards to display on a wider field. There he learnt to manipulate a native race, and showed himself to be exactly what such a race wants — at once sympathetic and despotic. There, in the toils and dangers of exploring a savage country, was fashioned the indomitable will that was to be his surest ally. There, too, he commended himself to the great department of State which was to employ him for thirty years almost without a break, and which was to prove more faithful to him than he ever was to it. The Colonial Office had found its man.
Chapter III.
GOVERNOR OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
Capable Governors were scarce in those days, when young colonies were to be guided through the perils of infancy. The Governor of a colony, then at six months' distance from the Motherland, and (the time required for a reply being considered) at twelve months' distance from the Colonial Office, was practically absolute. If he was bold and went far, he offended his superiors at Home ; if he was timid or weak, he brought the colony to an impasse. The type of Governor, at once strong and judicious, wanted for colonies that were on their way to becoming self-governing communities was still to be created, and it was gradually evolved in the forties, fifties, and sixties; for the Crown-appointed Governors of the North American colonies in the seventeenth century belonged to a different order. Grey was perhaps the most finished specimen of colonial Governor the evolutionary process was to produce, and yet, as will be all too plainly shown, he was in course of time to disappoint and exasperate the department that long trusted him so implicitly.
Two Autocrats.
He had made friends with ''the mammon of unrighteousness" by christening Mount Stephen in Western Australia after the permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and Stephen stood his friend as long as he remained at the Colonial Office. Stephen was one of two notable personalities who then ruled the great department. Sir Henry Taylor was known to cultured readers as a dis- tinguished dramatic poet (he was the author of Philip van Artevelde and The Virgin Widotu) and a political philosopher whose natural sagacity had been instructed
18
GOVERNOR OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 19
by his conversance with great affairs, and embedded in a volume that was rather ambitious than pretentious called The Statesman; he was known to fashionable society as consummate man of the world; and to a very few he was known as one of the high officers of the Colonial Office. Taylor virtually governed the "sugar- colonies," and how powerful a mere clerk in the depart- ment, bearing no specific designation, could be, may be learnt from his Autohiogra'phy, which contains many revelations. Still more interesting would have proved, had it ever been written, the autobiography of his colleague. Sir James Stephen, the real ruler of the future self-governing colonies from 1835 to 1847.* He is best known in literature as the author of Essays in Ecclesi- astical Biography, contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which are remarkable equally for their evangelical fervour and their sonorous diction, smelling of the State paper and the despatch-writer. Carlyle, conversing with Gavan Duffy, doubted their sincerity, alleging that Stephen had no thought of leading such a life as he there described, and at the same time etching a vivid portrait of the writer as an official. Each successive Secretary of State came into office, resolving that he would shake off the thraldom of the permanent heads of the Depart- ment, especially Stephen's, and very imperious they all were at the start. The wily Stephen apparently fell in with all they proposed, and in a smooth, silken manner expressed his assent. The unsophisticated Minister imagined that everything would be carried out as he desired, but it was always found that everything was done as Stephen decided, and the Minister ended by cheerfully accepting the yoke he had tried to throw off. Let anyone compare the despatches written from the Colonial Office in the thirties and forties with the Essays, and he will come to the conclusion that the writer of both was one and the same individual. Such was the man to whose favour or discernment Grey undoubtedly owed
* SoTiio of his letters have lately been printed for private circulation : Thf I<'irnt Sir Jarmn Stephen: Letters irnth Biooraphical Note*. Kdited by his daughter, Caroliuo K. Stephen. Heffer. 1906.
20 LIFE OF SIE GEOKGE GREY
his appointment. He it was who "entertained" "the high opinion" of Grey's "ability and energy" which induced Lord John Eussell to propose him for the Governorship of South Australia.
Though still slight in importance to what it was to become, it was a high appointment for a young man of twenty-eight. Grey reflected that he was the youngest man ever appointed to a colonial Governorship — at least, he should have added, in a British colony, and he feared that youth and inexperience disqualified him for holding so responsible an office. Twenty-five years later the professor of Moral Philosophy in an ancient Scottish university similarly recalled that in entering on his labours he was only twenty-eight years old and might well shrink from them. It would be hard to determine which position was the more onerous. To instil the principles of Ethics into the minds of successive generations of future teachers is a function so high that even the government of a nascent society and the moulding of a commonwealth are scarcely more exacting in their required qualifications.
The Military Governor- Grey was a representative of the military regime in the government of colonies. The first stage in all the older Australasian colonies was the naval stage — apparently for no better reason than that naval officers commanded the first convict ships sent out to New South Wales, and the first Governors of that colony were naval officers. The precedent thus created was applied to other colonies, and the first Governor of South Australia was a naval officer. When he proved unfit for the position, he was superseded by a military officer, marking the second stage of colonial governership. He in his turn being found unequal to a difficult situation was super- seded, while the military regime was maintained by the appointment of Captain Grey. The phase reflected the evolution of the Motherland, which had likewise passed through the military stage, when the sovereign was a military ruler. All of Grey's earlier governorships were
GOVERNOR OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 21
of this character. His government of South Australia and South Africa, and his first government of New Zealand, were despotic.
As afterwards in New Zealand and South Africa, he was sent to replace or supersede a Governor who had committed errors of policy that led to his being recalled. Grey's predecessor, Colonel Gawler, had only too closely followed the example set him by an earlier Governor of New South Wales, Colonel Macquarie; instead of endeavouring to settle the colonists on the untilled soil, he employed them on public works, making roads and erecting public buildings. The difference was that Macquarie employed convicts, while Gawler employed colonists, whom he had to pay, and yet Macquarie was called sternly to account for drawing to excess on the British Treasury. So did Gawler draw bills, which the British Government refused to meet. Authorities have stated that with a revenue of only £42,000 his annual expenditure amounted to £94,000, but it far exceeded even that extravagant sum. During his last twelve months of office his expenditure amounted to £174,000, and in a little more than two years and a half he had expended no less than £320,000. Those watchdogs of British finance, the Lords of the Treasury, felt that it was high time that such doings should be brought to an end, and they made such representations to the Colonial Office as ensured his recall. Colonel Gawler was a man of high character and by no means of deficient capacity, but he was the victim of adverse circumstances. "We shall find Grey himself in future years called to account for exactly such doings and at last recalled, he too, for still more high-handed proceedings than ever Gawler adventured on.
The Retrencher.
Grey was sent out to South Australia, as ministers have been placed in office, to effect a thorough retrench- ment- He took stringent measures to reduce the expenditure, and in a year he actually cut it down from the figures above stated to £34,000, according to one
22 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE GREY
authority — to £28,000, according to another. He stopped the public works then in progress, and thus reduced to beggary nearly 2,000 men, women, and children, who had to be supported as paupers. He reduced the wages of the emigrants whom the Colony stood pledged provisionally to support. He thus raised against himself the entire labouring class. His retrenchments were not confined to the bottom of the social scale. He abolished three depart- ments— the Stores department, the office of Registrar- General, and the Signal-master's department. The expenses of the Post Office and the gaol (built at great cost — in a crimeless land) ! were ruthlessly cut down. As always, he did not spare himself. The modest establishment of Government House was reduced. He thus raised the powerful class of office-holders against him.
The consequences were of the most serious description. A period of fictitious prosperity was brought suddenly to an end. All classes of property became unsaleable. Bankruptcies multiplied; in that small community there were 37 in a single year, and 136 writs were issued through the sheriff's court. A storm of unpopularity broke on the unfortunate Governor. Angry crowds marched to Government House and threatened his defenceless person. Attacks were made on him at public meetings, where his recall was unanimously demanded. The menace of impeachment was flung in his face. He was burnt in effigy. The press was dead against him, and virulently assailed him. Disappointed claimants, he told the Secretary of State, have "harassed me in every possible way," the ugliest included. He did not mention, what we now know, that blackmailing was attempted and frauds put on him. When the crisis had passed, he admitted that he would not willingly go through it again. So say the English Prime Minister and the Colonial Premier. They have often to "go through" a still fiercer ordeal, as was also Grey's later experience. He bore it all with fortitude and remembered it magnanimously. Looking back on it, he was willing "to extenuate the intemperate language and conduct of some
GOVERNOR OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 23
few." He was still able to forgive, but it may be suspected that his silence about South Australia in later years implied that in the long run he had not quite or finally forgiven.
He yet left no stone unturned to ease the situation he had created. The banks refused to negotiate his drafts, but he borrowed £1,800 from the Commissariat Chest and £3,000 from the Government of New South Wales. He sacrificed £400 of his small salary of £1,000. With these tiny resources he made head against the distress. What to do with the masses of unemployed? The baffled Secretary of State, writing like a wiseacre, instructed him to ascertain whether the Governors of AVestern Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand would receive some of the surplus population of South Australia on the understanding that their passages would be paid. Grey took more statesmanlike steps.
First of all, he recast the system of taxation. He created new sources of revenue. At the instance of that great colonial reformer, E. G. Wakefield, the income derived from the sale of waste lands, which ought not to be regarded as a source of ordinary revenue, had been devoted to the promotion of immigration; it was the distinctive feature of his policy. At the suggestion of the Colonial Office, Grey divided the revenue thus derived into two parts, of which one was set apart for its pristine end, while the other was to be expended in the work of settling families on the land and in aiding the aborigines. He heavily taxed the necessaries of life. He unadvisably, but perhaps necessarily, imposed port dues on ships entering Adelaide. It was an unpopular tax.
He next grappled with the problem of the distribution of population. It was at an acute stage. Of the white population of South Australia considerably more than one-half resided in Adelaide: 8,439 out of 14,G10 were resident in the capital. While he let no one starve, he refused to relieve those who insisted on staying in town when they might go into the country and work on the land. His chief object, he explicitly stated, was "to give the labourers no inducement to remain in town, or
24 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
upon public works ; but to make them regard the obtaining of a situation with a settler as a most desirable result." His efforts towards this end were largely successful. An official table prepared two years after Grey's departure from the Colony shows that the number of inhabitants in the rural districts had risen from 6,121 in 1840, the year of his arrival, to 11,259 in 1843 and to 14,977 in 1845. The number of inhabitants in Adelaide had simultane- ously fallen to 6,107 in 1843. These speaking figures show that the tide had been effectually turned, and the drift was now setting in steadily towards the country.
With the solution of the problem of distribution all other problems were in course of being solved. The same table that reveals the rural movement of the population shows an upward movement in both agriculture and industry. The value of exports of colonial produce rose from £15,650 in 1840 to £66,160 in 1843; the number of factories rose from 4 to 31, and of flour mills from none to 16. Later figures and other statistics were no less eloquent. The Governor had succeeded. Well might Lord John Russell sound his praises. ' ' In giving him the government of South Australia I gave him as difficult a problem in colonial government as could be committed to any man, and I must say, after four or five years' experience of his administration there, that he has solved the problem with a degree of energy and success which I could hardly have expected from any man. ' '
Providence was on his side. The discovery of copper mines, through a series of accidents, opened up a new vein of wealth and at the same time stimulated land sales, which had languished. The very elements fought for him. A fine summer brought a bounteous harvest, and the weather, which had ruined the reforming measures of Turgot, as it afterwards ruined the reforming measures of Loris Melikoff, came to his aid. He could now afford to remit the port dues he had temporarily levied to raise a revenue. He was a successful and prosperous ruler.
Grey was not the sole worker towards this consumma- tion. He had an efficient co-operator in one of the founders of the Colony, George Fife Angas. Mainly
GOVERNOR OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 25
through his untiring exertions, a large stream of German immigration poured into South Australia, giving it the exotic, but healthy, complexion it still retains. Large tracts of country were thus settled with desirable immigrants. And this was only one of the schemes by which this indefatigable coloniser sought to promote the prosperity of the Colony. ''Never let it be said," cried Herbert Spencer in his ebullient early manhood, "that one man can do but little." By the joint efforts of Grey and Angas the crisis was thus surmounted, and the Colony was started on a career of stable prosperity.
Relations with the Blacks.
A second great problem, of more permanent interest, a bequest from his predecessor, demanded an immediate practical solution. As in every other colony that he was to govern, a portion of the natives was proving troublesome. The overlanders, whose vast operations had impressed his imagination in West Australia, were being continually attacked by the tribes through whose territory they passed. One such attack had been dealt with by Governor Gawler just before Grey's arrival, and two others took place soon after it. In punishing them Grey made two new departures. Gawler had held that all the natives living outside the settled portions of the Colony stood outside of his jurisdiction and could be dealt with only as foreign peoples. He therefore treated offenders as prisoners of war and had them tried by court-martial. Such a procedure was opposed to Grey's instincts. Though for high ends, he was greedy of power and ambitious of influence. He took up the ground that all natives within the boundaries of the Colony were "within the Queen's allegiance," and under the Governor's aathority. He accordingly had offending natives brought to Adelaide and tried by the colonial courts. The principle was the same as he had asserted in Western Australia, and afterwards asserted in New Zealand in 1847 with regard to the Maoris, though it was there in opposition to the legal opinion of the Attorney-General, a Crown officer. In all countries, in England itself, the
26 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE OBEY
assertion of such a principle marks the growth of the central authority and the taking of an important step towards the unification of the population. In justice to the blacks who were tempted to attack overlanding parties by the weakness of the escort, he also required that such parties should be efficiently escorted. And he stationed E. J. Eyre, who was to be his lieutenant- governor in New Zealand, at a settlement in the interior where he could lend aid to passing overlanders and at the same time keep the blacks in order. His policy had a measure of success. The aboriginals were conciliated, and the attacks ceased.
He did not rest content with this satisfactory result. His policy consisted in that blending of sympathy with rigour that constitutes perfect justice. In a spirit of the noblest chivalry he set himself to improve the condition of these lapsed members of the Caucasian race, as Mr. Wallace considers them. He found employment for the younger members of the tribes. He induced storekeepers in Adelaide to employ them as porters, and farmers to use them as reapers. He did far more. Eealising that the future of the race lay with the children, he endea- voured to have them educated, and he established boarding-schools in two districts. Much else he sought to do. He persuaded German missionaries and some ladies to show kindness to the blacks, and he remitted a portion of the purchase money of their allotments to settlers who aided them. The results of the labours of this fine enthusiast were disappointing. The schools he established were given up after their founder left the Colony. The labours of the missionaries completely failed; not a single ** conversion " stands to their credit. The natives reverted to their old habits, or passed alto- gether out of the settled portions of the Colony and returned to savagery. Hundreds of such efforts have been made, and always with the same result. Should not the fact furnish data for an argument against Mr. Wallace's contention? If the Australian blacks are degraded Caucasians, should they not be able to recover their lost powers and, with the potent aid of a higher stock of that same race, rise once more to their ancient level?
GOVEENOB OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 27
Imperial Approval.
Meanwhile, he was giving high satisfaction to the authorities in England. In 1842 the Lords of the Treasury allowed that he had "acquitted himself in an able and satisfactory manner of the important trust which had been reposed in him." The Secretary for the Colonies chimed in and formally acknowledged "the essential and most effective services" he had "rendered in reducing the expenditure and re-establishing the finances of South Australia. " It is a proof of his genuine capacity, as yet unspoiled by perversity or velleities of rebellion, that, two years later, he was still in high favour with the Colonial Office. Lord Derby (who was still Lord Stanley) bore repeated testimonies (he called them testimonials) to the value of his public services in administering South Australia, and he admitted that Grey had shown "energy, capacity, and circumspection in the conduct" of its affairs. These were high compli- ments, and they seemed to have been well earned.*
His eminent services were to bring him something more real than compliments — they were to bring him promo- tion; but we may pause for a few moments to describe another and less-disputed phase of his multifarious activity.
The Savant.
Some men gain the bubble, reputation, at the cannon's mouth, while others gain it through the Post Office. Tyndall once expressed his surprise that all manner of persons who were unknown to him presumed to address him, asking him all sorts of questions and desiring all kinds of services. Herbert Spencer found his reduced working powers and limited time so encroached upon by correspondence that he had a letter printed, declining in advance to reply to all unauthorised communications.
•The political portion of the pi-esent chapter, like the corrfKi)onflinfi chnpti r of Mr Rces'B biography, was at first mainly writtfn from thf> matorinl siipi>li<fl in HiittoriH book on South Australia— the contemporary record of a IjcKislative (^oiiiuillor who snw at cloBC qnartcrs the thinfiB he describes. It hnH been rewritten to include the tiuU freBhly Btatcd by Professor HenderHon, who haw lia<l acoesH to the South Aiihtntban archives, examined the jonrnalB of the time, and l>een the recipient of the confldences of old colonists.
28 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Colonial savans overwhelm themselves with labour on the eve of the departure of the European mails, keeping up a correspondence which, they seem to imagine, reflects honour on them. And they are not, in a way, mistaken. The friends of a colonial savant appealed to the extent of his correspondence with European and American scientists in proof of the reality of his scientific claims and position, which were disputed. As the christeners of newly "discovered" mountain, lake, river, or glacier, they are often able to put foreign savans under obligation to them, and they are sometimes able to render them more real services by sending them collections from distant lands or communicating observations they have made.
Grey cannot rightly be classed among the scientific pretenders, but he was far from insensible to the glory to be acquired by associating himself with eminent men of science in the old country. His industry and intelli- gence entitled him to the distinction. When he explored Western Australia, he embarked on a wide sea and sounded deep waters. His soundings yielded many a treasure. In May, 1839, Professor (afterwards Sir Eichard) Owen acknowledged some specimens he had sent, doubtless to the College of Surgeons, of whose museum Owen was then curator, stating that they were either new or rare, and in either case were of great utility. Grey, it already appeared, was something more than a collector ; if not a savant, he was a keen observer, and his observations on the action of the hood i!n the hooded lizard, according to Owen, disclosed ''a new and interesting fact" in natural history. In December, 1840 and January and February, 1841, he presented the British Museum with mineral and zoological specimens and collections of fossils and shells. These were all fruits of his explorations in Western Australia. His brief residence at Albany was no less fruitful, and this time the British Museum made a special acknowledgment of his donations.
During his four years' residence in South Australia he continued to send home all kinds of scientific specimens. Some hundreds of mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, and
GOVERNOB OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 29
crustaceans were despatched to the national repository. Besides these, the indefatigable collector sent 265 rare or novel plants and 290 rock specimens and minerals. No wonder that the Trustees again specially acknow- ledged his benefactions.
He was catholic in his gifts. To the Horticultural Society of London he sent 52 packets of seeds, and to the Geological Society a collection of fossils. Probably, no other Governor has contributed as copiously to museums. His numerous collections may be described as the response of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to the maternal generosity of the Motherland, which has endowed its colonies with useful seeds, plants, and animals from all parts of the globe.
Grey was sympathetic with the pursuits of men of science and was ever ready to aid them. Lyell wrote to him in 1843 that Owen agreed with him in the opinion he had expressed about some cetacean remains he had sent Home. Anthropologists like Lubbock appealed to him for information on the religious ideas of Australians, especially of the kobongs, on which Grey was well qualified to instruct him. Inquiries are often made of colonial Governors, who usually apply to some expert in the colony, but Grey was one of the few who could personally supply the information desiderated. All Governors welcome men of scientific or literary distinc- tion from England or other countries, but Grey was able to extend a hospitality of mind as well as of hearth. He was no less sympathetic with the toils of others. He liad been resident in South Australia when Sturt and Eyre set out on their memorable journeys; Eyre was after- wards appointed his lieutenant-governor in the South Island of New Zealand, and he joined in recommending that Sturt, now blind and ailing, should be knighted. Where no political rivalries thwai-ted his natural instincts, he could be both just and generous.
Chapter IV.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM. The Subjugation of the Maoris.
His Appointment.
It was a tribute to Grey's capacity that, in four successive instances, he was appealed to by the Colonial Office as the man the best fitted in the Empire to under- take the government of a colony that was critically situated. He was fond of relating, and the fact had struck his imagination as well as embedded itself in his memory, that one day when he was out riding in the neighbourhood of Adelaide in company with his step-brother, Sir Godfrey Thomas, he was overtaken by a messenger in a "tax-cart" (the archaic detail carries us back to the forties), who had been sent from the town with despatches from England. He opened and read them, and found that he had been appointed Governor of New Zealand. In terms of high compliment he was assured of his fitness for the position. He was, indeed, almost solicited to accept it as an act of patriotism and in the interests of the Empire. The nominal author of the appointment was Lord Stanley, soon to become Earl of Derby, then Secretary for the Colonies ; the real author of it, we need not scruple to assert, and the writer of the despatch announcing the fact, was the all-powerful Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir James Stephen, whose keen eye and trained judgment had already discerned the energies and the capacities that were to make Grey the greatest colonial governor of his time.
The appointment did not pass unchallenged. In the House of Commons Lord Howiek (next year to become Earl Grey) objected to the nomination of one ''whose rank, age, and station were such that he could hardly carry weight or authority." The future Secretary for the Colonies was to redeem his natural scepticism by a
30
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 31
long series of public commendations, by practically surrendering to the new Governor the government of the Colony, and by publishing in his retirement the loftiest eulogy a colonial governor has ever received from his official superior.
Though his commission was enclosed, and it was there- fore hardly open to Grey to refuse the dangerous office, where he might be hounded to death, as Captain Hobson, the first Governor, had been hounded, or wreck the reputation he had already acquired, as FitzRoy, the second Governor, had wrecked his, the appointment was understood to be temporary, to meet an emergency, and the governorship of South Australia was kept open for him. Eight years afterwards he left New Zealand on a similar understanding. He was to return to New Zealand, though after an interval, but he was to return to South Australia only forty-six years later, and then in an unofficial capacity.
Governor FitzRoy (so well known earlier as a navigator and later as a meteorologist) had brought New Zealand by a series of indiscretions to the verge of rebellion. Who so well fitted to educe order out of chaos as the young governor who had just achieved a similar feat in South Australia? We do not need his assurance of the fact to believe that the new Governor had conceived a high ideal of his mission. The arena was one well fitted to call forth all his powers. He was to conquer and rule over a barbarous race of a higher type than the one he had left — intelligent, warlike, and in the main hostile, spread over a whole island, holding fortified places, and equipped with arms of precision. He was to encounter a powerful Company, with the great colonising genius of the age at its head, a number of clever young men (after- wards distinguished statesmen) among its personnel, and the command of the Colonial Office for its leverage. He was to meet with an energetic bishop, as uniquely fitted for his difficult duties as Grey was for his, and a Chief- Justice of rare integrity. And with them all this com- paratively untried young man of thirty-three was easily to hold his own.
32 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
As if anticipating his translation to New Zealand, Grey had taken a keen interest in the affairs of the island-colony while he was still Governor of South Australia. Hearing of the sack of Kororareka and the repulse of the troops by the Maoris at Okaihu and Ohaeawai, he had suggested to (he had not yet got the length of positively ordering) the commander of a British warship, which touched at Port Adelaide, that he should sail at once for the Bay of Islands, and he unconstitutionally sent along with it munitions of war from the military stores in South Australia. When the time of his departure came, he hastily seized the money in the treasury at Adelaide and carried it with him to New Zealand. It was a second unconstitutional act, and it excited the resentment of the South Australians, but was not expressly censured by the Colonial Office. The doings of the Csesars are apt to be "unconstitutional," and evidently the Colonial Office was chary of censuring a public servant whose chief fault as yet was an excess of zeal.
Arriving in Auckland on November 14, 1845, he found confusion reigning. In general, as was everywhere his way, he reversed the policy of his predecessor. The financial imbroglio was the most pressing and had first to be faced. Using the treasure that he had, Caesar-like, carried oif from South Australia, he called in and partly paid the debentures issued by FitzRoy, amounting to £37,000, and thus restored financial equilibrium. His next task was to suppress the Native revolt. Within five weeks of his arrival Grey had gathered together a force of soldiers, sailors, and friendly natives, amounting to over 1500, in order to strike a deadly blow. An English general, Sir Everard Home, sent with the troops from Sydney by Sir George Gipps, was in command. With this force Grey advanced against the Northern Maoris. These had built a new and almost impregnable fortress — a typical pah, of which a model was exhibited in England — called Ruapekapeka, or ''the Bat's Nest," near the Bay of Islands, and were there strongly entrenched. Of the ensuing siege the accounts are almost as various as
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 33
the narratives of the battle of Waterloo. The most intelligible is given by Mr. Eees, and was presumably inspired by Grey, who was present throughout. A very detailed and graphic narrative was ostensibly taken down by F. E. Maning from the mouth of "an old chief of the Ngapuhi tribe," and is printed in Heke's War in the North* And a third account, differing from the others in several particulars, is given by Prof. Henderson. It may not prove impossible to extract a harmony from the various narratives.
The Capture of Ruapekapeka.
Arriving at the Bay of Islands, the troops went up the Kawakawa River in boats and canoes. They spent the last fortnight of the year in making roads to the pah. Then they proceeded to bombard it, with ship guns, long brass guns, mortars, and rockets. Forgetting the disastrous gallantry of Col. Despard at Ohaeawai, Sir Everard Home (if Maning 's Maori chief may be trusted) was eager to storm the pah, but the chief, Moses, persuaded him against such an act of reckless folly, and the Maoris henceforth despised the English general as a ''foolish and inexperienced" person. The bombardment continued, making two breaches by January 10th, and in time it must have broken down the wooden palisades that constituted the outworks of the pah. Then Heke arrived, with only seventy men, having succeeded in eluding Macquarie, who had been stationed to arrest him. The orthodox account has it that Heke was dealt with by the British troops and his force scattered. On the contrary, he himself entered the pah and tried to induce the Maoris to retreat into the forest by the door of escape they always left at the back of their pahs ; the historians do not mention the fact, but Maning positively states, that the whole of the garrison save Kawiti and eleven men deserted the pah and joined Heke's force in the rear,* This seems to be inconsistent with the statement, also made by Maning, that the bulk of the garrison was
* Appcnderl to Maning's Old New Zealand- ChriBtchnrch : Whitcombe and Toiubu. t Ibid, p. 312.
34 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
temporarily out of the pah on the following day, attending prayers.
Next day was Sunday. A happy accident favoured the British, but the nature of the chance is differently told by different historians. Prof. Henderson says that, expecting a temporary cessation of hostilities, the Maoris ''ventured outside to cook their food." The orthodox telling of the incident begins quite differently, and it is confirmed by Maning. The garrison, consisting of Native Christians, left the fort to attend Divine service, never dreaming that they would be attacked by a Christian Governor on such a day. It was a historic circumstance. Many times before had the superstition or the piety of a people been thus used to their disad- vantage. It had been employed by King Ptolemy, King Antiochus, and the Romans against the Jews, by the Jews themselves against the Parthians, and by the Catholics against the Visigoths.
The ensuing action is also variously told. The accepted narrative has it that Wi Waka (William Walker Turau, Waka Nene's brother), observing the silence in the pah and hearing the psalmody, inferred that they had left the pah in order to hold Divine service in a valley to the rear of the fort. Wi Waka then waved his hand to Waka Nene, when both he and Tao Nui, with their people, silently advanced with a rush. On the back of the Maoris came the soldiers and sailors, who had also been at praj'^ers, and they entered the pah with a shout. The shout waked up Kawiti, the commander of the garrison, who, with his remnant of eleven men, vainly strove to make head against the invading flood. They fired two volleys and then retired, fighting desperately. The English had gained possession of the pah.
It was a decisive action. The Governor at once declared the war at an end, and he offered the hostile Maoris a free pardon. Two months after he had arrived in New Zealand the face of things was completely changed. The back of the rebellion in the North was broken. The colonists felt a nightmare taken off their chests; the Colonial Ofiice congratulated itself on its choice of a
GOVERISrOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 35
Governor; the English press was enthusiastic; and yet the Maoris were submissive. Kawiti submitted, acknow- ledged his fault, and became a Christian. Heke refused to go and see the Governor, but (we owe the particular to Maning) the Governor went to see him. Two years later he died, bequeathing his lands to Grey, who of course did not accept the generous gift. As a parallel act, Sir Everard Home, dying long afterwards in Sydney, bequeathed his books to Grey. Heaven and earth showered their bounties on the fortunate Governor. Yet, as we have seen, he had little to do with the taking of Euapekapeka. Doubtless his energy in getting together the small and mixed contingent and in pushing it onwards to its objective contributed to the result. But the victory was an accident of warfare, and, had there been no accident, it would have been the necessarv con- sequence of the Governor's superiority in military strength. None the less, he reaped all the credit of the action. He was henceforth known as a man who could strike a decisive blow.
The Seizure of Rauparaha.
Grey's campaign against the Maoris in the South was marked by an incident that occupies a place in history that is at first sight out of all proportion with its real importance. At a time of general peace, though of local disturbance, without proved hostility on the one side or warning on the other, the Governor treacherously laid violent hands on the most dreaded chief in the southern parts of the Colony. Te Rauparaha is a striking figure in the history of New Zealand. Of high rank, blending the best blood of two powerful tribes, and the principal chief of one of them, he was a ruler whose mana, or prestige, extended along both shores of Cook's Straits and far inland. Unfriendly observers found him an impressive personality. With the aquiline features of the Caesarian caste, but a retreating forehead, sunken yet piercing eyes, the projecting upper lip so seldom seen together with fierceness, yet a look of tigerish ferocity, he was a chief of commanding presence. E. J.
36 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Wakefield, a hostile judge, says that on one occasion he spoke ''with the majesty of a monarch," and he was then acclaimed as "king of the Maori."
Rauparaha had led many a daring raid against neighbouring tribes, and he had been mixed up with one of the ugliest deeds of blood in Maori-English story. He was vindictive and blood-thirsty, crafty and unscrupulous. He was not wholly unsympathetic with the English settlers. So early as 1833 a converted slave-boy, who had been educated at a northern mission-station, taught some of Rauparaha 's tribesmen their letters. The same missionary of civilisation indoctrinated both the son and nephew of the chief with the principles of the Christian religion, and so deeply impressed was Rauparaha that he despatched his son to ask that a missionary be sent to his tribe. He had signed the treaty of Waitangi, and thus, over the wide range of his influence, he surrendered the sovereignty of his tribe. It is probable that he had taken to heart the words of Waka Nene, spoken at a still earlier date, telling him that the British were good people, and that he would find his account in living at peace with them.
In 1839 Colonel Wakefield, the agent of the New Zealand Company in New Zealand, found him in general opposed to the alienation of Native lands, but extracted from his reluctance the purchase of some extensive tracts, and believed that he had extracted a great deal more. In 1843 Rauparaha was indirectly concerned in the "massacre" at Wairau, when he strenuously resisted the settlement of English immigrants on land they had never acquired, and a year later the representative of the British Govern- ment justified his refusal, if not his crime, while the action of the Company was condemned by the Secretary of State. The very next day, in an impassioned speech, Rauparaha revealed his mind and purpose. "Now is the time to strike," he cried. "You see now what the glozing pretences of the pakeha are worth; you know now what they mean in their hearts; you know now that you can expect nothing but tyranny and injustice at their hands. Come forward and sweep them from the land which they
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 37
have striven to bedew with our blood." Rauparaha, he said of himself, "will fight the Queen's soldiers with his own hand, — with his own name. ' ' It was the behaviour of the New Zealand Company that had changed the spirit of Rauparaha. Wholesale forcible conveyances of land to which thej^ had but the shadow of a claim had turned him against the pakeha. Still, as far as has ever been known, he took no overt action.
In May, 1846, troubles broke out in the Wellington district. A body of armed Maoris swooped down on the 58th regiment, stationed near the Hutt River, drove in the picket, killing and wounding a number, and then slowly retired before a superior force. This was probably the act of Rangihaeata, who occupied a strongly fortified position in the neighbourhood, and Rangihaeata was the son-in-law of Rauparaha. Yet relatives and slaves of Rauparaha aided the British in making roads, an indis- pensable aid to the movements of the troops, and they were said to surpass the Europeans as road-makers. In June a skirmish took place in the valley of the Hutt, probably made by the same undaunted disturber as the author of the night-attack in May, and the commanding officer had his suspicions of Rauparaha, but Grey was still doubtful. It was perhaps little that Rauparaha visited Grey and gave him assurances of fidelity; a traitor might have done the same. He was on that occasion subjected to a rough-and-ready test. Grey showed him an intercepted letter, bearing his signature along with those of others, inviting disaffected natives to the coast. Grey, a keen observer and a good judge of men, was then convinced that he was unacquainted with the letter, and after his father's capture Rauparaha 's son stated that he had not signed it (he was almost certainly unable to write). Yet on this flimsy evidence Grey relied in after j^ears, when challenged on the subject by Mr. Rusden and (a few years later) by another interlocutor. But the real ground of Rauparaha 's condemnation was that, knowingly or not, he gave his moral support to Rangihaeata, and if he was attacked, Rauparaha might fall on the rear of the attacking force. Grey decided to
38 LIFE OF SIE GEOKGE GKEY
strike a blow that would resound through Maoriland. On the night of July 23, he sent to Porirua 150 soldiers, who seized the unsuspecting warrior in his sleep, and had him conveyed to H.M.S. Calliope, where he kept the chief a State prisoner. Kauparaha's own prophecy had come true. Three years before, on the very day of the Wairau massacre, he had cried: "What could they gain by enslaving me? by fastening irons on these poor old hands'? No; that is not what they seek. It is because through my person they hope to dishonour you. If they can enslave me, they think they degrade the whole Maori race." To dishonour or degrade the Maoris was no part of the Governor's plan. On the contrary, he was to do more to raise them in their own estimation and in that of all the world than any other man, but his policy was always to disarm and disable an enemy. Then he was prepared to treat with them.
The ethics of the case seem comparatively simple. As regarded Eauparaha, it was plainly an unjust act. Probably, Rauparaha had nothing to do with the incrim- inating letter. His own overt acts were not culpable. But a man cannot be always dissociated from the society to which he belongs, and especially a leading chief, in a primitive community, could not be separated from the acts of his tribesmen and near relatives. Rauparaha lent Rangihaeata his countenance. But for Rauparaha 's approval or passive acquiescence, Rangihaeata would not have pursued a policy of active opposition to the colonists and hostility to the troops. That Rauparaha was involved in the consequences of Rangihaeata 's policy is shown by his attempts to set Rauparaha free- As regarded Rangihaeata and his tribe, the act was justifi- able. It was an act of war, and the tribe was at war with the British. No action could be more effective. It sent a thrill of dread through all Maoridom. It showed that the new Governor, who was already known as a "fighting Governor, ' ' was not a man to be trifled with. It probably averted much bloodshed. It resembled the sudden, unprovoked seizure of the innocent Due d'Enghien by Napoleon, which Napoleon defended to the last as being
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 39
necessary in order to strike terror into possible Bourbon conspirators. Had the duke been liberated after a brief imprisonment, the case would have run almost on all fours with Rauparaha's. But Rauparaha was released, after a brief time on parole, and Grey thus escaped the condemnation that overtook Napoleon.
Had the act caused Grey to forfeit the confidence of the Maoris, it would have been impolitic, and Mr. Rusden affirms, what Grey at the time admitted, that it did have this result. Long afterwards, in 1879, when Grey was Premier, he made overtures to King Tawhiao that were rejected on the ground that the captor of Rauparaha could not be trusted. Yet the Maoris considered all acts justifiable against a real or suspected enemy. Grey's wily character soon got to be known to the Maoris. Was it Heke in the far north who, when Grey had sent him a present of money, examined the sovereigns closely to see if they "had any hooks on them," as everything that came from Grey was apt to have? As for the alleged distrust of Grey on the part of Tawhiao, it was transient. I may be j^ermitted to offer some personal evidence on that head. I was a visitor at Kawau in the autumn of 1884, when the Maori King and his sons, with the great chieftain Rewi and his daughter, and other Maori chiefs, came to procure Grey's countenance and support in their projected mission to England. Rewi was then guarded, as always, but the attitude of Tawhiao was, on that occasion, one of almost childlike confidence. If ever he felt distrust of Grey, he had completely overcome it.
There is more convincing evidence. When, in the course of the conflict between Grey and the New Zealand Company, it was rumoured that the Governor was on the eve of being recalled from New Zealand a number of peti- tions against the recall were got up, and to one of these the first signature appended was that of the captured chief himself — the famous and dreaded Rau})araha. Some years later, when Grey was leaving New Zealand to return to England, the son of Rauparaha was the author of one of the many laments. Rauparaha himself bore no malice. He told his son to "love the Europeans." He
40 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGE GREY
had long been a professing Christian, and from the time of his seizure onwards to his death at an advanced age, he "was continually worshipping." But the devotedness of a whole race is proof that its faith in Grey remained intact. In the year of Rauparaha's death two Waikato chiefs wrote to the Queen, asking that Governor Grey should "long remain here as Governor of this island." "We have a great affection for him," they added.
The war, even in the neighbourhood of Wellington, was not ended by the imprisonment of Rauparaha. A guerilla warfare was still maintained by Rangihaeata, whom Grey disdained to follow, but who was pursued to the hills — he and his little band of 200 heroes— by 1000 English and colonial troops. In course of time he lost heart, dis- suaded by his relatives from continuing the strife. "Do not suppose, O Governor," he said to Grey, "that you conquered me. It was these, my own relatives and friends, who conquered me." He gave in, but as he proudly boasted, he was never defeated, nor was he ever captured. It was the way most Maori wars with the British ended. The natives were morally — they were seldom physically — beaten.
Wan at Wanganui.
In 1847 hostilities broke out afresh in the neighbour- hood of Wanganui, a nascent settlement 120 miles to the north of Wellington. The provocation, as was too often the case, was given by a heedless act on the part of the English, and the passions of the Maoris blazed out in deeds of vengeance. Whole tribes took up the cause of individual members, and the conflagration spread. Grey himself, always ready for a bit of fighting, by tongue or gun, took the field and arrived on the scene with troops. He was effectually aided by friendly Native chiefs, and these of the greatest— Waka Nene and Te Whero Whero, who came from the north and the centre of the North Island in order to aid the Governor. The war thus contributed to amalgamate the Maori race, all broken up into tribes, and give it a sense of unity. The alliance of friendly natives with an invader has been a feature of
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 41
almost all wars of conquest, from the time of the Romans onwards, and in none was it more helpful than in New Zealand. In the North, Waka Nene saved the Colony to the British in the dark days that followed the sack of Kororareka; Te Rangitake saved the more southern parts a year and two years later; and when Te Kooti's rising- terrified the colonists and almost scared the English Government into sending out a dictator, it was Rangihiwinui who played the part of the avenger and at the same time kept the loyal tribes from revolting. The debt of the New Zealand colonists to the friendly Maoris is immeasurable. On this occasion Grey bore generous testimony to their ' ' activity and gallantry. " " We could not have dispensed with their services," he honourably acknowledged. Once more, towards the end of the year, the war gradually died out.
A Blunder.
Like an unskilled medical practitioner, he was able, for a time, to bury his mistakes, or the mistakes of others, which he sanctioned. A Maori known to the settlers as Martin Luther, and to his own race as Wareaitu, was captured by the troops at Wanganui in 1847, tried by court-martial, and hanged. The despatch in which Grey described the incident was never published, but Mr. Rusden was fortunate enough to find it in the Colonial Office. Grey there states that Wareaitu was executed for his connection with the murder of certain settlers. No such charge was made before the court-martial. He was there tried as a rebel for attacking the troops. To stigmatize a Maori fighting in defence of his tribe a rebel was monstrous, and to execute him for it as a common criminal was a crime. The execution, said a military surgeon, Dr. Thomson, who has written one of the best books about New Zealand, was the disgrace of Grey's first governorship.
Chaptek v.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continiied.
The Missionaries.
Besides the Maoris, Grey was to find in New Zealand a remarkable body of men who were playing a large part in the history of the Colony. They belonged to two religious denominations — the Anglicans and the Wes- leyans, and their friendly rivalry presaged an equal share in its future civilisation. They had been principally instrumental in procuring the assent and the signatures of the chiefs to the treaty of Waitangi, and the first Governor had acknowledged his obligations to them in this connection. On many an occasion both Anglicans and Wesleyans had interposed between angry bands of Native combatants and made peace. They completed the pacifi- cation they had begun. Largely at their instance, the great hostile warriors — Kapiti and Heke in the north, Rauparaha and Rangihaeata in the south — turned their spears into priming-hooks and died Christians. Such services were incommensurable and unrewardable, and they should have earned for the ''transfigured band" both consideration and reverence.
The Missionary Ideal.
They received neither at the hands of Governor Grey. An older man, with a still more perverted mind, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, appraised them more justly when, in 1839, he instructed his brother. Colonel William Wake- field, to deal considerately with them, because of "the sacrifices they had made as pioneers of civilisation." Self-sacrifice was the last attribute Grey was to perceive in them. Half a century afterwards he told how he had found them living in comfortable houses, in competence, and in good positions. Having incredible influence over the natives, they had acquired great estates, — and this
42
GOVERXOK OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TEEM 43
was the pretext of Ms hostility. They also opposed and bitterly attacked all who stood up for fair dealing. The chief of those who thus stood up for fair dealing was Grey himself, and he seemed to thinlv that he had been badly used by them. Yet, at different times, he had written of them in despatches as "the numerous and admirable body of missionaries," and justly spoke of them as having conferred ' ' incalculable benefits ' ' on the Colony.
In the long strife that took place between them he was the aggressor. As early as February, 1846, immediately after the capture of Euapekapeka, he intimated that letters of a gravely compromising, indeed of a treason- able, character had been found in the pah. These he professed to have destroyed without reading, but he let it be plainly understood that the leading Anglican mission- ary, Henry Williams, was one of the writers. Williams was one of the most striking personalities in the early history of the Colony. Like the late Archbishop of York, he had served in the Royal Navy ; and the fighting spirit, subdued and refined, lived on in the old lieutenant. He was possessed by the ideal of the early missionaries, who looked forward to a missionary New Zealand, peopled by none but Maoris and their missionary teachers, or, if by some scattered Europeans as well, needed at first for purposes of trade and industrial initiation, then by those Europeans under the government of the mis- sionaries. No thought had they of making New Zealand a British colony, or the home of a future division of the British race. They knew their labours to be imperilled by the questionable specimens of Europeans already settled in the islands, and they dreaded that their entire work of evangelization would be ruined by British colonisation. So indeed it proved, or almost so. But these things were still in the womb of time. Meanwhile, these excellent, if mistaken, men dreamed of a Maori theocracy, where the missionaries would supersede the tohungas, or Maori priests, raise the whole people to a higher level, and create within them a new life.
Acting in that self-assumed capacity, so far from encouraging revolt, Henry Williams sought to guide and
44 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
disarm the rebel chiefs who lately threatened British ascendency. The heart of the old naval officer was loyal to the old flag", and he must have felt a sharp pang when that strangest of charges was made. The incident is notable only as revealing the beginning of Grey's animosity against Williams.
Gney's Action against them.
A month or two later it assumed an acute form. With the impression of the discovery still hot in his mind, Grey learnt that a number of persons had acquired large tracts of land from the Maoris, and for sums that now seem insignificant. These (he informed Lord Grey in a despatch dated, June, 1846) included "among them those connected with the public press, several members of the Church Missionary Society, and numerous families of those gentlemen," together with "various gentlemen holding important offices in the public service. ' ' He went on to say that "these individuals could not be put into possession of those tracts of land without a large expendi- ture of British blood and money;" hence, the despatch came to be known as "the Blood and Treasure Despatch." It would have to be decided whether (and he manifestly advised the Colonial Secretary not to decide that) "British naval and military forces should be employed in putting these individuals into possession of the land they claim." The despatch was marked, "confidential," but Lord Grey broke the seal of secrecy by promptly communicating the contents of it to the Church Missionary Society. The act set a questionable example to his namesake in New Zealand, who, twenty years after, communicated to his cabinet a confidential despatch from the Secretary for War and bitterly expiated the offence. The unfortunate Governor was twice punished — once for a despatch he wrote and again for a despatch written to him.
One set of facts could not be gainsaid. The mission- aries had acquired extensive estates, and they had paid sums that by no rule of proportion could be deemed the
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llKNKV WIMJAMS.
GOVEENOK OF ISTEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 45
equivalents of tlie so-called purchases. Of a compara- tively small number of missionaries no fewer than eight — six actual and two past missionaries — possessed an amount of land exceeding the maximum fixed by colonial ordinance at 2,560 acres, while the others were doubtless provided for on a smaller scale. There was nothing in itself unjust in such purchases. The Government of the mother-colony of New South Wales recognised that men who had made such heavy sacrifices for love of their kind, and who were so situated that they could not provide for their families, should have their families provided for by the State, and such provision was made in the form easiest to the Government that had fallen heir to the fee-simple of an entire continent by making grants of land to the children of chaplains. Unlike the early (and some later) politicians of the Colony, who made a fortune in New Zealand and then returned to England to spend it, the missionaries had resolved to dwell with their families in the land whither they had been sent and among the people they had converted to a new life. It is perhaps little to say that the missionaries did not ask, as Grey's despatch cynically implied they did, to be put in posses- sion of the lands they claimed — least of all, by the ' ' effusion of blood and treasure. ' ' They were already in possession of them, and the Maoris never contested the missionary claims. The influence of the missionaries was so great that the natives would probably have given up to them still more extensive tracts of land.
A Theocmacy.
It is an old question. As early as the first Christian centuries it was realised that the devotion of the faithful was a source of public danger, and statutes of the early emperors limited the amount of the donations they could legally make. The triumph of the Church over a moribund power augumented the evil. Throughout the Middle Ages the 'dead hand' of the Church was over all. In several European countries it was estimated that the Catholic Church held one-third of the landed wealth, and
46 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
similar statements are made of the Oriental theocracies. The acquisition of land, at least in early times, is mani- festly the material foimdation of the spiritual power. Through this means the Pope attained his primacy. Through it all the national churches sustained their energies and maintained their consequence in the world. At this day, the spiritual communions par excellence, such as the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists assure their material existence by trust deeds which give them a legal title to their chapels, schools, and endowments. Sometimes their most saintly ministers have tarnished their repute by their pertinacious pursuit of such wealth, and several ministers in all the colonies have impaired their spiritual usefulness by an undue addiction to the acquisition of it-
The danger of a theocracy, buttressed by large material resources, arising in New Zealand was not wholly imaginary. One of the missionaries claimed 30,000 acres. Another claimed about 10,000 acres, and a Government commissioner, to whom the Governor had remitted the settlement of the dispute, assigned him the full amount of his claim. To several others the same commissioner rashly awarded amounts exceeding the legal maximum. Grey had not the smallest intention of conceding any such extravagant claims. Of the missionaries Henry Williams was the most intractable. He positively stated that he claimed no excess over the legal maximum. On the contrary, as he jesuitically admitted, he made his very extensive purchases of land for the sole benefit of his eleven children, and he never derived a shilling from any of them. Men, other than misers, usually accumulate for the benefit of their heirs, but they are not generally considered the less selfish on that account. Nor was it literally true that Williams did not benefit by the lands he bought. When, in consequence of these transactions, he was dismissed by the Church Missionary Society, he withdrew to an estate owned by one of his sons, and there continued his noble missionary toils. He had imwittingly been providing for his old age.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 47
The Missionaries' Land Purchases.
The missionaries had immediately adopted the practice sanctioned by the Government of New South Wales. In order to provide for their children they had proposed to the Church IMissionary Society, which had hitherto granted a limip sum in satisfaction of all demands, that it should purchase for each child of a missionary 200 acres. The Society agreed, but annexed con- ditions that made the proposal unacceptable to the missionaries. They then decided to purchase land on their own account and place their children on it as they grew up. The Society did not disapprove of the practice, and the Bishop of Australia, then their diocesan, openly countenanced it. At the same time he gave them wise counsel. Let them provide for their children, and a blessing attend them, but let them reserve no land for their own use. Not otherwise could they escape aspersions.
Aspersions had already been made, and by one who fought without the gloves. When he was in England in 1840 Grey may, probably must, have seen four published letters addressed to Lord Durham by a famous Austra- lian Presbyterian, John Dunmore Lang. Dr. Lang had touched at New Zealand on his way to England in 1839. He had kept his eyes open, and when he arrived in England, he told what he had seen. He asserted that the missionaries, especially the agents of the Church Missionary Society, had been the ''principals in the grand conspiracy of the European inliabitants to rob and plunder the natives of their land," and that their sys- tematic practice was "one of the grossest breaches of trust witnessed for a century past." It was a scathing indictment, and matters were still worse than Lang had made out. It was Anglican missionaries whose mis- deeds he had heard of at the Bay of Islands, but, further south, missionaries of the other denominations had carried it to perilous lengths. The same pretext that induced the Anglicans to make extensive purchases induced the Rev. Richard Taylor, so creditably known in the literature relating to New Zealand, to purchase 50,000 acres.
48 LIFE OF SIE GEOKGE GEEY
Two things strike one in connection with the matter. Where did men who were presumably poor procure the money for making such extensive purchases? Mr. Taylor paid £681 for his 50,000 acres ; Mr, Fairburn paid £923 for his 40,000. They must have borrowed the money. That is, they engaged, through the ordinary channels, in land speculations. Were such speculations consistent with their professional character?
Next, the missionaries estimated the value of land at five shillings the acre. This is shown by their proposal that, instead of giving their children at fifteen years old a final gift of £50, the Society should buy for them 200 acres. It was also the estimate adhered to by the Govern- ment commissioners. At that rate Mr. Fairburn would have paid a sum of £10,000 instead of less than £1,000, and Mr. Taylor £12,500 instead of less than £700. And what was the money value of the tools, etc., Mr. Williams gave for his thousands of acres?
Williams never surrendered the lands he had so easily acquired. In his heated controversy with the Governor, the Bishop (who sided with the Governor), and the Church Missionary Society he took high ground. He demanded that the Governor's grave charges should "be either fully established or fully and honourably withdrawn." They seem to have been sufficiently established by the mere enumeration of the lands owned by Williams's sons — almost the only fertile lands in the beautiful but barren and unproductive Bay of Islands. Withdrawn they never were, unless a friendly visit to the Bay of Islands during Grey's second term as Governor of New Zealand be considered such. The historians have taken sides with Williams. Not only his son-in-law, the scholar Carleton (who used to cite Aeschylus in the House of Representatives, where there was no Sheridan to check him) in a biography of his father-in-law and in a special vindication, but the historian of the Church of England in New Zealand, the good Dean Jacobs; the historian of New Zealand, the Draconian Eusden; and the biographer of Wakefield, the all-accomplished and impar- tial Dr. Garnett, have with one accord set themselves
GOVEENOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 49
to laud and justify the brave old missionary. Two demurrers may be entered. First, let the unbiased reader peruse in the Parliamentary Papers the list of articles given by Williams in exchange for the tracts of land he purchased from the Maoris. It compares favourably with the collection of looking-glasses and Jew's harps given by William Wakefield for his alleged purchases, but it is still edifying. Next, let him remember that some of Williams's sons are among the largest landholders in New Zealand.
The Governor's Tpiumph.
The entangled affair issued in a victory for the militant Governor. The peccant missionaries were stringently dealt with by their ecclesiastical superiors and by the New Zealand courts. In 1849-50 Henry Williams was dismissed by the Church Missionary Society, and one of the most potent influences for good was for a time partially extinguished. The account of his departure from his "old and much-loved home, all untouched in Sabbath peace," reminds one of the depar- ture of the seceding Free Church ministers from their manses only seven years before, which has been pathetically painted by Sir George Hervey. The root of both severances was the same — collision with the civil power; but the Scottish Presbyterian went out with clean hands, while the Anglican went out gorged with the spoils of the Maori. If the biographers and his- torians vindicate Williams, they fling the other mission- aries to the wolves. Clarke, who had been a catechist, and then was appointed Chief Protector of the Aborigines, a capacity in which he rendered them signal services, was likewise dismissed, though a legal decision had been given in his favour. He offered to surrender the excess, provided it could be held by the Church in trust for the education of the natives, and when this con- dition was rejected, he divided his estates among the members of his family and was again condemned by his society for so doing. Fairbum was also dismissed, and he too offered to surrender his excess land on similar
E
50 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
terms, but in his case the Government acted with a stringency that no legal decision impeded. It seized the greater part of his 30,000 acres, which had been a bone of contention between two hostile tribes, and were bought by him at the instance of Williams (who refused to pur- chase them for himself), because on no other terms could peace be made. Some grasping Wesleyan missionaries, who had yielded to the same overpowering temptation, were also dismissed. The Governor had triumphed. Shall we condemn him? For once at least in his life his motives were pure. A professing Christian and an Anglican, he can have had no prejudice against either Anglican or Wesleyan missionaries, and it is surely doubtful whether he was animated, as Mr. Rusden alleges, by jealousy of the power wielded by the consecrated band. He saw the natives being robbed of their chief, almost their sole, possessions by men whose offence was all the deeper that they were self-dedicated to an unworldly life, and whose influence over the Maoris was the more irresistible. He stood between the helpless natives and his own conscienceless countrymen; should he not stand between them and those of his fellow-countrymen who ought to have been the living embodiment of the con- science of their race? We shall not condemn him. The whole episode forms almost the brightest chapter of a life where pure motives, noble passions, and high ends were strangely mingled with egoist aims, vindictive passions, and unworthy means.
Chapter VI.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continued. A Proposed Political Constitution.
Its Terms.
Early in 1847 the Governor received from the Secretary of State a copy of the Constitution of New Zealand framed by Parliament for the government of the Colony. It had been drafted after two of the fullest inquiries ever made by a select committee of the House of Commons, and the reports of the Committee abound in matter indis- pensable to the historian and useful to the sociologist. An ordinary Governor, whether he liked the new Con- stitution or not, would have taken the necessary steps to carry it into effect ; but Captain Grey was not an ordinary Governor. He closely examined the Act and found a number of provisions that appeared to him to be highly obnoxious. The Colony was to be divided into two pro- vinces, with a Lieutenant-Governor, appointed in Downing Street. The chief officials of each province were likewise to be appointed in Downing Street. There was to be a Legislature, elected by the local bodies. There was no provision for the representation of the Maoris. The greater part of the administration and apparently the entire legislation were to be made independent of the Governor-in-Chief, who saw himself shorn of three-fourths of his power.
Grey's First Rebellion.
Grey did not act precipitately. He approached Bishop Selwyn and Chief -Justice Martin, and, with his unrivalled powers of persuasion, he can have had little difficulty in convincing these two upright but as yet unsophisticated men that the proposed constitution would place in jeopardy equally the rights of the natives and the inde- pendence of the settlers. We do not know what
51
52 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
arguments he used. Eeviewing the whole subject forty- five years later, he alleged that in 1847 he was actuated by two motives. He believed that the popular sovereignty would be imperilled, and he dreaded the effect upon the natives of a policy that would practically exclude them from all control of the affairs of New Zealand. Whether he also used the argument that the natives' secure possession of their lands would be endangered, we do not know. We may suspect that it was, because this was evidently, as we may judge from their subsequent public action and printed utterances, the consideration that most weighed with both of these just and able men, who were pronounced philo-Maoris. Either they failed to perceive the mixture of selfish ends with loftier motives in the mind of the Governor, or they elected to overlook it. At all events, however it may have been managed, these high officials were gained over, and, with them at his back, the Governor felt strong enough to take one of the boldest steps the Governor of a British colony ever took. He ignored his Instructions, refused to allow the Imperial Act to have the force of law, and suspended the operation of the Constitution.
So, at least, it appears on the face of it, and so the incident is commonly narrated. The real manner of his defiance was less Promethean. Earl Grey's despatch (of December 23, 1846) left to the Governor the discretionary power of fixing the date at which he should promulgate the new charter. Of this power Grey prepared to avail himself. In the reply-despatch of May 3, 1847, he stated the chief objection to the new constitution. Eequiring that every elector should be able to read and write the English tongue, it would disfranchise, on its own territory, the entire Maori race, of whom not one was known to the Governor to possess the required qualifica- tion. Yet the great majority, taught by a band of devoted missionaries, could read and write the Maori language. Not only so. "In natural sense and ability," the Governor urged, the Maori race was equal to the majority of the European population. And he depre- cated the attempt to force on a proud and high-spirited
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 53
people a form of government that would bring them into subjection to an insignificant minority of European settlers. He would therefore, with the leave of the Secretary for the Colonies, refrain from giving effect to the portion of his Instructions that provided for the creation of representative institutions. All else should be carried out. Even this obnoxious portion he was prepared to put in force, if, after perusing this despatch, Earl Grey still adhered to his resolution. He neverthe- less requested that the Instructions should be revoked, if the reasons he had stated should ' ' command the assent of Her Majesty's Government." Thus, in the substance of the despatch there is little, in the manner of it there is not a trace, of the Titanic rebellion with the glamour of which it has dazzled the eyes of posterity.
The Right of Occupancy.
That he cannot have urged to Bishop Selwyn and Chief-Justice Martin, in opposition to the new Constitu- tion, the considerations that had most apparent weight with himself, is manifest from the stand they took and the lines of reasoning they followed, so different are they from his own. He makes no reference to the breach of the Treaty of Waitangi implied and virtually authorised in the Royal Instructions. Earl Grey frankly avowed that he "entirely dissented" from the doctrine ''that the aboriginal inhabitants of any country are the proprietors of every part of its soil of which they have been accus- tomed to make any use, or to which they have been accustomed to assert any title." He proposed to set up district land courts, in which no claim of the natives to lands shall be admitted unless it be proved that they had occupied or been accustomed to enjoy these, "either as places of abode or for tillage, or for the growth of crops, or for the depasturing of cattle, or otherwise for the con- venience and sustentation of life, by means of labour expended thereupon." In reading these instructions, which seem so explicit, the Governor jesuitically professed to assume that, when Earl Grey referred to unoccupied waste lands, he meant unclaimed
54 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
lands. Yet he is careful to explain to Earl Grey that the Maoris supported themselves, not only by cultivation, but by digging fern-root, by fishing and eel-catching, by hunting wild pigs ''(for which they require extensive runs);" and that to deprive them of the "wild lands" would be to cut off some of their most important means of subsistence.
It was no accusation against Earl Grey, or the direc- tors of the New Zealand Company, who prompted him, that they were unacquainted with the state of countries that were still at the clan stage ; not for twenty or thirty years were publicists to learn that in the greatest of British dependencies, where the clan stage is station- ary, there is no waste land, properly speaking. "Of uncultivated land there is abundance; but, with some trifling exceptions, the entire country is appropriated and is divided among the different village communities."* England itself, in so-called Anglo-Saxon times, was covered with a network of such communities. In 1847 New Zealand, so far as it was occupied by the Maoris, was at that stage, and, with similarly trifling exceptions, there was no portion of the land, at least in the North Island, that was not claimed by one or another of the clans.
What was the value of the claim? In theory, all the most eminent jurists and all the great discovering powers have recognised a "right of occupancy" as inhering in the aboriginal or indigenous possessors of the soil of a conquered country, and such a right can be extinguished only by treaty. In practice, history shows that, in America, at least in later years, the native right of occupancy has been steadfastly set aside by aggressive Governors and Presidents or encroaching Legislatures. In all the records of mankind there is hardly told such a long-drawn-out tragedy as is revealed by Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson in her work, A Century of Dishonour, where the earnest and accomplished authoress does what Burke declared that he could not do — draws an indict- ment against a whole people. No such charge can be
*W. B. Hearn, The Aryan Household, pp- 214-6-
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 55
made against the rulers of New Zealand. The day was to come when a whole province of acknowledged Maori territory was after a protracted war, to be confiscated by right of conquest, and there had previously been numberless disputes in detail, some of them sanguinary, about the possession of this or that portion. Some of the treaties, especially in the South Island, but also in the North, have not been strictly observed. But the alleged right of occupancy has ever been held sacred. Would it have been so held had the principle laid down by Thomas Arnold, and accepted on his authority by Earl Grey, been adopted and acted upon? The historian of ancient Rome and professor of history at Oxford maintained that such a right is ''inseparably united with industry and know- ledge." Wherever these had not been applied, he con- tended, and Earl Grey agreed with him, that the right lapsed.
The drift of public opinion in the forties was against the contention, and perhaps it was well. Ugly questions were thus not raised, and implacable animosities were not aroused. For one reason or another the Maoris parted with their lands as speedily as the needs of the colonists demanded, and the advance of colonisation did not, as in the United States it did, outstrip the decline of the Native race. In our days the trend of settlement is all the other way, and the Maoris are about to be dispossessed on a large scale in order that their lands may be thrown open to cultivation. It is a consequence of the more strenuous temper of our generation.
Two Philo-Maoris.
Against the principles stated in the despatches of Earl Grey and incorporated in the juridical portion of the new Constitution the two leading men already named took up strong groimd. In later days high officials of the Colony seemed always to have an animus against the poor Maoris ; in the earlier days they had a pronounced bias in their favour. After Grey him- self the Maoris never had better friends than Bishop
56 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Selwyn and Chief-Justice Martin. Through long terms of office and protracted lives these eminent men appeared to hold a moral brief for a race which, without their advocacy, would, in New Zealand at least, have been friendless indeed. On this supreme occasion, when the rights and the future existence of the race were at stake, both of them stepped into the breach and hazarded their good name as well as their official position in the defence of the Maoris. Selwyn not only recorded his ' ' formal and deliberate protest" against the principles avowed by Earl Grey; he stated that he was resolved "to use all legal and constitutional measures" to assist the natives "in asserting and maintaining" their "rights and privileges as British subjects." Chief- Justice Martin printed, but did not publish, a pamphlet on England and the New Zealanders. Both were sent to the Secretary for the Colonies by the Governor. If the Bishop's appeal was, like Antigone's, to "the infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven," the Chief -Justice's appeal was to the con- sensus of jurists. Earl Grey, in his turn, might have appealed to the practice of the United States, which, in those very years, was setting the maxims of its own eminent jurists at defiance.
Two points specially invite notice. Long afterwards, when the disastrous Waikato war was raging. Bishop Selwj^n expressed the belief that "the new Constitution" (which was to supersede the rejected Constitution of 1846) was the ultimate cause of the war. He meant, of course, the power conveyed by it to take the lands of the Maoris without the consent of the tribes. It was truly so. The exercise of that power, against which he was now contending, was the real cause of the war.
Next, the Chief-Justice predicted that, if these Royal Instructions were carried out, and the Maoris came to believe that their secure possession of their lands was threatened, "the Christian religion will be abandoned by the mass of those who now receive it. ' ' The prediction was fully realised only sixteen years later. Selwyn then wrote that the rise and acceptance of the new Hau-Hau or
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 57
Pai Marire religion (religion of "Good Tranquillity") were the outcome of the aversion of the Maoris for everything English.
A petition, signed by Selwyn, Martin, and many others, and protesting against the Constitution and the Instruc- tions, was presented to the Governor and forwarded by him to the Colonial Office. The Wesleyan Missionary Society in London took the same view. Naval officers, who had been travelling through the native districts, made known the dread of the Maori chiefs at the threatened loss of their lands. All possible influences conspired against the unfortunate measure.
It is indeed doubtful if any proposals emanating from the Government of the Mother-country ever met with such serried opposition. Mr. Rees states, manifestly on authority, that if he had been required to carry the Instructions into effect. Grey would have resigned his office, and the assurance is confirmed by contemporary evidence. According to Bishop Selwyn, Grey assured both Selwj^n and Chief -Justice Martin that he "neither could nor would carry them into practice in New Zealand. ' ' The other high officers of the Colony were no less determined. The Chief-Justice put forth a keen discussion of their legality and a strong protest against them, and, after flinging this firebrand into the Colonial Office, he declared that it was for the Home Government to determine whether he could fitly retain his office. The Bishop of New Zealand was no less emphatic. "A little more," he said, "and Lord Grey would have made me a missionary bishop, with my path upon the mountain wave, my home upon the rolling deep." His clergy were as outspoken as their chief. Earl Grey's despatch, wrote Archdeacon Maunsell, "strikes at the very root of the life and liberty of the aborigines." The only course open to sons of the missionaries would be to leave in sorrow the country which they were civilising and had won for the British.
58 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
Surrender of the Colonial Office.
We need not now hesitate to say that the Governor was wholly in the right. It was a thoroughly bad Constitution. We may go further, and admit that it was better for the Colony, at that stage, to be governed by an enlightened despot than by a packed Legislature. The Colonial Of&ce took the same view. Lord Grey confessed that he was staggered by the fact that no single Maori could read or write the English language. He could not understand that the missionaries should be teaching the natives to read and write their own language instead of that of the English. None the less, he meekly accepted the snub, and even turned the other cheek. He made haste to procure the passing of an Act suspending the Constitution for a period of five years.
The debates that took place in the House of Commons in December, 1847, and February, 1848, were highly flattering to the young Governor. With his habitual exaggeration or malapropism, Disraeli described him as being "appalled" by the receipt of the copy of the Con- stitution, but he lauded the Governor's ''discretion and abilities." Lord Lincoln, the future Duke of Newcastle, thought the Act should be repealed, not suspended. Some future notabilities took part in it. A trio of friends, inspired perhaps by common ecclesiastical sympathies — Gladstone, Eoundell Palmer, and Cardwell, approved of the Bishop's protest. Earl Grey admitted that the Sus- pensory Act was ''founded almost entirely on the recommendations of Captain Grey," who "so thoroughly understood the position and interests of the Colony." With a comic want of penetration the Secretary of State apologised to the Governor for throwing on his shoulders the burden of personal rule. Next year he was knighted. The force of complaisance could no further go. An act of rebellion has seldom met with such complete success or brought such a harvest of renown to its author.
Chapter VII. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
Civilising the Maoris.
The Governor now gathered all the powers of Govern- ment into his own hands and was henceforth free to devote himself to the most interesting, as it was doubtless the most important, part of his mission to New Zealand. Having fought and conquered the natives — always an essential preliminary with him — he devoted himself to the work of pacificating and civilising them. He was well fitted for the task. Genuine kindness of heart, sympathy with the wronged, a horror of injustice, and perhaps something of the savage in his own nature made him a born mediator. His schemes embraced nothing less than the amalgamation of the two races. Like Samuel Marsden and the missionaries, Lawry and Buller, like the New Zealand Company and a well-informed writer in the Edinburgh Revieiv, as also like Samuel Stanhope Smith, an old-time president of William and Mary College, with respect to the population of the United States, Sir George Grey believed that the future inhabitants of New Zealand would be a mixed population, a blend of British and Maoris. He certainly believed that, as two noble Spanish houses trace back their descent to Montezuma, and Australians as well as Virginians are proud to count Pocahontas among their ancestors. New Zealand families might one day boast of having in their veins the blood of a Christian hero like Te Waharoa or a mighty warrior like Te Rauparaha. The latter expecta- tion has hardly been realised, save in a few isolated instances; while the former has been signally disap- pointed; and both did more credit to the hearts than to the heads of those who thus hoped to save a doomed race.
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60 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Amalgamating the Races.
No more destructive policy could, indeed, be conceived- The mixture of the primary races stands condemned as producing ''chaotic" constitutions, of body, mind, and character, and leading to the inevitable degeneracy of the mixed breed. The experience of breeders is here decisive. No experienced breeder would dream of blend- ing radically different species, save now and then for a special purpose, as when the horse and the ass are interbred to produce the mule, or even widely separated varieties of the same species, as when the horse and the zebra are interbred for fancy or scientific objects. He unites closely allied varieties of the same species, or members of "the same variety that have some different points. To unite disparate individuals would be, not to imperil, but to wreck, the slowly acquired results of long inheritance or accumulated selection. The rules of the advisable mixture of human races are identical with the rules of the intermixture of animal races. Shun mixtures of the primary races and blend only varieties, is the one clear imperative rule in human societies, as among domes- ticated animals. Doubly is the mixture of primary races condemned when one of the races is very high and the other very low in the scale. x\ll history testifies against it. Canada under the French regime is a speaking example. During the hundred years of French occupa- tion, when the French immigrants mingled with the Indians, they sank so rapidly in the anthropological scale that they gloried in resembling savages in mind as well as in manners. The South American republics at this day contain visible evidence of the ''chaotic con- stitutions" resulting from the mixture of the immigrant Spaniards with the natives. Their political instability and their moral deterioration alike prove the injurious character of the blend. At the other end of the scale, the union of the Germanic races of Northern Europe in North America furnishes proof of the happy effects of the mixing of allied varieties. We need not too severely censure the short-sighted promoters of an injurious measure. In those pre-Darwinian days the most
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 61
instructed individuals were unable to realise at what cost the purity of a race is maintained. It is only by the unintermitted action of natural selection, as also of that artificial selection which follows in its steps, that each human race preserves the attributes that have been with such difficulty acquired.
Organising the Maoris.
The end desired was happily unattainable, but the means used subserved wiser purposes. Adopting the suggestion of James Busby, the first official British Resident in the Islands, the Governor pensioned some of the tribal chiefs ; others received regular rations ; and to others were given presents. Realising, as Hongi had long ago realised, that the possession of arms of precision was the chief source of Maori strength against the English and at the same time the chief cause of wars with one another, he succeeded, after a long struggle with his Council, in stopping the sale of fire-arms to the natives; and he otherwise endeavoured to abolish inter- tribal wars. He restricted the sale of alcoholic liquors among them and thus checked their ravages. One has seen, at the Hot Lakes, a stately Maori wrapped in his blanket, with the port of an ancient Roman clothed in his toga, assisting a tipsy Maori woman, with a child on her back, along the road; and one could conceive the hatred of the pakeha that smouldered in the heart of the old chief.
Grey next reverted to the policy of Governor Hobson, unliappily reversed by FitzRoy, of prohibiting the sale of Maori lands to private individuals and re-asserted the pre-emptive right of the Government. He proceeded to organize the natives. He formed and armed a body of Native police under Eur-opean officers. Some of the more intelligent he intended to use on juries and other- wise employ in connection with the administration of justice. Courts were created ; resident magistrates were appointed, with the powers of commissioners; and one of these was afterwards Sir John Gorst. A lawyer was
62 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
made standing counsel to the Maoris, with a salary and a commission on sums received. The courts thus consti- tuted were at first freely resorted to by the natives. During one year 211 cases were tried and £490 recovered from Europeans in Auckland alone for the Maoris.
Hospitals.
Pursuing his habitual policy, Grey reared hospitals for the natives in the four chief northern settlements, and at two of these, by 1852, nearly a thousand patients had been treated. He hoped thus to eradicate the belief in witchcraft, but it appears that in this he was no more successful than afterwards in South Africa.
Schools.
As previously in South Australia, he endeavoured to civilise the Maoris by educating the young. This time, however, he set up no State schools, but wisely left the teaching of the Maori children in the efficient hands of the missionaries. A proportion of the Colonial revenue, a larger proportion of the proceeds of land sales, and a fixed proportion of the funds contributed by the Imperial Government were paid to the Anglican, Wesleyan, and Catholic missionaries. A total sum of £5,900 was thus annually expended. The only conditions annexed were that Government inspectors should be permitted to examine the schools, and that English should be taught in them. Grey also induced the Maoris to set apart landed reserves as permanent endowments that would constantly be rising in value. The schools were indus- trial as well as educational. Carpenters and farm labourers were to train the young Maoris in the primary arts. Agricultural implements, horses, and cows were to be provided by the Government. Grey congratulated himself on the amount of success these institutions attained. It was, at all events, the beginning of a system of education which, to the credit of the Colony, has never been pretermitted.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 63
Public Works.
It was everywhere a constant part of Grey's policy to employ the natives on public works. Buildings were raised by them under European supervision. Like the Duke of Wellington, he was a great believer in roads. In South Australia he had made the Great Eastern Road across Mount Lofty, and thus laid open the valuable Mount Barker district ; and he opened up great lines of internal communication that gave access to rich agricultural districts. He now employed the Maoris in the making of roads near Auckland and Wellington, associating them with the English soldiery, and placing them under their own chiefs. When he is criticized for breaking up the tribal system by destroying the authority of the chiefs, and thus precipitating the ruin of the race, both in New Zealand and South Africa, the fact should be remembered. Earl Grey dreaded that just this would be the effect of his native policy, and it is the main thesis of Professor Henderson's biography that this result was actually thus produced in New Zealand. There it was in all probability rendered inevitable by the work of the mis- sionaries, who held the soul of everv Maori to be of infinite worth and therefore hastened the development of individualism within the tribes. In Cape Colony the place of the chief has been taken and perhaps more than filled by the black editors of journals, the ministers of the new Ethiopian church, and the leaders of Ethi- opianism.
Agriculture.
Grey also actively exerted himself to induce the Maoris to take to agriculture. To believe his sanguine despatches, he was largely successful. In the valley of the Waikato they had 1,000 acres under wheat, and in Nelson, in the South Island, 340 acres. Fruit, potatoes, and maize were also grown. Almost every village had a water-mill, and on one river there were ten. It is melancholy to reflect that all this fine blossom of civil- isation was not destined to mature. Here and there in the North Island the Maoris grow patches of wheat, and
64 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
everywhere they grow sweet potatoes; but the bulk of their land has been taken from them, and the greater part of the rest is on the eve of being taken. They are examples of arrested development.
Grey's Personal Sympathy.
Grey evidently did much for the Maoris; perhaps he did all that it was possible to do. Only one more gift could he bestow on them, and this he did not withhold. He gave them himself. With none of the repugnances which make wholesome contact with lower races impossible to most Englishmen, he moved among them as one of them- selves. He learnt their language, studied their traditions, wrote down their legends. The aggrieved told their wrongs into the Governor 's own ear and received the pro- mise of redress from the Governor's own lips. There was no condescension, no affectation of dignity or authority, but no one who saw him in the midst of a group of chiefs could doubt where the real ascendancy lay. The Maoris on their side took him to their hearts. With the nobler leaders, like Waka Nene and Rewi, he formed a high, respectful friendship, such as he had with Martin and Selwyn. To the end the great body of them never knew any other Governor than Kaivana Kerei, and to the last they spoke of him with an affectionate veneration such as few savage peoples have felt for a civilised ruler. When the good and evil of his life comes to be balanced in the eternal scales, his noble work among the Maoris, and afterwards among the more degraded races of South Africa, will weigh down all else. It will be his passport to Walhalla.
Chaptee vni.
GOVEENOE OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
The Mythologist,
It used to be said that three leading men in New Zealand entered into a compact (a holy compact, this time) to contribute each his share to the literature or the literary history of the Colony. Governor Grey was to collect and edit the legends of the Maoris. Hugh Carleton, one of the many good scholars early New Zealand had to boast of and long a prominent legislator, was to compose the history of the historically most picturesque of the provinces. And James Edward Fitz- Gerald was to write the history of Anglican Canterbury, of which he was at one time Superintendent, which he long represented in the Legislature, and where he founded and edited a newspaper.* None of the three altogether failed to redeem their pledges. Fitz Gerald did not write a history of Canterbury, but he edited from the newspapers the earlier Hansard of the colony, where the struggle towards self-government manifested itself in the debates, and he prefixed to it a historical sketch. Carleton did not compose a history of Auckland, but he composed A Page from the History of New Zealand, describing an import- ant episode in its history; and the biography of liis father-in-law, Archdeacon Williams, is almost a history of Northern New Zealand. Grey, perhaps the most constitutionally indolent of the three, nobly fulfilled Ms undertaking and a good deal more. He collected and translated both the mythology and legends and the proverbs of the Maoris.
* The story is possibly a pervorsion. In his Page, etc., Carloton describes as " the three most interesting episodes in the annals of the Colony " the Native war, the struggle for self-government, and the controversy over the purchase of Native lands by the mission- aries. These three episodes may have been the tasks self-assigned to the three magnates. At all events, Carleton avows that ho had, for his part, undertaken the third.
65
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66 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GEEY
The task had an earlier origin and a deeper source than any compact. In 1883, when he was handing over to the city of Auckland the second magnificent collection of books he had formed, he avowed: ''I have, from the earliest times to the present, done my utmost to preserve and record the languages and dialects of each of the nations [did he say, peoples?] amongst whom I have lived. ' ' He had made a worthy beginning with the blacks of "Western Australia. He now undertook a more dif- ficult task with a nobler race. Ambition, enthusiasm, and sympathy were all at the bottom of it. Literary ambition had burned in him ever since, at Sandhurst, he had translated Schiller and acquired the rhythmical lilt that never afterwards deserted his style. He had tasted of the intoxicating juice of the grape in his Journals; he was now to essay a work of recovery and reconstruction that would raise him almost to the level of Snorro Sturleson. Enthusiasm too was inspired by a theme that aroused equally his instincts of romance, his sense of poetry, and his thirst for science. And his heartfelt sympathy with a race that all the world has agreed to aggrandise was a no less potent motive. He caught the Maoris at the critical point when the shock of collision between two races projected such an image of the natives on the minds of the immigrants as readily translated itself into literature. He found the Maoris at their best, with their valour, beauty, and poetry still intact. Heroic and romantic qualities clung to them like a garment.
Grey lost little time in setting to work. In the summer (Southern summer) of 1849-50 he made an expedition overland from Auckland to Taranaki, and he passed through the picturesque country of Eotorua and Taupo to the West Coast. In course of it he gathered some characteristic pieces of Maori literature from the lips of tohungas, or priests, and of high chiefs. The short collection contains two imprecations, of the kind common in mythologies, a poetical welcome to strangers, and two legends, one of which alone would have rewarded his insatiable curiosity. It was a "gem of purest ray serene" — the legend of Hinemoa, the Maori maiden, who,
GOVEENOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIEST TERM 67
reversing the Greek tale, swam out to an island in the green lake of Rotorua to meet her lover. The legend was finely translated by the Governor and dictated to his secretary, Mr. G. S. Cooper, long Under-Secretary for the Colony, and incorporated by him in a Journal nominally written by him, but possibly dictated by the Governor. The Journal, with these gems enchased in it, was published at Auckland in 1851.
The enthusiast continued his self-imposed task, and three years later the indefatigable worker issued in London a collection of Maori legends in the original. In the following year (1855) Grey published his masterpiece — the Polynesian Mythology, and Ancient Traditional History of the Neiv Zealand Race, as furnished hy their Priests and Chiefs. It consists of translations of the legends and myths in the foregoing work, but, as we learn from the catalogue of the Grey Library at the Cape, it does not contain the whole of these, translations of some of them existing only in manuscript. Should not these 'lost leaves' be rescued from their banishment and pro- duced in an English dress*?
In an interesting preface the author relates how he came to collect the legends. In the constant intercourse with the natives which the duties of government imposed on him he discovered that the chiefs continually cited proverbs or fragments of ancient poems, or made allusions to things mentioned in their legends; and he soon found that he could neither successfully govern the 'Native race nor hope to conciliate its good-will, if he remained in ignorance of their literature, which was none the less really such that it was still unwritten. ''My Native friends," as he called them, aided him, and in after-years he recited the names of the chiefs and priests from whose mouths he took down the legends and myths. First and foremost figures "the Tiger of the Wairau," the formidable Rangihaeata; next came Te Rou, King Potatau, the ill-fated Te Heuheu, Patuone, and Te Tani- wha; while men so authorised as John White, most, instructed of Maori mythologists. Primate Iladfield, who must have known the Maori intus et in cute, Chief -Justice
68 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Martin, another philo-Maori, Archdeacon Maunsell, the philologist, and the missionary Wohlers contributed elucidations. Many of the Maoris, he says, sent him voluminous manuscripts. On the whole, few works of the kind have been drawn from more authoritative or authentic sources.
The work has long been a storehouse of information on Polynesian mythology. It has not escaped criticism. Grey himself claimed that it was a "close and faithful" rendering, and its general truthfulness has not been denied. Yet Maori scholars have alleged that the trans- lator sometimes sacrificed literality to elegance, and it is certain that, once at least, he sacrificed truth to decency. In fact, he admitted, in a letter to Mr. Tylor, that he had necessarily expurgated the myth of Maui, relating to the creation of the world; and Mr. Tylor states that he received from Grey "a more explicit and mythologically more consistent" version of the myth than the one Grey first published. It is also asserted that he was less deeply conversant with the hieratic form of the language than with colloquial Maori. Let all allowances be made on these two scores, and the Poly- nesian Mythology will still remain a classic.
A closer scrutiny shows that Sir George did much more than Bowdlerise the legends and polish their phraseology. A later publication of them reveals a mass of discrepancies among the various versions contributed by the different tribes. To reconcile these Grey "has smoothed out the inconsistencies and rejected the dis- agreements and variations, in order that the stories might have their full effect as romances of the primitive mind. ' ' He is thus, according to Professor Macmillan Brown, "a harmonizer of the legends rather than a reporter. ' ' The professor's final judgment is severe. While "the result is very satisfactory to the seeker of fairy stories and romances, " it is " anything but satisfactory to the student of ethnology or folklore, or even the history of the Polynesian mind."* Had the author fulfilled the title of
"Maori and Polynesian, p. 219.
GOVEENOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIEST TERM 69
his book and sought to harmonize the sacred stories of other branches of the Polynesian race, he would have found his task tenfold harder. The book contains no more than the myths and legends of the Maoris ; it is in only a restricted sense a *' Polynesian mythology."
A few months after it was published, it was translated into French by Dr. Eene Primaverre Lesson, who had accompanied as naturalist the French corvette. La Coquille, and who visited the Bay of Islands in 1824. According to his own account, he appended long notes to the translation, which was addressed to the Anthropo- logical Society of Paris. Nineteen months later a member of the Society, M. Gaussin, reported on it, but it seems not to have been published. Should not the Government of New Zealand, which in 1886 issued a second edition of the original, see to it that those doubtless valuable notes are recovered and done into English? Polynesia has long been a subject of predilection with French writers, and an appraisement of French contributions to the literature of New Zealand would be particularly interesting.
Grey's classic has been the source of many articles and many chapters. It has furnished materials to science and been used to buttress conflicting conclusions. Through it and some subsequent inquiries Mr. Tylor has discovered that Maui is a solar hero and the death of Maui *'a nature-myth of the setting-sun." An equal authority, Mr. Andrew Lang, on the other hand, disputes the solar character of the Maui-myth and sees in the story of the death of Maui a myth of the origin of death. With all his mastery Mr. Tylor is still enmeshed, even as another evolutionist, John Fiske, was, in that ancient solar mythology which the late John Crawford called "mere modern moonshine."
The work has also supplied materials for poetry, and in his Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day-Dream, Alfred Domett, Browning's ''Waring," has poetically paraphrased a number of the songs in Grey 's collection.
Chapter IX. GOVERNOE OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
Three Colonising Associations.
The New Zealand Land Company.
The Maoris having thus been conquered, conciliated, and organised, Grey had grave tasks before him. He had to measure himself against a not less formidable power, at least for the time — the New Zealand Company, which for a decade played a large part in English Par- liamentary history, in the proceedings of the Colonial OfSce, and in the founding of a British colony in New Zealand. The Company was an emanation from the brain of one of the deepest political thinkers, the subtlest schemers, and the most cunning manipulators of men that England has seen. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's dedica- tion to a colonial career was an accident, of the Darwinian sort, and it was to this 'accident' that the settlement of South Australia and New Zealand is ascribable. From the hour of the new-birth of his spirit he lived but for his colonies, true offspring of his genius. Grey was to come into personal contact with him only towards the end of his first term in New Zealand, when the Company was extinct, but he was brought into collision with the Com- pany as soon as his hands were free of the Maoris.
Jts Aims Thwarted.
It seemed specially constituted to arouse his distrust in advance, if not to excite his hostility. Its pretensions were high and its practices imperious. It virtually estab- lished an imperium in imperio. Before they landed in New Zealand, its officers and settlers, inspired by the theories of Hooker, Hobbes, and Rousseau, formed a social compact. Soon after they landed, they hoisted a flag, which was saluted by twenty-one guns from the ship
70
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 71
that brought them. They proceeded to set up a pro- visional government. They created a legislative and executive council, in emulation of the councils usually attached to the governors of Crown colonies, and they levied taxes. They appointed magistrates, who exercised judicial authority. They founded and named a settle- ment. Withal, the Company in England disclaimed all intention of establishing an independent polity. All its acts ran in the teeth of its professions. Three years later it denied, on legal authority, that the British government in New Zealand rested on a lawful foundation, and con- tested the validity of its acts. Governor Hobson dealt sternly with its pretensions in New Zealand, and Lord Stanley brutally suppressed its reclamations in England. Within an hour after he had learnt of the Company's proceedings at Wellington, Captain Hobson proclaimed the Queen's sovereignty over the North Island, and in another proclamation he declared the Association to be ''illegal and usurping." He held its doings to ''amount to high treason ; " he sent an officer with a body of troops, who were authorised to "displace all persons holding office under the usurping Government;" and he ordered him to restore to all persons any property of which they had been deprived by the so-called magistrates. Finally a proclamation summoned all persons to withdraw from the Association and submit to the proper authorities. Hobson has been accused of weakness by people who mis- take bluster for force and brutality for firmness, but he seems to have acted with equal promptitude and energy. His action was ominous of the attitude of the New Zealand Government towards the Company through the remainder of its history.
Its Land Purchases Fettered.
With the destruction of its independent civic existence the Company was hamstrung. For with its polity went its unrestricted power of purchasing land on its own terms. The Company might well proceed, as it did, to make extensive direct purchases of land from the natives,
72 LIFE OF SIK GEOEGE GREY
seeing that this was one of the privileges conferred on it by Act of Parliament. The British Parliament went still further. In accordance with the Wakefield system of colonisation, the Company was empowered to sell such lands at a minimum fixed price of £l per acre. Grey took strong exception to an arrangement that trenched upon the powers of the Governor. He also objected to any portion of the amount thus received being paid as interest on capital and dividends on stock. Surely, with injustice. Could a colonising company, in which the shareholders embarked large sums of money, be formed or conducted on any other terms than by paying dividends and interest? The directors and shareholders of the New Zealand Company had made a bad business of it, if the pecuniary returns were their only reward.
Two ordinances, annulling all land purchases made prior to the proclamation of sovereignty over the Islands, and another subjecting all such purchases made after a certain date to revision by a commissioner, smote the Company with paralysis. Thus fettered by the action of the local Government, it excited the resentment of its settlers, who described themselves as "smarting under a sense of wrong." They censured its failure to fulfil its obligations and asserted its disregard of the interests of the settlers. They complained that they were the vic- tims of the differences between the Company and the Colonial Office. The Company retorted that the refusal of the Governor to grant the rights of self-government had turned away the tide of immigration and consequently put a stop to land-sales. It had been truer to say that, with the blood shed at the Wairau on its head, the Com- pany was hopelessly at variance with the Maoris, who bitterly remembered its high-handed dealings and its perfidy, and would sell it no lands. Its offspring were also contributing to its difficulties. The Canterbury Association could not pay for the land it had bought of the Company and at the same time pay its way. The Otago Association was also in difficulties. The Govern- ment had practically to take over both associations.
GOVEKNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 73
Its Embarrassments.
By 1848 the embroilment had reached its height, and in March of that year Earl Grey and the Company agreed to entrust Governor Grey with the uncontrolled power of deciding disputes between the Company and its settlers. Six months later the chief officer of the Com- pany in New Zealand, Colonel William Wakefield, suddenly died, of a stroke of apoplexy. As if, when his functions had been taken from him and his mana was gone, his life naturally came to an end. He had lived for the Company, and loved it not wisely, but too well. Once more, Governor Grey had triumphed.
He assumed its chief function and acquired from the natives extensive tracts of land on easy terms. He succeeded where the Company had failed, in part because he gathered into his own hands all the powers of Govern- ment and some amount of treasure, but still more because he possessed the confidence of the natives. His manifest unbounded trust in them inspired a like trust on their part towards him.
Its Death.
We need further note only the last struggles of the expiring Company. So unprofitable had grown its tran- sactions, and so seriously had its land sales fallen away, that its solvency was threatened, and the British Parlia- ment had to come to the rescue. Two successive loans, amounting to £236,000, were granted in 1846 and a following year, on the understanding that they should be repaid in 1850. So unprosperous was the Company that in 1850 it could not meet its liabilities, and it peti- tioned to be wound up. Parliament again came to its aid and arranged that the Government of New Zealand should pay it the sum of £268,000 by reserving the sum of five shillings an acre on all future land-sales.
It is the way that colonising companies have usually ended — in virtual insolvency and in absorption by the governing State or by some other State. There is one notable exception. The Massachusetts Company merged
74 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
in the Massachusetts colony, and the form of government of the colony repeated the form of government of the Company. The New Zealand Company might have had a similar euthanasia. It was fashioned, and for some time it was engineered, by men who were large of heart and brain. They had conceived high ends: their object was nothing less than to annex and rule over an extensive new country, and there build up a grand new society, modelled indeed on the mother-society, but free from its defects. They rendered services of inappreciable worth: they rescued New Zealand from impending foreign domination, and they made it for ever the home of an Anglo-Saxon community. They begat on it another association of the same or a still higher type, and they aided a third association to settle still another province. Lastly, they endowed New Zealand with bodies of colonists equalled only by the colonisers of New England and never surpassed.
The Cantenbupy and Otago Associations!
Grey's relations with the Canterbury Association and the Otago Association were scarcely more harmonious than they were with the New Zealand Company. The friction between him and them was, indeed, constant. From the Canterbury Association, at all events, he received provocation. Arriving in Canterbury in advance of his immigrants, J. R. Godley, the agent of the Associa- tion in New Zealand, apparently just to keep his hand in, or perhaps openly to identify himself with the New Zealand Company, of which the Canterbury Association was the daughter, went to Wellington in order to join the officers of the Company and other settlers in the agitation against the Governor. Grey took a divine revenge. Years afterwards Godley admitted that he had been able to consummate his task only by "the wisdom and considerateness of Sir George Grey, who had hitherto practically given to its officers nearly the whole administration of public affairs." He took a more human revenge by thwarting the attempt made in 1851 to extend the Canterbury block.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 75
He was no less in constant conflict with the Otago Association, and the Rev. Dr. Burns, the spiritual head of the community, said that Sir George Grey's treatment of Captain Cargill, its civil head, had moved in him feelings of something more than Christian indignation. There can be no doubt that he was jealous of these imperia in wiperio, which diminished his prerogatives, trenched upon his functions, and hardly lightened his responsibilities. The Company and the two Associations had good reason for boasting, when he left New Zealand, that they "had given him a lively time. ' '
Chapter X.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
The New Constitution.
Colonial Discontent.
Grey would not have been Grey if lie had not excited active discontent in some portion of the colony he governed. Naturally, it was at the head-quarters of the New Zealand Company that he had the most and the bitterest enemies. The main charge against him in Wellington was that he wielded all the powers of an autocrat. In 1848 he was told that his government was "more absolute than that of any other dependency of the British Crown, with the exception of Norfolk Island. ' ' In the following year the agitation took shape, and a Set- tlers' Constitutional Association was founded by men who were afterwards eminent in the public life of the Colony — Fitzherbert, Fox, Featherston, (/'the three F's"— a fourth F, FitzGerald, was in opposition) and Weld, who all spoke at a public meeting in support of resolutions strongly condemnatory of the Governor. The agent in New Zealand of the Canterbury Association, the great and good Mr. Godley, did not scruple to censure Dr. (afterwards Sir David) Munro for contributing '' towards the infliction of a most serious and irreparable injury upon the colonists" by merely accepting a seat in the Legislative Council, and he denounced the "anti-colonial policy" of Sir George Grey. Only a year or two later Grey was to heap coals of fire on Godley 's head, as, many years later, on Weld's. At Nelson a future Premier, Mr. Stafford, four "magistrates" (probably mere justices of the peace), and some private citizens com- plained to Earl Grey of the Governor's absolutism. Even Auckland, the seat of government, and long his
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GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 77
city of predilection, took sides against him, and in 1849 drew up in public meeting assembled a petition to Earl Grey, which the Governor loyally forwarded, commenting upon it in excellent temper; the animus of the meeting will appear from the fact, disclosed by Grey himself in 1876, that the chairman of the meeting apologised ten years later for signing a petition containing "assertions made for no other purpose than to give personal annoy- ance."* And in 1851, Mr. Fox, who had succeeded Col. Wakefield as agent in the Colony of the New Zealand Companj^ gathered into a head the flood of denunciation in a long and elaborate indictment, where, on many counts, he arraigned the policy and conduct of the Governor.
The Governor's Absolutism.
There was abundant truth in one at least of the charges. In 1853, reviewing his career as Colonial Minister, Earl Grey took credit to the Ministry for the freedom it had left the Governor and the powers it had clothed him with. In December, 1849, he reminded the Governor that "the whole colonial revenue was" to be appropriated by the Governor himself, "with the aid of" a Legislative Council ' ' nominated by the Crown and acting under the direction" of the British Government. No wonder that self-respecting members of such a council should resign seats which could not be held on terms of independence. This state of things could not be indefi- nitely maintained. The settlers grew clamorous for representative institutions. In 1848 and again in 1849 the Governor replied diplomatically to such clamours and firmly resisted popular pressure. To Earl Grey he maintained that only a self-supporting community was entitled to be self-governing. Always deferential in form, he professed to be equally willing, as his lordship desired, to decline to introduce free institutions till he believed they could be safely conferred, and not to delay introducing them for a single day beyond what necessity
*N.Z. Parliamentary Debates, xxi, 368.
78 LIFE OF SIE GEORGE OBEY
dictated. For constitutional government was ''a boon which I" (the most autocratic Governor any British colony has had) ''am most anxious to see conferred upon" the inliabitants. In 1849, as in 1847, he implied that the Maoris would rise in rebellion if they were handed over to the tender mercies of the colonists. Do not the subsequent course of events, the Wellington and the Wanganui little wars, and far more the protracted and disastrous conflicts in Taranaki and the Waikato that dragged through a great part of the sixties, vindicate his prescience?
Provincial Legislatures.
Yet some twenty thousand colonists, most of them belonging to a good class and not a few of them men of exceptional ability and culture, could not be kept indefi- nitely in a state of pupilage. Men like Fox, FitzGerald, Featherston, and Fitzherbert, like the poet Domett, the naturalist Swainson, and the geologist Mantell, like the whole body of settlers in Canterbury and Otago, were the equals and the superiors of the voters in most European countries, and were, perhaps, still more capable of governing than of being governed. Grey was well aware, to his cost, of their moral and intellectual superiority. In many a wordy battle they had shown themselves a match for the Governor and for a still greater than he, the Colonial Minister himself. That minister now authorised his deputy to introduce a measure of local government, and in the Act of 1846 he had himself furnished a pattern. That Act contained provisions for the creation of pro- vincial legislatures and a General Assembly. The General Assembly was dropped for the time, but the Colony was ripe for the creation of provincial administra- tions. Physical accidents have sometimes diverted the course of public policy or affected the fates of nations. A shower of rain during the French Eevolution averted a meditated rising. An earthquake in Wellington, the permanent seat of earth-tremors and earthquakes, pre- cipitated the innovation. In October, 1850, the Governor
GOVEKNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIEST TERM 79
passed an ordinance establisMng Legislative Councils in each of the provinces into which the mode of colonisa- tion had divided the Colony. There were some novel and some reactionary features in the new ordinance. The franchise was liberally granted to the Maoris — at least, to those who resided in settlements where Europeans were in a majority; other electoral districts there were to be none. Leaseholders to a fixed amount and all freeholders were to have votes. Note also that there were to be nominee members appointed by the Governor for two years only; Grey had no objection to nominee members so long as they were nominated by himself. Leading colonial citizens, such as Mr. Stafford, held that the proposed reform was not radical enough. Ahead of their time, they demanded universal suffrage and vote by ballot, two elected chambers, and the removability of the Governor by address of the two houses. These proposals should have commended themselves to the Governor, who in later days advanced further still, but either the Radical in him was not yet full-grown, or else he held that a colonial constitution should not grant political privileges too much beyond those enjoyed by citizens of the Mother- land. They were more satisfactory to Earl Grey, who felt that the Governor had ''removed all obstacles to the establishment of representative government in New Zealand. ' '
Grey's Authorship.
Sir George Grey was doubtless prepared to take further steps in the way of constitutional legislation, but he held his hand when he learnt that a constitution for New Zealand was being prepared in the Colonial Office. Though of English origin, it was of colonial parentage. The putative father of it was Sir John Pakington, who had succeeded with the Ministry of Lord Derby to a brief tenure of the Colonial Secretaryship. The real author of it was Sir George Grey. On this point the evidence is conclusive. Here is the English evidence. In February, 1852, Earl Grey acknowledged that the
80 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGE GREY
Provincial Councils Ordinance ''has been of great service in preparing" the Bill about to be submitted to Parlia- ment. Meanwhile, a change of Ministry took place. On July 1, Sir John Pakington transmitted the new constitu- tion, and he acknowledged in writing to the Governor, that the measure "owes its shape in a great degree to your valuable suggestions." The Parliamentary Under- Secretary, Sir Frederick Peel, went still further. He asserted that the "bill just passed was framed, excepting in one particular, by Governor Grey himself, and it was to him that the colonists were indebted for the constitu- tion which Parliament had granted them. ' '
Sir George Grey might therefore seem to be within Ms rights when he claimed the constitution of New Zealand as his handiwork. Yet there is a very different account of the matter. When Sir Jolin Pakington suc- ceeded Earl Grey as Secretary for the Colonies in 1852, he found in the pigeon-holes of the Colonial Office a bill prepared by his predecessor, granting a constitution to New Zealand. He did not accept it en bloc. According to Mr. Eees, here as everywhere expressing the belief of Sir George Grey, he summoned Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Fox, who had gone to London to launch a for- midable indictment at the head of the Governor, and this most determined of Grey's opponents aided the Minister in mangling a perfect constitution. There is better evidence on the subject. Sir Charles Adderley, after- wards Lord Norton, expressly states that the measure *'was based on a draft I drew up under the guidance of Gibbon Wakefield."* If Gibbon Wakefield's narrative be correct, Adderley 's statement errs by unduly simplify- ing the actual process. The draft referred to had been "drawn up at Hams, Adderley 's seat, by a committee consisting of Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Adderley, Messrs. Fox and Weld, afterwards New Zealand Premiers, and Wake- field."! Wakefield, who contributed this interesting detail in a letter to Lord Lyttelton, also virtually claimed the
*Seview of " The Colonial Policy of Lord J. Russell's Administration," p. 137. \ Edward Qihbon Wakefield, by Dr. Garnett, pp. 330-1.
GOVEENOR OF KEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 81
authorship of the constitution by petitioning the House of Commons in its favour.*
It is difficult to understand why Grey should have set such store by his claims to originality in connection with the constitution. These circle round the Provincial Councils. Earl Grey had anticipated this feature. Wakefield identified himself with it so passionately that he might seem to be claiming it for his own. It was through Wakefield's persistent advocacy that this part of the Act was carried, notwithstanding the opposition of Sir W. Molesworth and Robert Lowe; while Moles- worth, Cobden, and Bright, we may interpolate, voted against the clause that provided for a nominee second chamber. But the provincial system was forced upon constitution-makers by the different origins of the various settlements and in part by their geographical situation. There would seem to be little merit in accepting the dictates of history and nature.
So peculiarly did Grey regard the creation of the pro- vincial system of government as his own that, as he informed the present writer, he deliberately modelled it upon the State-system of the United States. In order to mask the source of the loan, as he confessed, he named the units 'provinces' instead of 'States.' For the same reason he named their elective heads 'superintendents' instead of 'governors.' He was radically disloyal to the British Government when he made these admissions, but it does not follow that he was equally disloyal when he devised the system and proposed the designations. His good-name is happily shielded behind a far greater name. In the debate in the House of Commons on the constitution, which he was chiefly instrumental in carry- ing through the House, Mr. Gladstone avowed his preference for Grey's plan of electing the second chamber in New Zealand by the Provincial legislatures. But no Cleon has ever impeached the loyalty of such an Aristides as Gladstone. Nay, it was by Earl Grey himself that the Governor's attention was drawn to the models he might
* Wakefield's letter was published in the Lyttelton Times, October 30th. 1852.
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82 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
find in the constitution of the United States. Lord Grey- had asked him whether he had considered American methods of government.
Mutilations- Grey's plan of a constitution was mutilated by one organic alteration and two amputations. According to his own account, he designed that the Legislative Council should be elected by the Provincial Councils, and the pro- ject was another of the many loan-ideas he had derived from the United States. This seems to be a partial error. One-third of the Council was, by this scheme, to consist of members nominated by the Crown. He was therefore not as much of an innovator or as perfectly consistent as he fancied. Be that as it may, in the new constitution the Legislative Council was to consist entirely of members nominated by the Crown, and such, in spite of all attempts to introduce the principle of election, the constitution of the Council still is. The granting of responsible govern- ment changed the character of this nomination. Under the old dispensation, when New Zealand was a Crown Colony, the members of the Council were appointed by the Governor in the name of the Crown; under the new, they were appointed by the Ministry. Grey never ceased to regret what he deemed a blunder. A nominated Upper House, he mourned, ' ' destroyed the glorious fabric I had been privileged to frame." That roystering Eadical, Sir W. Molesworth, agreed with him, and spoke against the clause, while such advanced Liberals as Cobden and Bright gave silent votes against it. A chamber of such nominees, he believed, would necessarily consist of politi- cal Conservatives hostile to all important reforms, as in fact they have often been ; and they were bitterly hostile to Grey's own advanced projects when he was Premier, especially his system of land-taxation. What would he have said had he lived to see a Legislative Council con- verted from a highly Conservative chamber into a thorough-going Eadical one by the simple device of changing the life-tenure of its members into a seven years'
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 83
term, and then passing measures of a Socialistic character that have attracted the attention of all the world? The reason for the change to a nominee House was that an elected chamber would have been, like the Senate of the United States, too strong a body. The same dread has been an obstacle to making it elective ever since.
The two amputated limbs of Grey's abortion of a con- stitution were the municipal and rural organizations. They were wisely left to be shaped by the new legislature. Not till many years after were they perfected. The rural organs of self-government, particularly its county councils and parish councils (or townships), were one day to be adopted from her daughter by the Motherland. They were only the first links in a tributary chain that is binding the mother more closely to the daughter, and the daughters more closely to one another. .
The Land Question.
A semi-political, semi-agricultural problem of no less difficulty was more urgent. The land question was, as it is, a standing perplexity. Till 1852-4 the disposal of the waste lands in all the colonies remained in the hands of the Home Government. In these years it was, in one colony after another, definitely handed over to the self- governing colonies as apart of the grand boon of constitu- tional freedom and representative institutions. High authorities have esteemed it a questionable step. Gibbon Wakefield, who had founded on the colonial land question the edifice of his reputation and, indeed, his career as a coloniser, held that the extensive waste lands in the colonies should be retained by the Crown with the object of promoting emigration from the Motherland and plant- ing settlements in the colonies. Doubtless reflecting Wakefield's sentiments, with which he was well acquainted, John Stuart Mill, a disciple on this theme, advocated the same view. The great renunciation was by no means a "Greek gift," for it was generously intended; it was rather a gift of the Centaur, and it has often proved a shirt of Nessus. A distinction, very flattering to Grey, was made in the case of New Zealand.
84 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
The power to make regulations for the disposal of Crown lands, previously exercised by the Colonial Office in the name of the Crown, was unconditionally conceded to the Governor. He did not undervalue the magnitude of the concession. As he exorbitantly expressed it, he was "endowed with powers which perhaps no single man had before exercised." He forgot the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. He forgot the early Governors of New South Wales, who dealt far more autocratically with far more extensive tracts. He also forgot the fact that such powers were granted only to the Governor-in-Council, but he doubtless made light of that. In fact, he never had been effectually thwarted by his council, and he was not now.
He was not slow to avail himself of the vast powers thus placed in his hands. If his own account may be trusted, he was at heart a democrat from his youth up, and he explored North- West Australia in the hope of discovering tracts of land on which the landless masses of England might be settled. Fortune had brought to him a richer Eldorado than Western Australia was for many a year to prove. In New Zealand, where millions of acres lay expectant, awaiting the advent of the pastoralist and the agriculturalist, he had been kindled to indignation by fanciful schemes of colonisation that barred the door against proletarian settlement. He resolved to make an end of all that. On May 14, 1853, he issued a proclamation embodying a plan of rural administration and land settlement that must have been forgotten by those who describe him as a dreamer and a political mystic. It reveals a clear conception of the end he had in view and a iBrm grasp of the means by which it was to be gained. There were to be three classes of lands ; limits were set to the number of acres that could be held; and all were to be sold by auction. Above all, lands that had hitherto been sold at £l, £2, and £3 per acre were to be sold at ten shillings and five shillings.
The ordinance roused a storm of disapprobation, but in certain districts it scored a signal success. The small- farm settlements of Greytown, Masterton, and Carterton
GOVEKNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 85
were reared on the ordinance, and in the province of Auckland the lands were dealt with in the interests of the great body of the people. Grey claimed that he had ''made an end of the practice of closing the land against the poor. ' ' It might have been replied that he threw open the gates of large landed estates to the rich. By "grid- ironing" the land and ''taking the eyes out of it" wealthy individuals were able to defeat the Governor's designs. Just so had Earl Grey suspected that they would be defeated. And just so have similar projects been thwarted in Victoria and New South Wales. Grey's whole career, especially with its many contrivances for the advancement of indigenous races, is a palmary instance of the futility of high ends, even when they are ministered to by suitable instrumentalities.
Chapter XI.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
The Chuechman.
His Relations with Bisliop Selwyn.
In 1845 Mr. Gladstone, who had succeeded Lord Stanley as Secretary for the Colonies, wrote to Grey, who had just been appointed Governor of New Zealand, intro- ducing to him George Augustus Selwyn, whom Gladstone had known at Eton. Selwyn had been for three years Bishop of New Zealand — its first and long its sole bishop — and he was already playing a conspicuous part in the affairs of the Colony. It was of vital importance that two such high officials should harmoniously co-operate on all questions where the spheres of Church and State overlapped or intersected, and Gladstone expressed the hope that there would be ''a general concurrence of judgment ' ' between two such men in all matters of public importance. The hope was realised. During the whole of both of Grey's terms in New Zealand the Governor and the Bishop thought and planned, felt and acted in unison. Seldom before had the secular and the spiritual powers been so united. When the Treaty of Waitangi was believed to be imperilled by the action of Earl Grey, and the secure tenure of their lands by the Maoris was placed in jeopardy, Selwyn strenuously concerted measures with the Governor and the Chief Justice to avert the calamity. On all things affecting the interests of the natives they were at one. It was, indeed, the chief sphere of the activity of both. During Grey's first term the Maoris formed the great majority of the population, and the immigrant white element was comparatively unimportant. Consequently, the Governor was governor mainly of the Maoris, and the Bishop was largely bishop of the Maoris.
J^>isH()r Si:l\vy.\".
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 87
On the government of the Maoris the Governor confessed that he often took counsel with the Bishop.
Both being men of culture, of high talent, and of strong character, they became fast friends and close associates. More than once they traversed on foot the difficult country, some six hundred and fifty miles in length, between Auckland and Wellington, scaling mountains, fording rivers, and threading forests in company, and in the houses of Maori chiefs they were often joint guests. Together they voyaged in the Pacific. They grew to be firm allies, naturally lending one another aid in times of trouble. When the great trial of his life came — the apostasy of the Maori race — Selwyn did not forsake his old converts, but continued to minister to them in war as in peace, while Grey strove to suppress the Hau-hau movement; and when, in 1863, Grey was assailed on all hands during the Waikato war, Selwyn wrote to him urging him to '^uphold the right calmly and firmly against the weakness, the impatience, and the ignorance of men." But for the interlude of Grey's High Commis- sionership in South Africa, their terms of office in New Zealand would have been nearly synchronous. Selwyn arrived in the Colony a few years earlier and remained in it a few months later. To the last Grey spoke of Selwyn with affection, and after Selwyn 's death the tears started to his eyes at the mention of the heroic prelate's loved and honoured name.
A Church Constitution.
All his days Grey was strongly opposed to the State establishment of religion, and he reckoned it as one of his achievements that he had prevented the creation of State Churches in South Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. None the less, he was always, at least in profession, a staunch churchman, and it was only natural that, with his contriving brain and his passion for build- ing up, he should busy himself with the affairs of the branch of the Church of England in the Colony. Accord- ing to his own account, repeated by Bishop Selwyn, he was lying on a sickbed at Taranaki in the month of June,
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88 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
1852, when he drafted a constitution for the Church. There is no room for doubt about the fact. Selwyn admitted that the first draft of the constitution was pre- pared by Grey. ''I believe I have now in his handwrit- ing," he told the assembled Synod, the document "upon which the Church is founded." And he confessed that Grey had given the Church its ''outward framework." Grey constantly claimed the paternity of the ecclesias- tical, as he did of the political, constitution. His claim has been disputed, and the historian of the Church does not admit it. Touring the Australasian colonies a few years ago. Bishop Welldon was ' ' shown in Auckland the little chapel in which Selwyn drew up the constitution of the Church of New Zealand," and he asserts that that church, "in its charter as in its character, still retains the impression of his mind. ' '
Its AuthoB^ship.
To neither Grey nor Selwyn can the authorship of the new ecclesiastical constitution be plausibly assigned, at least without qualification. Ecclesiastical, like political, constitutions are not created; they are evolved, and it took five years for Grey's embryo to grow into a fully formed organism. Sir George Grey addressed a letter to Earl Grey, enclosing a copy of his draft constitution, explaining the necessity for such organization, and dip- lomatically defending it in advance against the possible charge of disloyalty to the Church of England. That church, fashioned by the State and possessing little of the flexibility of Nonconformist organizations, was not well adapted for transplantation. Yet a local government of some kind was indispensable, and a constitution was therefore necessary. Grey did not conceal the source of his inspiration. He admitted that his "outline of a plan of church government" resembled "in many points that which we are informed has proved so beneficial to our brethren in America." In later life he openly avowed that he had taken his model from the Episcopal Church in the United States. The letter was signed by hundreds of Anglican members. In order to carry its proposals
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 89
into effect, public meetings were held in all the settle- ments to consider the "general principles of a constitu- tion for the Church in New Zealand." A commission or committee was appointed to frame a constitution. When we read the list of the commission, we can imagine something of the process of evolution the institution went through. Among the clergy, besides Selwyn, there were Bishop Harper, head of the new diocese of Christ- church, Mr. Abraham and Mr. Hadfield, first and second bishops of Wellington, William Williams, afterwards Bishop of Waiapu, and his more famous brother. Arch- deacon Henry Williams. Among the laity there were such men as Sir Edward Stafford, Sir Frederick Whitaker, both subsequently Premiers of the Colony, and Mr. Swainson, the very able Attorney-General of the infant Dominion in pre-constitution days. Is it credible that men of such talent and forcefulness of character, little given to passive acquiescence in any man's doings, should, in such a matter, have submissively followed another man's lead! We may be sure that every principle and every detail, every clause and almost every word, were objects of keen scrutiny and prolonged dis- cussion. Grey may have laid down the foundation; others reared the pile. His was the sculptor's hand that deftly moulded the clay model; the others were the master-workmen who carved the finished statue.
Take it as we will, the constitution is to Grey an additional title to fame. It has won high repute. An Australian bishop has spoken of the iVnglican Church in New Zealand as *'the best-organized church in the Anglican communion throughout the world." In Aus- tralia, Canada, and elsewhere it has been accepted as a pattern. Some of its laws and regulations, it is stated, have been adopted by the Church of England. It was one of the earliest reactions of a colony on the Motherland.
Chapter XII. GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND— continued.
His Departure.
He had thrown open the wide waste lands of the Colony to the whole people and to future generations of immigrants. He had framed a constitution for the Church, as he had for the State. He had left everything in readiness for bringing into operation the constitution he had shaped, loyally accepting its deformities and its blots. What was left for him to do? As if conscious that he had no longer a place in a constitutionally governed country, he then prepared to leave New Zealand. He did not leave it without com- mitting one more act of insubordination. The Constitu- tion Act provided that one-fourth of all sums derived from the sales of land throughout the Colony should be remitted to London and there paid to the account of the New Zealand Company in compensation for the expendi- ture it had incurred in settling the central portions of the Colony. The Governor loyally remitted the bulk of the money thus received, but directed that the portion of it derived from land-sales in the province of Auckland should be retained in the Colonial Treasury, on the ground that that province had all along lain outside of the Company's operations. The reason assigned was good, or at least the case was arguable, but the terms of the statute were express and left him no alternative. It was not the first time he had flown in the face of an Act of Parliament. Yet even then the rebellion was closely veiled. Should his "reasons fail to command the assent of Her Majesty's Government," he said, he desired that the Colonial Office should draw on the New Zealand Treasury for the amount in defect. As a matter of fact,
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GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 91
the sum was never paid till it was made a part of the first loan raised in England by New Zealand. We shall see how the Colonial Office dealt with the rebel.
Invalid Excuses.
His very departure was an act of mutiny. His official biographer states that he went "nominally on leave of absence." The leave must have been very nominal indeed, for there is no evidence that it was either asked for or granted. All the evidence is the other way. Another and equally authorised biographer states that his term of office had come to an end. He was appointed for no fixed term. Unaware of his departure the Secretary of State continued to address him as if he were still in New Zealand, and he was expressly charged with having left the Colony prematurely. He simply wanted a holiday and took it. The pretext was his mother's failing health. Eighteen years ago (in 1890) a high Chinese official applied to the Court at Pekin for permission to resign the government of his province and return to his native place in order to nurse his aged grandmother. A reason that was at length, after more than one application, held valid in ancestor-worshipping China could have no force in ancestor-eating New Zealand. It must still have had some force in England, and the Duke of Newcastle, in defending the derelict Governor against attack in the House of Lords, urged the fatal illness of his mother as a valid excuse for his departure, and disarmed opposition by mentioning that he had arrived in England too late to see his dying parent.
Colonists' Regrets.
Grey was not to be permitted to leave New Zealand like an ordinary man or even an ordinary Governor. Save only the Marquis of Ripon, the philo-Indian viceroy, no other Governor's departure has been so lamented. The settlers at Wellington, to whom his name had been an offence, forgot their grievances against him, overcame
92 LIFE OF SIK GEOBGE GEEY
their animosities, and joined in the chorus of regrets. They presented to him a piece of plate, which of course he could not personally receive, the Colonial Office assimilating the representative of the Sovereign to the Sovereign herself; it was deposited in the Museum at Auckland and bore the suitable inscription: Fundatori Quietis— ''To the Author of the Peace." From such a trusty ally as Bishop Selwyn, moving his acquiescent clergy, he received an address that seemed to add the approbation of Heaven to that of Earth, and it greatly affected him as ''one of the highest rewards he could conceive. ' '
Maori LamentSi
But it was from the Native race he had conquered by arms and then conquered by genuine sympathy and true friendship that the most touching farewells were to come- Chiefs of note composed odes of grief. Other chiefs travelled long distances in those railwayless and roadless days in order to see their loved benefactor once more before he departed. Some presented him with valuable greenstone meres and other heirlooms, which, thirty years later, the writer saw him exhibit to the sons of those chiefs. They came from the Waikato plains which, twelve years later, he was to receive from this very race and these very chiefs and from Native villages that were to be burnt in war. But no second-sighted vision of any Maori Cassandra then darkened the prospect. All old sores were healed, and all old scores wiped out. Not only chiefs of staunch and tried loyalty, like Patuone, Te Whero Where, and Te Rangitake, but the son of Rauparaha whose spirit he had broken by treacherous capture and prolonged imprisonment, and "the tiger of the Wairau," the formidable Rangihaeata, now loyal and a Christian, lamented the loss of the great Governor, the great reconciler. In a collective address Grey appealed to their nobler instincts. Together they had reared churches, hospitals, and schools. The natives had abandoned their false gods. Mills had been built. Good roads had been made. Agriculture had spread, and
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: FIRST TERM 93
•
prosperity everywhere prevailed. His parting request was that they would not hereafter suffer any evil deeds to sully the names of the patriots of early days, or obscure the good works that had been accomplished. Alas! less than a decade later, the very men to whom he appealed were to rise in rebellion, and were to do such evil deeds as would leave an ineffaceable stain on the memory of their race, while the churches and schools would be abandoned, the false gods would be reverted to, or new false gods devised, the mills would cease their whirr, the highways would echo with the tramp of armed bands, prosperity would disappear, and a whole race sink back many degrees in the scale of civilisation.
Chaptee XIII. AN INTERLUDE.
At the Colonial Office.
It was the fate of Grey that, even when he was at the height of success, he was dogged by the shadow, if not of failure, yet of misdoing; the croaking voice of censure jarred upon the ear just sahited with the shouts of triumph. He had hardly set foot in London when he was chilled by the cold air of official disapproval that blew through the icy corridors of the Colonial Office. The Colonial Office, in fact, turned its back on him. His official friend, Lord Lincoln, now Duke of Newcastle and Secretary for the Colonies, positively refused to see him; and the Permanent Under-Secretary treated him sternly. What had he done? He had been guilty of the worst of all faults in the eyes of a State department — he had dis- obeyed its behests. The Duke had already, in December, 1853, replied to the despatch of May, 1852, where Grey explained the course he had taken in respect of the land fund. In a despatch that crossed his homeward journey he was told that his disobedience was unpardon- able. All the considerations he urged were already known to his superiors. He was imperatively ordered to transmit the money without delay. This single statement seems to prove that he had never received leave of absence. The Colonial Office was unaware that he was on his way to England.
In Parliament.
He had not only the cold chills of the Colonial Office to encounter. He had to meet the fury of the British Parliament. In the House of Commons the attack was led by legislators so authorised as Sir John Pakington.
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AN INTEKLUDE 95
and Sir Charles 'Adderley, and withstood by the Under- Secretary, Sir Frederick Peel; in the House of Lords Grey was attacked by Lord Lyttelton and defended by the Duke of Newcastle. He might well have been sum- moned, a new Clive or Hastings, to the bar of either Chamber when he was thus virtually impeached. Grey claimed, or his official apologist claimed for him, that he had often been silent when he was attacked or condemned. This was not an occasion for being silent, and in a memorandum, dated July 1854, he made a capital defence of himself. We will not say that he practically exoner- ated himself from the charges brought against him, nor that this was proved, as he himself held, by the withdrawal of the motions in both chambers. A Parlia- mentary resolution is often moved with the sole object of drawing public attention to the facts stated and withdrawn when that object has been gained. But the charges made, though grave in the eyes of the Colonial Office, were light in the public eye, and he left the court, so to speak, without a stain on his character. His mana was still unimpaired, and his fame was augumented. High-handed doings are not often visited with censure at Oxford, and the honorary degree of D.C.L., bestowed on a man who had just turned forty, amid the frenzied applause of the Sheldonian Theatre, must have consoled him for the disapproval of the Tite Barnacles and biased legislators.
Chapter XIV. HIGH COMMISSIONEE IN SOUTH AFEICA.
His Native Policy.
However it might condemn its officer's recalcitrancy, the Colonial Office could not afford to stand on its dignity. It wanted its strongest man for its most difficult post. Sir George Grey was sent to South Africa. The situation there was in many respects analogous to the one he had just quitted. The Governor was practically absolute. There were mutinous Native races still unsubjugated. There were allied peoples, whom he might endeavour to federate. In South Africa, accordingly, he found a field of labour after his own heart. He had gone to Western Australia on a quest worthy of Saul, the son of Kish, but he found a kingdom in the natives whom he strove to win over to a new life, to raise and improve. A more important sphere of the same kind, with larger powers, was opened up to him in South Australia, and there he laboured earnestly to effect the advancement of a degraded race. In New Zealand he was given a still grander task, and, with all the energy of an enthusiastic nature, he schemed and toiled to develop an inchoate civilisation and arrest the decline of a dying people. Once more he was granted a fresh commission of a similar order and placed in a position to lift one or another of the lower members of the human family from its slime.
The blacks of South Africa did not belong to a race that excited a like enthusiasm with the Maoris. Most of them 1 were negroes, far down in the scale, and there was then no evidence that they could be raised. Unlike the Maoris, they were not personally attractive. It made no difference to Grey. With a heart large enough to embrace all the
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HIGH COMMISSIONER IX SOUTH AFRICA 97
failures and abortions of humanity, he set himself to improve the condition of the Bantus as he had done to improve the condition of the Maoris. His efforts were ' - remarkable, and his apparent success was notable.
British Kafraria.
He set to work in the province nearest his hand, where he possessed consular powers. There he repeated the policy he had striven to carry out in New Zealand. Dis- regarding the warnings of Earl Grey, who urged, /publicly in 1848 and privately in 1853, that the power of the chiefs should be maintained with a view to the preservation of order, he strove to break the power of the Kafir chiefs by undermining their influence and secretly sapping their authority. From 1856 onwards ^- he appointed them magistrates, and, in lieu of the fines they had arbitrarily levied on defaulting or offending kraals, he assigned them a salary or pension, paid monthly and calculated on the fines. By the side of the chief, sitting in his own court, he proposed to place a European assessor, who was a virtual magistrate, and who thus supplanted the chief in his judicial capacity. It was intended that the fines thus levied should meet the cost of the arrangement, but it soon proved that the institution would cost as much as £3,000 a year in excess ^ of them. The scheme was reported against by the / British Resident in Kafraria, whom Grey must soon / after have got rid of, on the Turkish principle, but Grey I induced the Secretary of State to assent to it, on the v^ understanding that the expenditure in connection with it should be drawn from colonial funds. This was far from being Grey's intention. He designed that the Imperial Government and the British tax-payer should bear the chief burden, and as a matter of fact it was this that happened.
The new system had a measure of success. Two of the chiefs promptly accepted the magistrates nominated by Grey, and four others had agreed to do the same. It was characteristic of his optimism that he believed, after a tour through Kafraria, that the natives had generally
98 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
found the system acceptable. We shall soon see how far they were from accepting it.
Native Reserves.
Grey next segregated the Native tribes by setting apart tracts of land for their exclusive occupation. The chief source of trouble with the indigenes in all countries has been, not the invasion of native territories in force, but the steadfast encroachment of settlers on the lands of the Natives as their own give out or their numbers increase. By the assignment of reserves or locations the Kafirs were parked off and protected against the stealthy invasions of the colonists. It is the policy that has been more or less fitfully pursued in other countries that have been at handgrips with the same difficulty. The United States also has set apart such reserves for the Indian tribes, if it has not always kept them sacred. It has been feebly attempted in Australia, and both there and in New Zealand it is now proposed as a settled policy — in Aus- tralia, with the object of saving the remnants of the aborigines ; in New Zealand, with the intention of appro- priating the greater part of the Maori lands, which are no longer wanted for the dwindling Native population. Grey's object was not only to preserve the Kafirs, who were in little danger of disappearing, but also to provide scope for British settlement. We shall see how he aimed at settling the country.
Schools.
Wherever he went, Grey introduced the means of education. He had initiated public schools among the Maoris, and he now founded a great industrial school at Lovedale that seems to have been an unqualified suc- cess. By 1890, it is stated, as many as 2,000 youths had passed through it and there received both general and technical training. So highly was it appreciated that Kafir chiefs for seventeen years contributed as much as £1,000 a year towards its support, and the testimonies to its utility are abundant and strong. Similar schools
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 99
for the training of youths in agriculture and carpentry were established elsewhere in Kafirland. Of these the first was set up at Heald Town. So successful was it that in a single year, 1857, the Fingoes contributed £220 to its support. High schools were also founded for the sons of chiefs and the training of teachers. On all these Grey reported in terms of high commendation, as was his custom in respect of all his experiments; but, as with similar institutions in South Australia and New Zealand, the Imperial Government was sceptical of his success. It had a right to make a jealous scrutiny of the results. A large part of the cost — apparently, the greater part of it — fell on the Imperial Government and the missionary societies.
Hospitals.
Grey had, moreover, a hospital policy that no less merits commendation. He schemed to build hospitals all over Cape Colony, and he made a beginning with a hospital at King William's Town. He employed the Kafirs in quarrying stones for it and the military in rearing it. Soldiers were used as day-labourers and sappers as skilled mechanics, and military waggons were requisitioned. When it was finished, he summoned from Wellington Dr. Fitzgerald, whom he had known in New Zealand, to take the place of resident physician. It was a tribute to both Grey and Fitzgerald that the Doctor was induced to come to South Africa mainly by the strong affection he felt for the Governor. The hospital seems to have proved a great practical success. The natives travelled long distances by waggon and on foot to seek medical aid at the new temple of -^sculapius. By 1858 11,380, by 1886 111,000, by 1890 130,000 patients had been treated in it. One notable result was the revolution it effected in the minds of the Kafirs. By them, as by all primitive peoples, diseases were believed to be of super- natural origin and could be treated only by preternatural means. Now the superstition was destroyed, as false beliefs are best destroyed, by the inculcation of true beliefs through the use of natural agencies, and the
,100 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
power of the witch-doctor was as effectually broken as the power of the chiefs.
Such, at least, was the claim made by Grey. It appears to have been one of his many delusions about the effects of his measures. Witchcraft survived in South Africa, as it survived for centuries the establishment of hospitals among the most advanced European peoples, and survives indeed, to the present day. The hospital has not been enlarged for half a century, and the matron confessed to Professor Henderson that the natives do not resort to it as much as might be desired.
Public Works,
The Governor further acquired influence over the Kafirs by employing them on public works, as he had employed the Maoris, and in opening up the country. Two long lines of roads, dotted with forts, near which Europeans were to be settled, were carried through the country. The roads were made by Kafirs, graded as overseers, second-class men, and ordinary labourers, and paid accordingly; all were imder European superin- tendents. The scheme was excellent — in theory, but it wrecked itself on three rocks. First, the Kafirs, like most indigenous peoples, could not be got to work. Next, it was hard to find capable European superintendents. Lastly, as we shall see, the Imperial Government kicked against the burden of expense thus thrown on it.
A Kafin Rising.
Meanwhile, Grey's civilising schemes had been exciting the distrust of the Kafir chiefs, who saw their judicial functions being absorbed by white assessors and their authority over their tribesmen undermined by white superintendents. They must have believed that, in the mind of so far-seeing a Governor, there was a deeply laid plot to conquer the natives by pacific means. They met plot by counterplot and hatched a conspiracy which, had it been successfully carried out, would have reconquered British Kafraria for the blacks.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 101
Two very different versions of the events have been given. On one side there is the picturesque and poetical narrative of Mr. Eees, probably inspired by Grey and told just as Grey was in the habit of telling it. On the other, we have the far balder and more prosaic, but pos- sibly more exact, narrative of Professor Henderson, who presumably derived his facts from the copies of Grey's despatches in the Government archives at Capetown.^ The discrepancies between the two at first sight transcend the discordances among the Roman legends that whetted the ingenuity of Niebuhr or those that baflfle the harmon- izers of the Pentateuch or the Gospels. Examined more closely, they are seen to be mutually complementary. Each is by itself imperfect and incomplete. Either states what the other omits, and vice versa. The two, taken together, contain the whole truth. We will try to fuse them.
At the beginning of the chain of events, and underlying it, we discern a Kafir conspiracy against the British occupation of Kaf raria. Kreli, the paramount chief of the Kafirs, was the soul of it. His fellow-conspirators were named Fadanna, Quesha, and Macomo. They cleverly used the priesthood, which was probably sympathetic, as a collaborator. The high-priest, Umhlakaza, cunningly created an instrument in a prophetess, who professed to be in communication with the dead ancestors of the race. A secret subterranean passage, known only to herself, took her below the waters of a lake and brought her into the presence of the dead chiefs. There the eye was gladdened bj'^ evergreen pastures where grazed count- less herds. Receiving the ancestral commands, she told them that homes would there be provided for them and never-failing supplies of food; never again would they need to toil. It was, of course, a mere lure, but it misled a whole people, numbering 60,000 warriors and 200,000 souls. In obedience to it, and by command of their chiefs and priests, the infatuated tribesmen promised to destroy their crops, cattle, and stores of food on an appointed day — February 18, 1857 — and sacrifice them to the spirits of their ancestors. All who disbelieved in this prophecy
102 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
and refused to make the required sacrifices would be destroyed. The real object was to reduce the Kafirs to desperation by the destruction of their supplies, and thus induce them to rise against the British. To indicate the day, a great miracle would be performed. On the appointed day the sun would rise as usual, but would,., soon turn back and set in the quarter whence it hadf^ risen. A hurricane would spring up. The Kafirs would^ then advance, and the Europeans would be swept into" the sea. A new and brighter era would dawn.
The colonists waited in suspense for the arrival of the dread day. A British force, under an English general, guarded the frontier. The great day arrived. The voluntary promises were kept, and the destruction duly effected. Then the Kafirs prepared to advance. Greatly outnumbered and evidently alarmed, the general pro- posed to retreat, and he sent a message to Grey to that effect. With a statesmanlike eye Grey saw at once the impolicy of a retrograde movement, and promptly ordered the general to hold his ground. If he dared to retreat. Grey threatened to supersede the Commander- in-Chief and himself take the command. It was no idle menace. He believed he had the power, and he certainly had the will. Needless to say, he was submissively obeyed. To the end of his days he recalled the incident with satisfaction and pride.
The Kafirs did not venture to attack. The expected miracle was not performed. A schism broke out in the / Kafir camp between the believers and the unbelievers, which latter, as is usual, were blamed for the failure of the prophecy. The two sides fought, and some were killed. Feeling that he had gained his end, Grey set out to return to Capetown, and he captured several leading chiefs on his way back. Having destroyed their supplies of food, the Kafirs were overtaken by famine, and the appalling number of 50,000 died of starvation. Grey's humanity was as energetic as his hostility. He immedi- ately devised measures of relief. He brought 34,000 natives into Cape Colony and distributed them as ser- vants. For the rest he built villages and supplied them with food, agricultural implements, seeds, and cattle.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFEICA 103
Several of the chiefs captured were sentenced to longer or shorter terms of imprisonment, j But Grey was not the man to leave his work unfinished. i^Eealising that there could be no lasting peace in South Africa while Kreli remained powerful, he gathered together a small force of colonial irregulars and the mounted police he had created and attacked the chief in his own country, where he lay in fancied security. Then he drove him into the interior, where for years he was kept powerless, and, on his own humble petition, permitted to return to a location in his former territory only when he could no longer be active for mischief. The case was parallel to the seizure of Kauparaha, and its effects were similar. It broke the back of the Kafir resistance, as the seizure of Rauparaha ensured the definitive ascendancy of the British in New Zealand. Grey won great repute in South Africa by the decisive stroke, and he received high laudation from the Colonial Office in a despatch that bears the traces of Bulwer Lytton's lofty diction. Well might the Secretary of State commend his ''firm and benevolent dealing with the native races," his ''sagacity in fore- seeing and averting collisions, and" his "able policy in using unexpected and strange incidents in the histoiy of the Kafirs for their advantage and for the security of the Colony.
J >
The Cost of Civilising the People.
Grand civilising projects cannot be carried out without money, and all of Grey's civilising schemes, in Western Australia, South Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and again in New Zealand, demanded a large expenditure, of which the greater portion fell on the Imperial Trea- sury. When he pensioned the chiefs in British Kafraria, he calculated the amount of the pensions on the amount of the fines previously levied, but it was found that a sum of £3,000 more would be annually required. The Secretary of State sanctioned the arrangement only on the understanding that the corresponding expenditure should be met out of colonial funds. By the end of 1854 Grey estimated that the total expenditure on his complete
104 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
schemes, now fully developed, would amount to £60,000, and he asked that the Imperial Government should con- tribute two-thirds of the amount, the remainder being provided from the revenues of British Kafraria. So powerful was the mana of Grey with both the English Ministry and the Parliament that that sum was cheer- fully, indeed, enthusiastically voted, and Mr, Labouchere (Lord Taunton), then Secretary for the Colonies, con- gratulated him on the popularity of his administration and the credit it reflected on the ministry.
For three successive years a subsidy was voted, and for only three years had it been originally asked for. At the end of that period. Grey professed to believe it would no longer be wanted, because the necessity for employing Kafirs on public works would then cease, the education of young Kafirs would become self-supporting, their increasing civilisation would increase the demands for English commodities and thus enlarge the revenue, and progressive settlement by Europeans would augment the prosperity of the province. Grey's expectations were not realised. In drawing up his estimates for 1858 he made no allowance for a reduction, and Lord Stanley, the Secretary for the Colonies in the new Derby Ministry, advised that there should be no reduction. The Lords of the Treasury, vigilant guardians of the public purse, protested, and Lord Stanley was constrained to intimate to Grey that the vote for the dependency would be cut down by one-half.
Grey was thrown into a panic. What was he to do? Should he break up his administrative apparatus, dismiss his magistrates and unpension his chiefs, close his hos- pitals and his schools? He could not and he would not do it. He was pledged for another year to support the institutions he had called into existence. As Daniel Webster once threatened to pay the United States' national debt out of his own impecunious pocket. Sir George Grey more seriously resolved to carry on the system at his own expense, and he laid out £6,000 on this benevolent object. Of course, he well knew that the British Government could not remain indebted to one
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 105
of its own servants, and the sum was ultimately repaid him.
Meanwhile, he fought hard for his cherished system. He was reminded that he was laying heavy burdens on the British taxpayer, and he might have remembered that the taxes on the prime necessaries of life, such as tea and sugar, were then burdensome. In vain did he plead that, by averting war, his civilising schemes made a vast saving to the country. None the less, he had not the smallest intention of accepting the retrenchment. Professing sub- mission, as always, he practised rebellion, as always. He continued his expenditure as before, unreduced. The Treasury accounts for the following year showed that he had exceeded the annual vote by no less a sum than £46,000. Truly, here was a man who knew how to flout his superiors. And this was only one of several direc- tions in which he outran the constable.
The Results.
To what extent were these costly schemes successful? Historians cast doubt on the results. Some assert that, ■with his recall in 1859 and his departure from South Africa two years later, his structure of beneficent administration tumbled to the ground. The grand- fatherly government of a Native race came to an end. He himself claimed that he had been signally successful. The Kafirs throve, and throve in consequence of the institutions he had planted. Almost a quarter of a cen- tury later another High Commissioner, Sir Henry Loch, visited the community and was received by 8,000 Kafirs mounted on horseback, who were wealthy and inde- pendent. They had not forgotten the old Governor who had done so much for them, and, when Loch recalled his name, they vividly remembered him. So did the Maoris in after years. Evidently, he made a deep impression wherever he went. He was a force and his administra- tion a reality. He undoubedly counted for much in the improvement now so observable-
Chapter XV.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA—
continnecl.
The Gekman Legion.
A Military Colony.
Another matter on which Grey came into collision with the Imperial Government was closely connected with the colonisation of British Kafraria. He asked the British Government to send him out 1,000 military pensioners for settlement on the frontiers of Cape Colony and in Kafraria, where they could at once lead the lives of farmers and be a bulwark of the settlers. It seemed a well-conceived scheme. Colonies of veterans had been planted by Imperial Rome in many of the countries of the Empire and by Napo]eon in Northern Italy, and within a decade they were to be planted by Grey himself in the North Island of New Zealand. The Roman military settlements, at all events, were a success; could not Imperial England tread in the footsteps of her ancient homologue? He could not know that the New Zealand pensioner-settlements, like the Napoleonic, were to prove failures. The War Office announced the scheme, but South Africa was so little known in those days that few applications were received, and the matter was allowed to drop. Many of Grey's schemes, though beneficent in themselves, were in advance of his time.
Then it occurred to the War Office in 1856, when the Crimean war was over, that this would be a convenient way of disposing of the German Legion which the refusal of the British populace to enter the army had obliged the Government to enlist for the war in German cities. Grey was attracted by the proposal and induced the Cape Parliament to aid in carrying it out by con- tributing a sum of £40,000, or £5 a head. Then the first
106
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 107
hitch was felt. Grey understood that the whole 8,000 legionaries would be sent out and accompanied (as he phrased it) by ''a fair proportion" of marriageable women. His expectations were woefully disappointed. Only 1,930 agreed to emigi'ate, and with these were only 330 females. Grey had some excuse for maintaining that the War Office had not kept faith with him, but, after all, it could not compel the legionaries to South Africa, and nearly 2,000 military settlers should have been hardly less welcome than 8,000.
Grey's Insubordination,
Still less did Grey keep faith with the War Office. On the plea or pretence that he could not settle in Kafraria men who had no families (as if, in all countries, most emigrants had not been males, unaccompanied by females !), he kept them under arms and on full pay. This was a manifest breach of the understanding with the War Office. That department had stipulated that, if the legion- aries were employed in active service, they should receive full pay, but if not so employed, they should be struck off the pay-list. Having ascertained that the Legion was not acting against an enemy in the field, the War Office directed the Lieutenant-General commanding the forces in South Africa to strike off the legionaries. Grey there- upon directed the Lieutenant-General to keep them on the pay-list "until we can hear again from Her Majesty's Government." It was his stereotyped formula in carry- ing on his rebellions. The War Office persisted in its demand, and the Governor persisted in his refusal, winding up and declaring, in a style he was to repeat in New Zealand, that the censures of the War Office had only made him more resolved to persevere in his resistance. He added that he would follow this line without regarding the cost or the sacrifice that such a course would entail on him. He had grown reckless, and then he was astounded when the necessary consequences of his acts burst upon him.
Grey was no less imperious in his way of clothing his Legion. He coolly ordered the necessary clothes and boots
108 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
from the military department and sent the bill to the astonished War Office. The War Office was furious, and reiterated its instructions (as he admitted) in ''per- emptory and positive terms." Grey remained deaf to the official thunder and loftily left it to be settled by the Imperial Government which department should bear the cost. Once more the rebel was victorious. The Lords of the Treasurv decided that the War Office should foot the bill.
His Rebellion,
The Governor was not yet done with the German Legion. Having humanely provided it with boots and clothes, he now, with equal benevolence, proposed to supply the legionaries with German wives. He first sought to attain his object by constitutional means, and he proposed to the Colonial Office that it should despatch to Capetown a number of German families, from which the legionaries might select help-meets. The Secretary of State made the obvious criticism that, if the young women of these families were old enough to marry, their parents would be almost past the age of suitable emigrants; and he suggested that some Irish girls of good family should be assisted (apparently by the High Commissioner) to emigrate. It is in connection with this affair that Grey's insubordination, now amounting to positive rebellion can, as at first appears, be most definitely sheeted home to him.
For the despatch of Mr. Labouchere was received by Grey on July 27, 1857, and acknowledged by him on August 22. Yet we are informed that on August 19 he took the extraordinary step of entering into negotiations with a German trading firm, Goddefroy and Co., of Ham- burg, and on August 25 he signed the contract. Four thousand Germans were to be sent out; the cost was to be £50,000 ; and it was to be met by bonds on the revenues of British Kafraria. The arrangement, doubtless through the British Consul at Hamburg, got to the ears of Lord Stanley, the new Secretary of State, who took prompt measures to arrest the proceedings of the
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFEICA 109
Hamburg firm. He informed them of the true nature of the security, and instructed them to abandon their plans. This, they explained, they could not at once do, seeing that emigrants had been already selected. Lord Stanley was constrained to assent to the despatch of 1,600 emigrants, and to pay down £5,000 to compensate them for the breach of further undertakings. He then called Grey sharply to account for acting in defiance of the instructions he had received. Grey replied that he was unaware that the Secretary for the Colonies disapproved of his action. Stanley reminded him of the despatch of June 5.
The facts are not quite conclusive nor the dates quite damning. We are told that he received the inhibitory despatch on July 27. If he then entered into negotia- tions with the Hamburg firm on August 19, he committed an act of insubordination of the most definite character. But we are also told that he signed the contract six days later.* How could he have conducted such negotiations to a conclusion in six days with persons in a country situated at a distance of 7,000 miles? Evidently, these negotiations had been going on for some months and cannot have been initiated on August 19. The carriage of a mail from England then consumed, as it appears, 52 days, and between Capetown and Hamburg the distance was greater. Allow fifteen weeks for the double journey and as many days for the drawing up of the contract, and it is plain that Grey must have instructed Goddefroy and Co. as early as the previous April. By that time, as he quite truly said, the Secretary of State had expressed no opinion on the subject, nor, we may add, could he possibly have done so. He was in total ignorance of the matter. Grey therefore stands partially acquitted of the major charge of flying in the face of a prohibition issued by the Colonial Office. But he is not wholly acquitted even of that. For he signed the contract 29 days after he had received a despatch that practically forbade him to take such action. And he is not even
* Henderson, Sir George Orey, pp. 179-80.
110 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
partially acquitted of the charge of taking such action as no subordinate had a right to take. Nor was it other than a blunder to send for German emigrants when English emigrants were available. Did he not believe in the mixture of races — he who advocated a blend between the Maoris and the English?
The matter did not end there. The German firm pressing him for money on account of the emigrants sent, he had personally to meet the expenditure incurred. Some banking relatives of his own, according to his own account, temporarily met his liabilities. Of course, they had ultimately to be discharged by the Imperial Government.
Chapter XVI.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA—
continued.
A South African Kingdom.
A grave problem demanded settlement immediately after he arrived. It concerned the policy to be pursued towards the Native races. He had already served his apprenticeship to this department of statesmanship in two very different countries, and was thus prepared for grappling with it on an ascending scale of difficulty. The rapid decline and steadfast retreat of the Australian blacks were gradually withdrawing them from inter- course with the colonists and supervision by the Govern- ments. The Maoris were far more formidable, but they too were wasting away before the white advance, and their total disappearance was only a question of time. It was quite otherwise in South Africa. What to do with the blacks? was a question that kept sleep from the eyes of every High Commissioner in turn. The problem was at its acutest in Zululand, where the colonists were, as they still are, enormously outnumbered by the Zulus. A plausible solution of a particular portion of the problem had already been proposed. Mr. (now so well known as Sir) Theophilus Shepstone was the son of an African missionary, and as such had ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the Zulus. So completely was he master of everything connected with the subject that he had for years been confidential adviser to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal on Native affairs.
Proposed Zulu Province.
To this connection it was owing that he made proposals to Sir Benjamin Pine, the Lieutenant-Governor, respect- ing the disposal and management of some 50,000 or
lU
112 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGB GEEY
60,000 Zulus who had fled into Natal to escape from the tyranny of three ferocious Zulu chieftains — Chaaka, Dingaan, and Panda. This huge horde of natives formed a source of disturbance and unrest in Natal. Could they not be organized into one of those non-genealogical tribes which Sir Alfred Lyall discovered in India, and which Dr. W. E. Hearn believed to be the origin of the State? Yes, certainly, thought Mr. Shepstone; provided a suitable location could be found. One such was lying invitingly ready at hand. To the west of Natal, between the colony and British Kafraria, lay a beautiful and fertile territory, where forests flanked wide and well- watered pasture-lands. What specially recommended it for settlement was the fact that it was a waste domain, occupied only by a few white settlers and a few kraals, but mainly by wild beasts. Mr. Shepstone proposed that he should march the entire body into this no-man's-land. There, under more favourable conditions, he was to con- tinue to rule over them and pursue his civilising work. "Who, indeed, so well fitted to play to them the part of an Earthly Providence?
Undesirable!
The proposal had been heartily seconded by the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal and conditionally sanc- tioned by the Home Government. The matter was suh judice when Grey arrived at the Cape. Sir John Pakington, still Secretary for the Colonies, required him to report on the proposal. He examined it thoroughly, as was his custom, viewed it under a variety of lights, and probed it to the bottom. On December 3, 1855, he at length made his report. His imagination, which led him astray in Western Australia and misled him so grievously in New Zealand, again played a prominent part. In a vision he beheld Shepstone 's Goshen occupied by a numerous and thriving white population. Forget- ting Matabeleland, now Ehodesia, he described it as the last-remaining uncolonised part of South Africa that was suited for European colonisation. Situated on the eastern slope of the great range of the Drakensberg, it
4
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 113
was the key of South Africa (surely a gross exaggera- tion!) and, held by British colonists, it would safeguard States that were now in jeopardy. More than half a century has rolled by since then. Have his prophecies in respect of the disputed territory been more completely fulfilled than they were in North- Western Australia?
But the root of his objections to the scheme did not really lie there. They lay in the position to be granted to Shepstone. That touched him to the quick. That an imperium should be created in imperio of the real ruler of South Africa was intolerable. That it should be assigned to a missionary's son, and that son Shepstone, was monstrous. That such a man should be placed in the position of a sovereign, possessing absolute powers and without giving guarantees for his loyalty, was noth- ing less than a scandal. Yet it was the position he had himself assumed in South Australia and New Zealand; it was the position he would himself have accepted in New Zealand so recently as 1884. It took on quite a different complexion when it was to be assumed by another. What was Shepstone 's record? For ten years he had had com- plete control over the Zulus of Natal (Grey's later account was only that he had been ''confidential adviser to the Lieutenant-Governor"). He had magistrates to aid him, missionaries and a military force. Yet the Zulus were as great savages as they had been a thousand years before (how did he know that?). If Great Britain designed to set up an independent kingdom, let her select as its ruler one whose public service and experience proved his fitness to govern both natives and Europeans (Grey himself, namely).
There were other objections to the scheme, he held. The removal of the Zulus into the new country would breed disorder. The massing of men was always dis- astrous (how many examples there have been, all over the world and all through history, of voluntary or constrained collective migrations that have not been disastrous!). Fresh hordes would flow into Zululand to fill the places of those who had gone, and these would be a source of peril to Cape Colony.
114 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Scheme Arrested.
So far had the matter proceeded that Shepstone had actually procured the cession of the territory from the few native chiefs who occupied it, and he prepared to enter into possession. But the High Commissioner would bear no brother-ruler near his throne. After instructing Sir Benjamin Pine to proceed no further in the matter, he reported adversely, and the Home Government could do no otherwise than accept the verdict. Mr. Shepstone had to wait for his kingdom. We cannot help regretting that the experiment was not made. Shepstone could pro- bably have assured its success, if anyone could. It was not to be, and the Zulus are still a menace to Natal.
Chapter XVII.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA—
continued.
An Episode.
Grey sends Troops, etCi, to India,
Grey was never parochial, and the strands of his varie- gated career were continually being crossed by threads from the Motherland or from other provinces of the Empire. In August, 1857, he professed to have received from Lord Elphinstone, Governor of the province of Bombay, a despatch informing him of the outbreak of the mutiny in India. As the Governor of Bombay and the High Commissioner of the Cape could have no official relations with one another save through the Home Government, the term 'despatch' is obviously inaccurate. The fact remained, and it was grave. Grey at once realised the gravity of the situation as neither the Governor-General of India nor the English Ministry realised it. His action was prompt and decisive. A man- of-war then lying in Table Bay was at once sent to India, two batteries of the Royal Artillery stationed at Cape- town were also sent, and with them were sent ammunition, military stores, and some horses, including the Governor's own carriage horses. Grey's public-spirited action received the warm approval of Queen Victoria. *'I hear," wrote Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, "the Queen is in great admiration of Sir George Grey, at the Cape, having sent his carriage horses to India and going afoot. " Grey had no more power to despatch the man-of-war than the Governor of New South Wales would have to despatch to India the British squadron anchored in Sydney Harbour. It is also doubt- ful whether he had— indeed, it is hardly doubtful that he
115
116 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
had not — power to despatch the Eoyal Artillery, and it is certain that, in the eyes of the Home Government, he incurred Talleyrand's reproach of trop de zele. Pos- terity will not ratify the judgment. The verdict of history will be that, if he acted ultra vires, he was justified in so acting. His action was that of a statesman and a patriot.
Conciliates Natives.
According to his own account. Grey continued to despatch to India all the Imperial troops he could possibly spare, numbering 5,000. As these were under the com- mand of English officers, who could obey only the orders of the War Office, he must have superseded those officers and thus supplanted the War Office. It is possible, but not very credible. One thing is certain. Resolving to trust to his personal influence to maintain peace in the midst of hostile races, he showed his customary energy in fore- arming himself against possible dangers. He set out on a series of visits to the kraals of the Kafir chiefs in order to extract from them solemn assurances of fidelity, or at least to arrange for a truce so long as the Empire was in danger. It is a tribute to his powers of persuasion, and at the same time a testimony to the loyalty of character of these savages, that he was completely successful and met with no refusals. Had they fallen on the defenceless settlements as the Zulus fell twenty years later, the British colonies would have been wiped out. He climbed the heights of Thaba-Bosigo, and from Moshesh, the aged chief of the Basutos, he received an assurance of friend- ship. From all others he received similar assurances. All were kept, and the whole of South Africa remained at peace, not only during the struggle in India, but for many years after. Grey was a fighting Governor, but he fought to end wars, not to begin them, and he established peace.
Levies Troops.
He was not content with taking these energetic measures. In answer to a second appeal from Lord Elphinstone (so he asserted) he summoned to its old
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 117
standards the disbanded German Legion, or a large por- tion of it, and despatched it to Bombay. For a subject to levy troops without the authority of the Sovereign was an act of high treason, and Grey undoubtedly incurred the risk of the severe penalties attached to such a procedure. Though the German Legion took no part in suppressing the Mutiny, it aided in keeping the peace in Bombay, which must have been denuded of white troops. Here again, therefore, the action of the High Commissioner, taken in contravention of the law though it was, will meet with the approval of posterity.
Advises Use of Maoris.
We are not sure that the same approbation will be meted out to another measure that he proposed or recom- mended. Some old friends of his, leading Maori chiefs in the North Island of New Zealand, offered to raise regi- ments of Maoris for service in India. For a number of reasons Grey strongly advised the Home Government to accept the offer. Recalling the employment of Indians in the war of American Independence, where the Indians were yet matched with hostile Indians in the American service, the English Government refused to accept the offer. Grey had been misled by his romantic attachment for a race whose virtues he probably overestimated and to whose savagery he chose to shut his eyes. In the matter of savagery there was, indeed, little to choose between the brown race and the white. A touch of canni- balism would hardly have been out of place at a time when Indian natives were blown from the mouths of guns. At all events, the civilised world will probably not again sanction the use of savage troops against even semi- civilised peoples.
Diverts the China Contingent.
The condemnation thus affixed to an ill-advised and ill-timed offer is of a mild nature compared with the astonishment raised by another phase of the same episode. Not in the excitement of the moment, but in
118 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
cold blood and to the last years of his life, Grey seriously maintained that it was he, and not Lord Elgin, who diverted the troops on their way to support the British plenipotentiary in China and despatched them to India. To himself alone he calmly arrogated the merit ascribed to that act, of having ' ' saved India. ' '
A Delusion'
It is a case for the Society for Psychical Research. From the beginning to end the narrative is a pure hal- lucination, or a tissue of hallucinations. It is difficult to conceive that a sane mind can have entertained such delusions or through forty years persisted in such beliefs. Mr. Rees charitably assumes that Grey believed that, in an emergency, when the existence of the Empire was at stake, a high officer of that Empire could ignore all precedents, supersede all rules, and act upon prin- ciples he had himself originated. But this is much too charitable a view of the case. There is no doubt at all that in 1857 Grey believed— in 1884, as the writer can testify, he still believed — that, as Commander-in-Chief within the Colony, he possessed the supreme command of all forces in the Colony, could direct military move- ments, and supersede the English general if such movements were not made. That was an extraordinary straining of his powers, and, as we have seen, it was not in imagination only. But it was mild in comparison with the incredible assumptions he made when the transports destined for China, to support Lord Elgin in forcibly concluding a treaty with the Chinese Government, touched at Capetown to take in supplies. He then claimed that, as the troops had come within the boundaries of the Colony, he was empowered to direct their movements. This was his deliberate belief. In pursuance of it he required of the commander of the troops that he should disobey the orders he had received from the War Office, diverge from the route he had been instructed to take, and steam straight to Calcutta. Through his biographer he asserts that the commander. Col. Hope, yielded to his insistence or rather obeyed his orders, and steamed
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOL'TH AFRICA
119
straight for Calcutta. The troops arrived in India in time to enable Sir Colin Campbell to relieve Liicknow. But for this unexpected reinforcement Lucknow would have fallen, and India itself might have been reconquered.
Against the Evidence.
Not a tittle of evidence supports this chain of assump- tions. The officer in command only laughed at the mock orders he received from the Governor and continued his voyage to Singapore, as he had been instructed to do. There^ Lord Elgin received a despatch from Lord Canning, the Governor-General of India, informing him of the outbreak of the Mutiny and the critical situation of Central India. Then he rose from the table, where he sat at dinner, and paced the balcony for two or three hours, evidently deliberating what steps he should take in this grave emergency. " To his eternal honour," according to Lord Malmesbury, he decided to sacrifice the means of accomplishing the mission that had been entrusted to him, and divert to India the troops that had just arrived at Singapore, as had been arranged. Is it not plain that the transports did not steam straight from Capetown to Calcutta, as Grey had ordered they should, and as he professes to believe they really did, but simply pursued the course to Singapore, whither they had been sent? Lord Elgin, and he alone, diverted them to Calcutta; and Sir George Grey had no more to do with the diversion than the Man in the Moon. The facts, clearly stated and irresistibly argued, were placed before him in a New Zealand journal in 1890, by an officer who had been on board the transports when they touched at Capetown, but nothing could eradicate the deep-seated delusion. By deputy (for he was too proud to enter per- sonally into controversy with any colonist), and that deputy ( if I do not mistake) Mr. Rees, he maintained in the same journal his old contentions, as he had done for thirty-three years to all who would listen to him, and thus furnished convincing proof that megalomania had per- manently disturbed the balance of his mind.
120 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGE GREY
One more piece of evidence is available. When Mr. Eees 's narrative was published, Sir Henry Loch, who had been Secretary to Lord Elgin, wrote to the Times, giving his statements a specific denial and scouting the claims made by, and on behalf of, Sir George Grey. Nothing more conclusive is ever likely to be produced.
The True Actor.
It is little to add that Mr. Rees, by his own confession, was unable to discover that any fitting recognition of Sir George Grey's signal services on this historic occa- sion had ever been made. What he really means is that he can find no evidence that things had happened as Grey said they did. All who follow him in the same track will be in equal perplexity. One is surprised, on looking through the histories of the Mutiny, to observe how indefinite are all the statements made about the incident. Even in the book that ought to have contained an authorised narrative there are only the haziest references to it. The unpretending volume, indeed, might have been more luminously compiled. Elucidative notes or illustra- tive words, such as Carlyle appended or prefixed to Cromwell's letters or intermingled with his speeches; Lord Elgin's meagre accounts filled out from authorita- tive histories; above all, some glimpses of a striking personality, would have greatly added to its historical value. The Earl of Elgin was no ordinary man. Driven by inherited financial embarrassment to seek a remunera- tive career by honourable public service abroad, he exercised a wise despotism over Jamaica in his early manhood, brought constitutional government in Canada into successful working in his maturity, and when the snows of age had prematurely whitened the finely shaped head he went forth to rule the great dependency he had saved. The writer well remembers listening with all the reverence of boyhood to the address he gave in the town hall of the city near his seat at Broomhall on the eve of his departure for India. An Anglican rector who had been his contemporary at Oxford said that he was there the finest elocutionist of his time, and all who
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 121
heard him at Dunfermline in the early sixties must have felt the solemnity of the occasion. A slight tremor shook his voice as he spoke of the unlikelihood of his return from the sphere of his new labours, but true eloquence was lacking to match the polished enunciation and the finished elocution. He never returned, and, djnng tragically at his post, he unwittingly bequeathed to his son both the reversion of the viceroyalty and a seat in the present Cabinet.
He was lying at Singapore, impatiently waiting for the arrival of the troops that were to support his mission in China. Instead of them came a messenger, grim and ter- rible, to tell of the rising of the Sepoys in Central India, and with it an appeal to his generosity and patriotism. So far from its being the case, as Grey always alleged, that Lord Canning underestimated the danger and asked only that some horses and other trifling reinforcements should be sent him, it is stated in the Letters that Canning urgently entreated Lord Elgin to send him troops— the troops, namely, that were destined for the China Expedi- tion. And '*I have not a man" to send, he writes to his wife. His troops were still at sea. He did exactly what Grey claimed to have done. He despatched fast steamers to intercept the slow-sailing transports and divert them towards the Hoogly. After consulting with the local general, he had resolved on a great act of renunciation. He determined to sacrifice the China mission, and thus relinquish in advance all the glory he might have hoped to win. As it happened, he reaped the higher glory of renouncement, and he did not in the long run sacrifice the impurer fame of negotiating a questionable treaty.
Evidence is deficient on the one side and altogether lacking on the other. In a matter in which there ought to be thousands of witnesses, many of them still living, we are unable positively to say that the transports com- plied with the requests of Grey or obeyed the orders of Elgin. Grey's contention, which looks like the delusion of a distempered brain, is at least arguable. Whately's Historic Doubts about Napoleon might have a counter- part in Historic Doubts about Lord Elgin.
Chapter XVIII.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA—
continued.
South African Federation.
Sir George Grey had, years before, schemed a federa- tion of New Zealand with the South Sea Islands. He now proposed that the various States of South Africa should be united by a common bond, (hi a despatch written at the end of 1855 he advocated "a federal union among all these territories, in which great individual freedom of action" should be "left to each province, whilst they" would "yet all be united under British rule.". "He vainly endeavoured to induce the Imperial Government to resume the sovereignty of the Orange River State. In the following year he intimated that the State would ask to be included in a federal government with Cape Colony, and he requested instructions. In a private communication or a secret despatch, dated in September, 1858, Bulwer Lytton, now Secretary for the Colonies, reminded Grey that he had frequently urged the union of British Kafraria with Cape Colony and of the various South African States with one another. He was informed that "a high value in the eyes of Her Majesty's Government" attached "to the expression of his deliberate judgment on such a question," and he was instructed that "it would be expedient to keep in view the ultimate policy of incorporating British Kafraria with the Cape Colony, and even, if possible, of uniting all her Majesty's dominions in South Africa under some common , . . . government. ' ' The limitation of the reference will be observed. But no thought of limitation entered the mind of the High Commissioner. He had schemed a Commonwealth of all South African States without regard to differences of race or colour.
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HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA 123
His Ideal.
His views were expounded in August, 1858, in the greatest despatch he ever wrote — this man of many despatches. It was remarkable for its large and states- manlike views, its prevision of eventualities, its imagina- tive delineation of future social states, and the glowing ardour that animated it. Such a commonwealth as he designed would form an impregnable rampart against the native tribes. It would create an extensive industrial system and a vast commerce. It would exalt the character of the colonists and breed new types of statesmen and law^^ers, divines and men of letters. And it would pro- mote the highest interests of mankind. Evidently, the man who could conceive such a vision was endowed with an imagination that was ardent, capacious, and construc- tive. Was it the imagination of a statesman or an utopianist? Half a century has gone by, and the things he foresaw are still unrealised.
Was he any more a statesman in his grasp of details than he was in his general conception? He proposed to leave large powers to the States. Yet this was the blunder he had committed in New Zealand only a few years before. There he had left too large powers to the pro- vinces, and, after attaining maturity through a brief existence of twenty-one years, the federal constitution of New Zealand was abolished in 1876.
His Action.
CHe did not content himself with writing despatches. Exceeding his instructions, he invited the Orange River Free State to indicate its willingness to join such a com- monwealth. He presumably sent a similar invitation to the Boers of the Transvaal ; he certainly looked forward to the eventual adhesion of the Republic. The Orange River Volksraad promptly responded, approving of the advisableness of a union or alliance with the Cape. The terms of the response should be noted, for in them lies the key to the situation. It was an alliance of equal States, not a federation of dependent colonies, that the Volksraad
124 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGE GREY
contemplated. It will be remembered that the Orange Eiver republic, a few years before, had successfully- asserted its independence, and constrained Great Britain, not then over-greedy of new territory, to relinquish its sovereignty. The High Commissioner deplored the surrender of a country that was sensibly British by its sympathies, as it was largely British by its ethnical com- plexion. Almost as a consequence his relations with the State had continued to be of a strangely friendly character. He had sought to commend himself to the sons of the expatriated French Protestants by boasting that he was himself descended from an exiled Huguenot noble. He had founded in the capital of the State a college where he advised that, while English was not neglected, literary Dutch should be the language of instruction. Well did he know, moreover, that the population of the Cape, originally a foreign colony, was largely of Dutch extrac- tion. When he projected a federation where two English colonies, one of them more than half -Dutch, would be balanced by two Dutch States, he therefore projected a federation on a Dutch base, with Dutch necessarily as the official language, Dutch affinities, interests, and antipathies — a federation that never would have acted harmoniously with British policy or taken its place as a constituent member of the British Empire — a federa- tion that would eventually have hoisted an alien flag and declared itself independent of Great Britain. Whether the High Commissioner contemplated this result or not, he deliberately prepared the means to this inevit- able end, and if he did not foresee it, he either ignored the possibility of it, or was indifferent to it. The Colonial Office took this view. It is impossible to read the despatches from Downing Street without perceiving the belief that inspired them. In the eyes of the department the High Commissioner of South Africa and Governor of Cape Colony stood convicted of disloyalty, if not to the nation to which he belonged, at least to the Govern- ment he served.
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125
His Recall.
-^ Without waiting to receive the approval of the Colonial Office, he opened the Parliament of Cape Colony in 1859 with a speech in which he advised that that body should take steps to bring about the federation of the South African States. This was the final straw that broke the endurance of the long-suffering Colonial Office. On Mav 5 a despatch had been sent to him expressing dis- satisfaction with his proceedings, but it must have been received too late to arrest him. On June 4, as soon as the tenor of the Governor's speech was known in London, he was peremptorily recalled. He was treated with high consideration. The Secretary of State, whether Lytton or Carnarvon, but more probably Carnarvon, acknow- ledged "the large and comprehensive nature of" his views; he even admitted the "fairness" of the High Commissioner. But he was plainly informed that he was ''committed to a policy of which" Her Majesty's Govern- ment "disapproved on a subject of the first importance." The steps he had taken would "have to be retraced."
The blow was by no means a clap of thunder in a clear sky. Ominous muttering preceded the explosion. Kumours of his probable recall had been for months floating on the wings of many winds. They had not escaped his ears. In a despatch that would have been pathetic, if it had not been pitiful, he again struck a chord that he had harped on during his first term in New Zealand, and told the Secretary of State how he was worn with anxiety and broken down with toil. If to such vexations and labours were to be added misconstruction and distrust at the Colonial Office, his situation would be rendered untenable. Above all, if her Majesty's Government were dissatisfied with his administration to the point that they had meditated his recall, as his enemies in the Colony rumoured, then he hoped that they would treat him as English gentlemen are wont to be treated, and say plainly what they designed.
We are reminded of the querulous tone of the State- papers written by English statesmen who enjoyed the
126 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
questionable distinction of serving the virgin Queen. Burleigh, Walsingham, and Davison are continually deploring their lot in having to carry out the behests of a capricious and intractable woman. Alone in them, of all English State-papers, the note of personal feeling constantly recurs, and alone in the despatches of Grey, of all British Governors, is the same chord struck. Like them too, and like another Grey, not perhaps greater or less high-handed. Lord Grey of Wilton, what he had to dread was deposition or recall. Governors have been recalled for a variety of reasons. They have been recalled because they were too old or too young, because they were too meddlesome or too slothful, because they offended the immigrants or alienated the natives, because they were Pharisaical or were immoral, because they made war or failed to make peace. Grey was recalled because he was a King Stork, and chiefly because he was j endeavouring to bring about a federation in South Africa/ tthat would prove inimical to the interests of the Empire. All his other offences, strongly though they were con- demned at the time, could have been forgiven ; they were over and done with. In relation to federation he was active for mischief, and if his mischievous activity were not checked, there was no saying what the incorrigible meddler, who believed that he was ruler of South Africa, would be tempted to do.
r The nominal author of his recall was Sir Edward K&lwer Lytton, but the real author of it Grey believed to be the young Earl of Carnarvon, the Under-Secretary who governed the department in the absence of his chief through ill-health consequent on a nervous break-down. Grey himself, inspiring Mr. Rees, gives an animated account of the manner in which the recall was effected. As an act of more than ordinary gravity, it had to receive the approval of the Cabinet and the final sanction of the Queen in Council. In Grey's belief, the Queen resisted the decision, and the Earl of Derby, returning from Windsor, where the meeting of the Privy Council was held, confided to Clerk Greville the expression of
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA. 127
his appreliensions : ^'I fear, we have done a bad day's work in recalling Grey."
^ Just so did it appear in South Africa. Addresses of regret poured in upon the disgraced Governor from all quarters; Dutch leaders, Kafir and Zulu chiefs, and English missionaries, including the heroic Livingstone^ voiced their sincere sorrow that so sympathetic a Governor was leaving them, and leaving them under a cloud. Never before, it was rightly felt, had such a Governor been vouchsafed to South Africa. The injunc- tion of the Colonial Minister was, however, imperative; a few written words, at a distance of 5,000 miles, were as potent as the stroke of a sword; believing the decision to be final, the popular Governor broke up his home and prepared to take his departure. We can imagine his melancholy reflections on the miserable Homeward voyage. He was going Home to disgi'ace.
Happily, it proved to be far otherwise. His sun had not yet set. He was still on Sunium's heights. His .deposition was a boomerang that recoiled on his authors. ^/The returning steamer was boarded off Southampton by a reporter, who brought the thrice-welcome news that the Ministry which had recalled him had been driven from office, and that he was to be reinstated in the governorship of the Cape. A condemned criminal to whom the news of a reprieve has been brought could hardly feel greater joy than the deposed Governor must have felt. He could now afford to take the matter jovially. Meeting a New Zealand ex-official (Walter Mantell, once Protector of the Aborigines), he told him that he only wanted a holiday and took steps to obtain it. Long afterwards, when he saw the significance of the event in the light of later happenings, he spoke of it as ''a great fall." He had then taken it to heart; he never took it to head.
The cold reception by the Colonial Office after his return from New Zealand in 1854 had been offset by the enthusiastic greeting he received from the undergraduates of Oxford. His condemnation by the
128 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
same department was now virtually reversed by the University of Cambridge. In company with Mr. Gladstone, he was granted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Young England admired the large views and bold spirit of the Governor, who was a man after its own heart ; it was indifferent to the alleged errors of his policy.
Chapter XIX.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA:
SECOND TERM.
On Sunium's Heights.
Grey had left South Africa under a cloud ; he returned to it almost a conqueror, having been enthusiastically acclaimed by the jeunesse doree of England, enjoying the sunshine of the Colonial Office, and welcomed alike by English and Dutch. He returned, indeed, with his hands tied, but he soon threw off the handcuffs. In cer- tain matters that involved legislation or expenditure he could act only in conjunction with the Legislative Council ; he soon let it be known that the Council would have to act as he wished.
An Autocratic Governor.
He had long had at heart the building of a breakwater at Table Bay, where stormy winds from the south-west still make anchorage insecure. A bill laid before the council prior to his departure had been thrown out in his absence by the influence of the narrow-minded Dutch members, who saw a future for agricultural or pastoral occupations in their country, but could not perceive the importance of creating facilities for commercial inter- course. At the very first session of the council after he returned. Grey acquainted its members with his determination to have the breakwater made. He accord- ingly placed a sufficient sum on the Estimates for the purpose, and announced his resolution not to let a single vote be passed unless this project was sanctioned. One day's debating sufficed. The vote was carried by a small majority, and next year the first stone of the structure was laid by an illustrious visitor, Prince Alfred.
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130 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
A Royal Prince at the Cape.
A great social triumph was to crown his second term in South Africa. The Prince Consort and the Queen, resolving to give their second son, Prince Alfred, the unique experience to be gained by witnessing the administration of a British colony under one of the greatest colonial rulers, sent the Prince to South Africa on his way to Australia. There, as everywhere, he was of course royally received, as only Britons and British colonists can receive their sovereign or their sovereign's son. Grey was nominally only a secondary figure in the pageant, but in reality he played the leading part. The Prince laid the foundation-stone of the breakwater that Grey had wrung from the narrow-minded and close- fisted Boers of the Cape. He turned the first sod of the first railway. He was entertained at a banquet where Grey was the chief speaker and the best. To crown all, the Prince was taken by his magnificent entertainer on a tour of 1,200 miles across South Africa — through Cape Colony, British Kafraria, the Orange Free State, Natal, and back. A picturesque procession at Capetown led it off. A great hunt was arranged on a gigantic scale. A thousand Barolongs had for days or weeks been employed beating up game and afforded the royal party (shade of Rhadaman thine Freeman forgive the epithet!) royal sport. Ostriches and zebras, wildbeestes, bonteboks, and springboks, jerboas and antelopes were bagged in multitudes. Talk of the Caledonian Hunt, whether of ancient Greece or modern Scotland ! The tour filled up a month, and when the Prince got back to Capetown, he must have felt that he had witnessed a unique sight and gained a priceless experience.
Both the Queen and the Prince Consort were highly gratified with Grey's treatment of their son, and they expressed their satisfaction in cordial terms. The Queen commissioned the Duke of Newcastle to convey her warm thanks to the High Commissioner for the reception he had given the young prince. But she did not content her- self with this vicarious expression of her gratitude.
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She was "anxious to express personally both the Prince Consort's and her own thanks for the very great kindness Sir George Grey showed our child during his most inter- esting tour in that fine colony." She believed that it would be "beneficial to Prince Alfred to have witnessed the manner in which Sir George devotes his whole time and energy to promote the happiness and welfare" of the colonists. Grey had some excuse for imagining that he was not like other colonial governors, but stood in a peculiar relation to the Sovereign and was held by her in special esteem.
Chapter XX.
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFRICA:', SECOND TERM— continued.
The Library Founder.
None of the acquisitive passions is so respectable as the avidity of collecting books. It is pre-eminently the scholar's passion. These are his quarry, his mines of Golconda, his Kimberley diamond fields, where he will find who knows what massive jewel or, in any case, the solid substance of his erudition. The wife of his bosom may grumble, as Lady Hamilton gently repined when her helluo lihrorum carted home fresh additions to the stores of which the philosopher made so little visible use. Even the literary worker who makes no pretensions to learning, and who cares less for the form than for the intrinsic utility of the volumes he uses, is pleased when he picks up for a few shillings a rare treatise of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But these are only amateurs, timorous paddlers in deep waters, while men with tastes, curiosity, and means set out in quest of rare old editions, or have agents in many countries. Thus equipped and thus advised, in a few years they may gather huge or valuable collections with which to feast their own eyes, while they feast the eyes of others. Then, when they die, they bequeath them to their descendants, like the Earls Spencer, or to a college, as did Victor Cousin to the Sor- bonne. Now and then, but far seldomer, such a connoisseur may part with his hoards in his lifetime. What motive then governs him ? Love of praise perhaps, but also an honest desire to diffuse the benefits of erudi- tion and the materials of research. Such mixed motives we may conceive to have animated Grey when he decided to present to the Cape the splendid accumulation of books and manuscripts he had been getting together during a
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good many years — nearly twenty, he himself stated in the preface to the second edition of his Polynesian Mythology.
Unfortunate Allocation,
In the same preface Grey confesses that, in depositing at Capetown a large collection of volumes and MSS- relating to the Polynesian languages, mythology, and traditions, he "must seem to have acted injudiciously." The defence he makes is that at the time he made the donation he was residing at the Cape and that he hoped, in conjunction with Dr. Bleek, the librarian, who had come to the Cape on a philological mission, to work on the philological and mythological portions of the collection, especially those relating to New Zealand. He had apparently quite forgotten that he had ceased to reside at the Cape and was then residing in New Zealand. Not till some months after he had entered on a second term as Governor of New Zealand did he offer to present the collection to the Cape Library. The books were, more- over, no longer in Capetown, but in England. The whole narrative makes his action appear worse than inju- dicious. It was an act of folly to send that fine collection of Polynesian literature to Capetown, where it could only rot on the shelves, and deprive of it New Zealand, where alone it could be studied by experts. It looked like a vindictive act. It was an ominous beginning to a term of administration that was to be brought to an end by a virtual recall.
We can forgive him for depositing at Capetown the 415 publications and MSS. in or relating to 78 African languages; but the 40 books in or on West Australian dialects should have been deposited, if not in London or Oxford, Paris or Berlin, then at (Australian) Perth. The 42 works in or on the various Fijian dialects, the four on or in the dialect of Rotuma Island, the many more on other Polynesian tongues, and above all, as already said, the Kohinoor of the collection, the 524 volumes and MSS., containing poems, legends, translations, letters, grammars, and vocabularies in or from the Maori
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language should have been placed in Wellington or Auck- land. It is impossible to exaggerate the injury thus done to Philology. All the great Maori scholars of New Zealand — Colenso, Maunsell, White, Grey himself — have passed away without having an opportunity of using the treasures he had gathered. The chance of finding men to edit them who had themselves spoken with the old chiefs and tohungas from whose lips they had been taken down has passed away with them and can never recur. It was an irreparable blunder.
Bibliographic Treasures.
The other treasures thus buried at the extremity of a continent, likewise away from the scholars who could use them, are not imica, but they could have been far more profitably placed elsewhere. They consist of 53 MSS., in the Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Hebrew languages. Twenty-four works belong to the fifteenth century — such a collection as probably no other library south of the Line can boast of; and 60 are of the sixteenth century. One hundred were published within fifty years of the invention of printing, and these include an English trans- lation of the Polychronicon, printed by Caxton in 1482. I said just now that the Library contained no unicum, but Grey claimed that the copy of the first folio of Shakspere there is the only complete copy. The MSS. are remark- able. There are no fewer than 120 ranging from the tenth to the fifteenth century, on vellum and illuminated, and in eight languages. Two of them are Dantean (what would not Signor del Balco or Signor D'Ovidio give to examine these?), several of Petrarch, one the earliest edition of the Roman de la Rose, and a Flemish transla- tion of Mandeville's Travels. There are 50 chap-books, so precious to historians, and there are 42 works pub- lished by or attributed to Defoe. One great division of literature which he never forgot is splendidly repre- sented. There are 374 Bibles or parts of the Bible in 160 languages, and there was no portion of the collection, perhaps, of which he was more proud. Two or three thousand manuscript letters — a passion with him to the
HIGH COMMISSIONER IN SOUTH AFEICA : SECOND TEEM 135
end of his days — adorn it. Among them are some letters of Cromwell^ which Grey offered to Carlyle, but the wearied editor sorrowfully admitted his unwillingness to unhoop his cask. As we write, every line increases our regret that for so many years such rarities and such trea- sures have been or will yet be lost to the world.
A Great Bibliography.
Only the catalogue is accessible. By a piece of good for- tune, on a par with the splendid gift, a German scholar had come to South Africa on a philological mission, or it may be, like a well-known New Zealand geologist, on a mission of his own, and was transformed into a phil- ologist. With some aid from Grey, a virtuoso rather than a connoisseur in letters, Bleek compiled a catalogue of the collection that is a masterpiece of its kind. The arrangement is detailed and scientific; the description full and exact. The notes are invaluable, and they incor- porate original information of importance. In the opinion of an authority the catalogue is ''virtually a handbook of African, Australian, and Polynesian phil- ology." How exhaustive it is will appear from the fact that it gives an account of 198 publications and manu- scripts (the bulk of them Maori) in the Grey Library at Capetown.
Scholarly Homage.
The Catalogue was the best advertisement the Library could have received. To foreign scholars it must have been as the waters of Tantalus. They were not slow to make their acknowledgements. Max Muller hesitated over an article for the Quarterly Revieiv, which Grey seems to have suggested to him, but he publicly stated that ''Sir George Grey's services to the science of language have hardly been sufficiently appreciated as yet, and" held that "the Linguistic Library which he founded at the Cape places him of right by the side of Sir Thomas Bodley." But the Bodleian is used, whereas the Grey Library is useless. Baron Bunsen made a no
136 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
less glowing recognition of the "rich treasures," ''the enlightened and indefatigable researches and collections, ' ' Grey had "heaped on all scholars of African ethnology and comparative philology." The Bonn philologist, Lassen, was hardly less laudatory, and Professor Sayce was duly recognisant. The Catalogue, taken by itself and also as the s^Tnbol of a great collection, will be one of Grey's most enduring monuments.
Chapter XXI.
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: SECOND TERM.
It was a source of legitimate pride to Grey — and in later years he reminded the Secretary for the Colonies — that, on four different occasions, he had been appealed to by the Colonial Office to accept the governorship of a colony that was passing through a crisis. First in South Australia, when the high-minded but injudicious Colonel Gawler had brought the Colony to the verge of insolvency. Next, in New Zealand, when a Governor possessing many fine qualities, but lacking in judgment, had been found unequal to a difficult situation. Again, in South Africa, where troubles of many sorts had been brewing. Now once more to New Zealand, where the relations between the Maoris and the settlers had become hopelessly entangled, he was summoned from a country where he was doing splendid work, to restore order and peace in a country distracted by a prolonged Native war. The Duke of Newcastle, recalling Governor Gore Browne, explained that he considered it desirable that, at a critical moment in its history, the Colony should have the advantage of "the authority attaching to the name and character of Sir George Grey." And the recalled Governor himself, with a generosity which, to the credit of human nature, is happily not rare in such circum- stances, acknowledged that the Colony had everything to gain from the experience and prestige of his predecessor.
Origin of the War.
Yet the incoming ruler was hardly less at fault than the outgoing one, and he was almost as deeply implicated in the causes of the war. Governor Browne had, indeed, made the purchase of land that was to set the whole
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country in flame, but the root of the strife goes farther back and deeper down. Grey is accused of having, in 1847, committed a grave error of judgment by refusing, out of complaisance to Gladstone, Secretary for the Colonies in July, 1846, to confirm a wise decision of his predecessor, Governor FitzEoy. The war that desolated the North Island in the sixties was already germinating in 1846. The Ngatiawa tribe, resident in Taranaki, had been defeated by Te Whero in 1831, and the remnant fled southwards before the victor, settling on the south- west coast, as other members of it had previously done, but thereby relinquishing none of their rights of occu- pancy. The New Zealand Company bought, on its usual terms, a large tract of land once occupied by the Ngati- awa, and the sale of a portion of the land was duly ratified. But a large part of the tribal territory had been nominally sold, and to this the absentee Ngatiawa, repre- sented by Te Rangitake, an ally of the Government and chief-peacemaker in the southern district, would not consent. Though he was well acquainted with Maori land-law, which is that of all Aryan peoples,* Grey held that the rights of the absentees lapsed by non-assertion, and while he informed the tribe that he would make ''most ample reserves for their present and future wants," he validated the sale. He thus aided in hatch- ing the brood of war that overspread the whole island twelve or fifteen years later. Could he have succeeded in preventing the return of the exiled members of the tribe, as he strenuously and secretly endeavoured to do, he might have killed the seed of the hydra. Hearing that the exiles intended to return, Grey sent orders from Auckland to Wellington to ask Te Puni, a friendly chief, to dis- mantle the canoes ; if he refused, they were to be seized or destroyed. He completely failed in his purpose. The canoes were neither dismantled nor destroyed, and in them the surviving members of the tribe safely effected their collective return. They reoccupied their old locations, and their occupancy of these was the fountain and origin
* Sir C- Metcalfe, in Elphinstone, History of India , p. 214.
GOVEENOR OF NEW ZEALAND : SECOND TERM 139
of the Waitara struggle. Grey too had returned, and he found the serpent-brood preparing to strangle the Colony in its Lernaean coils.
It boded little good for his new term of governorship in New Zealand that Mr. Fox was Premier of the Colony when he entered on it. Fox, who had inherited the feud of the New Zealand Company against Grey, had been one of his most rancorous opponents during his first term. His animosity against Grey waxed hotter as the collisions inevitable with such an animus multiplied, and, before Grey's second term came to an end. Fox was to resign his seat in the legislature on the pretext that nothing could be done so long as Sir George Grey was in office. If such were his feelings when Grey returned to New Zealand, they were carefully dissembled. At all events, coming back clothed with prestige as a kind of political Messiah, Grey found him professedly friendly and met with cordiality from his Ministry.
Organizing the Maoris.
He needed all the aid he could receive. His ingenious and inventive mind had already devised a plan for organ- izing the Maori race and making future conflicts between it and the colonists impossible. He was not the first to make the attempt. The high-minded Duke of Newcastle, the previous year, had introduced a bill to establish a Native Council, his guiding principle being that the Natives should be governed through institutions of their own, with the Imperial Government to stand as an arbi- trator betwixt them and the colonists. Grey's distinctive idea, on the contrary, according to Sir Charles Adderley, ''seems to have been rather to introduce Eng- lish institutions among the Natives as an alternative, than to make use of theirs." If this were the case, it would now be considered an error. It seems to be equally in accord- ance with the law of evolution and with common sense to pursue the policy of perfecting Maori institutions. No others would be practicable, or would survive. As we examine Grey's measure, there does appear to be a peculiar mixture of English and Maori ideas. The North
140 LIFE OF SIR GEOEGE GREY
Island, the only portion of New Zealand where the Maoris were numerous enough to be formidable, was to be divided into about twenty districts and each subdivided into six hundreds. The subdivision, the hundred, was, as we remember, an old notion of Grey's, in whose original constitution for New Zealand it has a prominent place ; how questionable a name it was may appear from the fact that historians are still in doubt about its true signification in early England. In each district and hundred there was to be a runanga, or assembly,* and the runangas of the hundreds were to elect the nmangas of the districts. The district runangas were to consist of a Civil Commissioner, appointed by the Governor, together with twelve elected Maoris. There seems to have been no attempt to create a General Native Assembly or, as the Duke of Newcastle named it, a Native Council ; perhaps the unity of the Native race was held to be not yet sufficiently assured. But the district assemblies were clothed with administrative and legislative functions, to be exercised with the approval of the Governor. They were to pass measures for the suppression of nuisances and of drunkenness. The administration of justice, the organization of education, and the relief of the sick in hospitals were committed to them. The all-important subject of land-disputes, whether tribal or individual, which had been the cause of the late war, was entirely remitted to them. The sales of Native lands had hitherto been effected through the Government. Now, when the Civil Commissioner had settled the boundaries. Native owners might sell land to purchasers approved by the Government and recommended by a runanga, but not more than was enough for a farm. Chiefs were to be appointed magistrates of hundreds and other natives constables. A revenue was to be provided through the receipt of fines and fees and a house or land tax. But Grey did not expect that the revenue thus accruing would suffice, and, as in all his plans for the improvement of indigenous races, a considerable Imperial expenditure
* Another Aryan institution. Hearn, The Aryan Household, pp. 137-30.
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was involved. In this case he estimated that £50,000 would be wanted, but this sum would cancel an expendi- ture of £629,000, of which the Colonial Treasury- contributed £129,000. Sir Charles Adderley's account is slightly different. He says that Grey ''induced the Home Government to contribute, besides their military expenditure in New Zealand, a special grant for Native improvement." As if to confuse the impartial historian, the colonial Ministers asserted that the Governor, *'as Imperial Native Administrator, was spending more than a million a year for the English Government." It is a fact that the high consideration in which Grey was held induced the Imperial Government to grant him liberal sums for such expenditure which it refused to other and less esteemed Governors.
This hopeful scheme might have had the effect of build- ing up the race and healing all old sores, had it ever come into operation. It was passed through the Assembly as the "Native Districts Eegulation Act." The Ministers frankly accepted it, and the Premier accompanied the Governor on tour through Native districts in order to support and expound the new constitution. First, they went to the Bay of Islands, where Grey's old friend, Thomas Walker (Waka Nene) warmly welcomed hira; and there his policy was enthusiastically received. Apparently, in only one district were the new institutions materialised. At Taupiri, on the Upper AVaikato, a village runanga was elected, and a village headman was appointed, with a salary; but no district runanga was called into existence. One Civil Commissioner is after- wards mentioned in a different district, but no runanga. In fact, only a beginning was made of carrying the scheme into practical operation, even in the parts of the country that were likely to be the most favourable to it, and that beginning was not maintained. It was difficult, says Adderley, to get the natives either to sell their land or to cultivate it, or in case of a dispute to resoii to the new courts, or to accustom the Commissioner judicially to admit their claims. The time was ill-choscn for making
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an experiment that might, under more favourable cir- cumstances, have been successful. The laws were about to be struck dumb by the clang of arms.
Surrender of the Waitara; seizure of Tataraimaka.
The Governor resolved to get to the bottom of the Waitara imbroglio. Visiting Taranaki, he called for a map of the Waitara district he remembered to have seen during his first term of office — for he forgot nothing. The Minister accompanying him denied that any such map existed. At last it was happily recovered. When he had found the map and seen the boundaries of the land occupied by the Ngatiawa, his mind was at once made up. He determined that the land bought from Teira (Taylor) should be given back to Wiremu Kingi, the head of the tribe, and all possible reparation made. (Here we are following his own account of the matter — not perhaps to be implicitly trusted, but still to be carefully heeded.) He then, he says, or Mr. Rees says for him, summoned a meeting of the Cabinet; he means, the Executive Council. He expressed his conviction that a great wrong had been done. The natives were wholly in the right. And he urged that steps should be publicly taken to acknowledge the justice of their cause. The Ministry should issue a proclamation declaring that the land- purchase should be rescinded and amends made. The Premier of the hour was Alfred Domett, Browning's *' Waring" and Grey's personal friend and guest, with whom in after-years he was in regular correspondence; and surely the author of Ranolf and Amohia should have been a philo-Maori? The Native Minister was Sir Francis Dillon Bell, who had reluctantly found the incriminatory map. The two agreed upon a plan. On April 4 the land taken at Waitara should be abandoned or restored. But either Grey or the Ministry (and apparently it was both) seemed not to have magnanimity enough to make an absolute surrender. Like Danton on his way to the guillotine, they must show no weakness at a critical moment. They must duly evacuate the Waitara on April
AT,Fiu;i) hoMi'/r-r
I
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND : SECOND TERM 143
4 1863, but on the very same day they must take possession of Tataraimaka, which they claimed. The action was equivocal on the face of it. Ihe best-laid schemes "gang aft agley," and an lU-laid scheme was almost certain to go awry Ever .. anxious to show strength and assert superiority, (jrey instructed General Cameron to march into the Tatarai- maka and take possession of the district hefore the Waitara was abandoned. It was unfortunate, and it was a fresh fatality. Were the Maoris to be blamed for mis- taking the intentions of the Governor?
One fatality breeds another. In answer to the seizure of Tataraimaka, the Maoris, on May 4, laid an ambuscade between New Plymouth and Tataraimaka, where a number of British officers and soldiers were killed or taken Four days later in hot haste, alarmed at last, the Ministry issued" the long-delayed proclamation. It was too late. The distrust of the Maoris had been thoroughly aroused, not again to be allayed, or not for many years.
The Authorship of the Wan. The responsibility for the outbreak of the war would, then seem to lie on the shoulders of the Ministry. Others, and these among the best-informed, lay all its weight on the Governor. A once well-known colonist, Mr. O. t . Hursthouse, and a former Premier, who latterly occupied the position of Auditor-General, Mr. FitzGerald, uncom- promisingly maintained that it was the Governor's war. Proper efforts, thev asserted, had not been made to arrange terms of peace, and the advance of the army compelled the Maoris to fight with the courage of
despair. ,
We must go back a month or two. On New lear s Day 1863, Grey paid his last friendly visit to Waikato. On January 3 he rode alone to Ngaruawahia. The Maori King, Tawhiao, came to the neighbourhood, but not quite to the place. With the king-maker Grey had a long interview. Other chiefs, who were anxious to avoid war, desired a longer interview. A great Native
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meeting was arranged. It was not held. ''Tired and nnwell," in fact, feeling that his mission had failed, Grey returned to Auckland, on the pretext of public business. We are reminded of the fictitious telegram that Ruskin had arranged should be sent to him when he went on a visit at Hawarden, expecting to find the company of the Grand Old Man unendurable. Whether it was business or chagrin, or the perception that a reconciliation was hope- less, the withdrawal of the Governor rang the knell of peace. The natives resumed their hostile attitude. With the approval of the Governor a British force occupied the Waikato. War was henceforth inevitable.
One last opportunity of making peace was granted. In December of the same year General Cameron was advanc- ing inwards to the heart of the Waikato. Recognising the importance of the position, as the king's headquarters, he urged that Ngaruawahia should be occupied. The Ministers pressed the Governor to accompany or precede the General and offer the Maoris terms of peace. The Governor expressed his willingness, and he was possibly sincere, for he was a true lover of peace. But the Ministers insisted on accompanying the Governor, and to this he refused to consent. Neither would yield, and the mission never came off. Another and a last chance of making peace sped into the limbo of unfulfilled possibilities.
A few days later, on December 18, Grey issued a memorandum explaining that he could not, as Governor, have made overtures to the Maoris, who might not have accepted them, when the odium of failure would have fallen on the Governor. It was an illogical inference and applied far more to a mission without Ministers than with them. Perhaps we should recall our assertion of his sincerity. His principle all through life was to treat only with a vanquished enemy, and he may have been determined to defeat the Maoris before he would negotiate with them. Fox affirms in his book on the war that, if Grey had accepted the mission proposed to him by his Ministers, peace would have been made. Many months afterwards, in a despatch, Grey denied the assertions of
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: SECOND TERM 145
FitzGerald and Fox, and, thirty years later still, instruct- ing Mr. Rees, he repeated the denial. Well-informed Maori chiefs affirm that, after the taking of Rangiriri, the making of peace was impossible. "Fire had been set to the fern," said a chief, and it is all too probable that, the passions of the natives having been kindled, there was no other issue than the disastrous war that ended in the total subjugation of the Maori race and the confiscation of great part of their territory.
The Condominium.
On one score Grey was assuredly in the wrong, and his Ministers as certainly in the right. He desired to negotiate alone with the Maoris. He would have acted unconstitutionally if he had. A great change had taken place in the Governor's relations with the Maoris in the previous year. Wlien the constitution had been brought into operation, the administration of Native affairs was left in the hands of the Governor, as representing the Imperial Government. This reservation was undoubtedly made to restrain the rapacity of the colonists. The Secretary of State could control his own appointee and representative ; he could not control a colonial legislature. After seven or eight years' trial the condominium had proved a failure. Accounts again vary respecting the manner of the devolution. Sir Charles Adderley asserts that Grey insisted on the necessity of retaining his con- trol of Native affairs, and this best consists with our knowledge of his character. Mr. Rusden on the other hand afiSrms that Grey himself proposed to his Ministers to surrender his autocracy. A series of conflicts ensued. We might think that Ministers would gladly accept com- plete control of the Native race, realising all the power that such control would give. But they also realised that greater responsibility would involve a larger expenditure; and the Imperial Government would not even then relin- quish the right of vetoing distasteful or oppressive measures. In 1862 the Fox Ministry was defeated in attempting to maintain the separate system of Native guardianship, and the Domett-Bell Ministry succeeded
146 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
to carry it out. For the Duke of Newcastle had cut the Gordian knot by pronouncing that the attempt to administer Native affairs by the Imperial Government had been "a shadow of responsibility without any beneficial exercise of power." An Imperial Act empowered the Colonial Legislature to repeal the 73rd section of the Constitution Act, and Ministers took over the department of Native Affairs. The Ministry had now "a clear title to guide and influence deliberations that might have peace or war for their issue. The Ministers were therefore in the right to insist on being present with the Governor at Ngaruawahia when he dis- cussed the terms of a possible peace. He could not act but on the advice of his Ministers. Grey's contention was untenable, and the results of the refusal to open negotiations therefore rest on his shoulders.
Onakau.
Guerilla wars have no history, and the war in the Waikato was a guerilla war. It had its picturesque features and varying fortunes. The Maoris fought with the desperate bravery of men defending their national existence, and the English too often with the lack of skill usually shown in bush warfare. One particular passage- at-arms has evoked the unstinted admiration even of unfriendly historians and has been enshrined in not unworthy verse. The siege of Orakau stands out as one of the most heroic incidents in the war. A chief of the Maniopoto, Rewi (the Maori transliteration of Levi), short, wiry, and fiery, held the pah with some three or four hundred Maoris, women and children included. It was besieged by a British force of 1,250 men, consisting of artillery armed with Armstrong guns, infantry, and militia. Every natural advantage had been used with the science of a Vauban to make it impregnable- Gabions and sap-rollers, earthworks with flank defences, deep ditches, posts and rails, all concealed from view behind flax bushes, trees and high ferns, enabled the small garrison to resist many assaults. Hand-grenades and shells poured from the heavy guns had no effect. At last
GOVERNOR OF NEW ZEALAND: SECOND TERM 147
the situation grew untenable while the fortification was still unbroached. The water supply of the garrison was exhausted, and they had little food left. Their ammuni- tion was almost spent. Still they had no thought of yielding. Summoned to surrender, the heroic leader answered in a single repeated memorable word : ake, ake, ake! Never, never, never! His word was kept to the letter. They sang a hymn to the Christian God, who seemed to have deserted them. Then, as if by a sudden revulsion of feeling, they flung back to their old beliefs and the gods they had deserted, and shouted a frenzied karakia, or imprecation on their enemies. Finally, in broad daylight, and in the face of the foe, all the occupants of the pah marched out in a solid column, the greater chiefs and the women and children in the centre. They were hotly fired on, yet with some restraint arising from the respect felt for such a deed, but succeeded in making their way to a place of safety. "Does ancient or modern history," asks Sir W. Fox, "or even our own rough island story, record anything more heroic?" Twenty years later the writer was present when the poem composed by Thomas Bracken, immortalising the event, and marked by the ringing refrain, ''ake," etc., was shown to Rewi, now loyal to the bone and a pensioner, but no unmanly exultation betrayed itself at the pointed reminder. An hour or two before in the great drawing- room of Sir George Grey's mansion at Kawau, Rewi had sternly arraigned the Maori king, Tawhiao, who sat beside him, accused him of giving way to intemperate habits, and threatened him, unless he could overcome these, with the total failure of his projected mission to England. It was a striking scene. "He is a man," said Sir George Grey, "to whom life is a reality."
The Werei*oa Pah.
Grey's first term in New Zealand was adorned by a striking incident where he personally figured to advant- age— the capture of Ruapekapeka ; his second term there was brightened by a similar episode — the capture of an equally fortified pah, that of Wereroa. It was an unfailing
148 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
theme of his conversation; it figures in Mr. Rees's biography as Grey told it ; and it was evidently a source of inward pride to the old Governor. Things did not happen quite as Grey narrated, and Professor Henderson has rendered a service in telling the ''true story" of the incident, which a British officer, some years ago, had previously set in its true light.
Away down near the south-west coast of the North Island, at the confluence of two rivers, stood the historic fortress of Wereroa. There, perceiving with a military eye the strength of the situation, the Maoris had entrenched themselves as strongly as once at Ruapeka and (under Rangihaeata) near the Hutt. Esteeming it **the centre and focus of disaffection," the Governor and the Ministers (for once in agreement) deemed it important that the pah should be taken. The English general, Sir Duncan Cameron, believing that it could not be captured with the force under his command, and asking for 2,000 additional troops, on his march westwards passed it by. His decision excited so much dissatisfac- tion that the Governor determined to attack the fortress himself. Gathering a small force of less than 500 militia, he quickly marched across country from Wellington to the Wanganui River. Arriving in front of the pah, he did not at once show fight. On the contrary, he used all his powers of suasion to induce the garrison to sur- render. He nearly succeeded. The chief in command of the pah came out when Grey appeared, and invited him to take possession of it. As it proved, the chief did not represent an undivided garrison. An irreconcilable and stronger section broke away from his leadership, threatened to kill the Governor, who was shielded by the chief, and determined to fight on.
Grey soon discerned the vulnerable part of the Maori Gibraltar. Impregnable on two sides of its triangular formation, it was commanded in the rear by a tongue of land. He promptly sent a strong party to capture the eminence. On a Thursday at midnight the storming party started, misleading the Maoris by leaving their tents standing in face of the pah. They dauntlessly
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plunged into the forest, guided by a young Maori, who curiously bore the name of the Governor, (Hori Kerei, or George Grey), and, emerging on the heights in the rear, by dawn on Friday they had taken the outworks and captured some 50 natives. Realising that they had been outwitted, the garrison evacuated the pah by that back-door which was made in all Maori fortifications, and the colonial troops entered the fort on Saturday. Not a man had fallen in this bloodless victory. The Governor might well crow over the General, and he con- tinued to crow for the rest of his days.
It was a meritorious exploit, and almost deserved the eulogies it received from friend and foe. Almost, but not quite. It must be said, in defence of Cameron, whose soldierly courage had never been questioned, that he pro- fessed to be willing to attack the pah, with or without reinforcements, if the Governor required him to do it. This the Governor refrained from requiring in set terms, but it is plain that he expected the General to attack the fortress. All that Cameron asserted was that, if it could be taken at all, it could be taken only at a ruinous loss. Next, the fighting power of the garrison had weakened since he passed it by; the garrison was now torn bj^ internal dissensions, and its commander was in favour of surrendering the pah. Again, Cameron hoped to compel the garrison to yield without fighting by cutting off their supplies; the heroic defence of Orakau and the Gate Pah had taught him at what cost such rude fortresses are taken by storm. Lastly, the taking of the Wereroa pah was nothing like so important as was alleged. As a matter of fact, its capture had absolutely no effect on the progress of the war. All this being ungrudgingly admitted, it none the less casts a grave shadow on the military capacity of General Cameron that he should have failed to discover how the fortress could be taken without being stormed. He was evidently no strategist. Grey on the other hand, was all that Cameron was not, and if his triumph was marred in a military sense, while it was purified in a moral sense, by its being an easy victory, it is certain or probable that he
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would still have won, had the defence been more obstinately maintained. Wereroa is now the site of a State experimental farm.
Gi*ey and Cameron.
The incident led to a breach of the friendly relations between the Governor and the General. Sir W. Fox wittily observes that a correspondence which began with the familiar form of address, ''My dear CAMERON," on one side and * ' My dear GREY, ' ' on the other, wound up sternly with ''SIR" on both sides. From this moment the General grew ever more opposed to the war he reluctantly carried on, while the Governor grew ever- more in sympathy with the colonists who carried it on. And when Cameron plainly said, on being sent to conduct hostilities at Wanganui, that it was being carried on in the selfish interests of self-seeking colonists, who had cast greedy eyes on the Native lands. Grey bluntly expressed the opinion that the Colony would do better if the English troops were sent out of it. In a despatch he even formally advised that the troops should be withdrawn, and that in their place an Imperial guarantee should be given for a three-million loan, or else that a Parliamentary grant (Grey's chief instrument at all times) should be made for three or five years. The judicious Cardwell point- blank refused to sanction either loan or grant. An angry correspondence ensued, and the Ministry, at the end of its resources, resigned.
Separation of Civil and Military.
That was not the only issue of the quarrel between the Governor and the General. The Colonial Office intervened to define and limit the prerogatives of the Governor. In 1865 the Department laid it down that a Governor, though Captain-General and Commander-in-Chief by the patent of his office, "is not entitled to take the immediate direc- tion of any military operation." In the following year, standing by his colleague at the War Office, Lord Carnarvon, who had succeeded the Duke of Newcastle
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at the Colonial OflSce, instrncted the Governor that he was not at liberty to exercise control over the movements of the troops. As proud as a savage chief, Grey keenly felt the indignity that was put upon him. His reply was not unworthy of himself. While deeply feeling the disgrace of such a reprimand and such a rule, he would make it his "pride to serve the Queen in disgrace as in prosperity." He argued against the adoption of the rule, and his contention was supported by the Duke of Cambridge in the House of Lords in July, 1867. The Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief magnanimously held that "no more dangerous step could be taken," and he laid it down as a principle that "the military authori- ties must and ought to be subject to the civil." We are not surprised that, in this conflict of authorities, the Governor was threatened with removal.
Two Policies.
The development of the topic has, however, led us to anticipate the course of events. The virtual rupture o| Grey's relations with Cameron brought him more intd harmony with his Ministers. He claimed, or his official biographer claims for him, that, during his second governorship in New Zealand, he was in more har- monious relations with his Ministers than with the Colonial Office. It is a very bad account of his relations with the Colonial Office. During at least one-half of his second governorship he was on almost the worst possible terms with his Ministers. In one chief department which absorbed all others — that of Native affairs — he was cer- tainly not continuously in harmony with his Ministers, and for the greater part of the time he was in general agreement with the Seoetary for the Colonies. The disagreement was no accident, and it concerned principles, not details. For a period of thirty years, almost from the granting of representative institutions in 1854 till 1884, the New Zealand Ministry, save at rare and brief inter- vals, was strongly anti-Maori. The conflicts and collisions on this line between the Governor and his Ministers were incessant. They stood for two different causes — the one
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for the preservation of an indigenous race, the other for the expansion of a young immigrant community. They could not but collide ; collision, was in fact, their chronic state. On the Governor's side there were abundant con- sideration and conciliation, the weapons of one whom real force had deserted. On the other, the forms of reverence, too often accompanied by the reality of dis- respect. His Ministers led him into error, inducing him to issue instructions he disagreed with, and he had some- times to thank subordinates for revealing the real object of them. They kept him in the dark about their purposes and even about their doings. They then suddenly called upon him, as in connection with the change of the seat of government, to do things requiring deliberation. They suppressed despatches from the Secretary for the Colonies that were favourable to him and unfavourable to them. He must at times have thought that they exhausted the forms of irritation and annoyance with no other object than to persecute him out of his office. Of course, there was no such design, but had he allowed a morbid imagination to play over the facts, as he did in after- years, he might have been maddened by a multitude of acts that were certainly motived by public principle alone.
Te Oriori.
One of the first occasions on which they came into sharp conflict was over the treatment of some Maori prisoners taken in war. A well-known chief, Te Oriori, was kept in durance by the Ministry. Grey almost pathetically pleaded with the Ministers to release the chief on parole, as he had himself released Te Rauparaha. He pointed to the character of Te Oriori, who had on several occasions acted nobly by the colonists. He spoke of the effect the imprisonment of so great a chief would have in prolonging the war. He told how he ''had done his utmost at all times to promote the views of his Ministers, and wished to show that on a point where he felt so strongly a responsibility really rested on him, which gave him a strong claim on their consideration, which he hoped they would yet
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recognise. ' ' It was all seemingly in vain. Ministers would not yield. They even flung in his face his treatment of Eauparaha as a parallel that justified their own action. Grey reported the incident to the Secretary of State, the firm and judicious Cardwell, who thoroughly approved of the stand the Governor had taken. The Governor, that great official held, was empowered to decide on the fate of prisoners of war without the concurrence of his Ministers. It was for him to determine what course should be taken. He should be fully prepared to support Grey, should the Governor decide to take action at variance with the opinions of his Ministers. And when the Governor asserted that he owed a high responsibility to the people of England, who were supplying the troops which were suppressing the rebellion, the Secretary informed him that he rightly interpreted his position. ''Your responsibility to the Crown," he stated, "is paramount." Yet Grey did not and could not release Te Oriori, who was a prisoner in the hands of the Government, not of the Governor. Ministers themselves solved the problem by secretly releasing their prisoner on parole. It seemed a triumph for the Governor, but it was also a humiliation. The Ministry had not the grace even to inform the Governor of their action. It was a propos of this incident that Fox refused to publish Cardwell's despatches.
Confiscation.
That was an episode, but it revealed a mere crack in the relations between the Governor and his Ministers. A far larger question opened up a deep fissure that threatened to yawn into an impassable gulf. Grey was not from the first intractable. Two bills were passed through both Houses — the Suppression of the Rebellion Act, and the New Zealand Settlements Act — which Sir John Richardson, afterwards Speaker of the Legislative Council, described as "savouring of the darkest periods of legislation, ' ' and which Sir Frederick Weld, afterwards Premier of New Zealand, denounced as "unconstitu- tional and tyrannical." The first was Draconian, and
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the second provided for a measure of confiscation of Native lands as a consequence of the war. The extent of land to be confiscated was left indefinite, and Grey made no difficulty in giving the Royal Assent in December, 1863, to both Acts. They appeared in a different light to the incorruptible Sir William Martin, now retired from the Bench. The old Chief-Justice wrote and this time published, in November, 1863, a pamphlet where he said that the proposals of the New Zealand Government had aroused in him "a feeling of sorrow, if not of shame," and Grey, forgetting that, sixteen years before, Sir William had loyally stood by him, attacked his old com- rade-in-arms. He feared that Martin's Observations ''might be misunderstood by persons at a distance," and he assured the Duke of Newcastle, in transmitting the Acts, that he would see to it that the confiscation was "not carried too far." The sequel throws a lurid light on the assurance.
The battle raged on this line all through 1864. The Duke of Newcastle had reluctantly assented to the pro- posed measure of confiscation on the strength of Grey's assurance that it was to be kept within reasonable limits. His successor, Mr. Cardwell, was less pliable. He agreed to a measure of confiscation only because none could be carried out without Grey's concurrence. He relied on Grey's "sagacity, firmness, and experience" and on his "long-recognised regard, as well for the interests of the colonists as for the fair rights and expectations of the Maori race. ' ' The greater part of the cost of sup- pressing the rebellion had been borne by the Motherland,, which had therefore, as represented by the Governor, a right to a deciding voice on such a question. He laid down large principles and deduced from them a law of modera- tion regarding the amount of confiscation that would be consonant with natural equity. The Ministry was not prepared to listen to counsels of moderation. They affirmed that 3,000 colonists had taken service on the understanding that they would be assigned farms scooped out of the confiscated land, and they said that they intended to enrol 20,000 men, who would all of them be
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settled as military pensioners. The wranglings and bickerings between the Governor and his Ministers were incessant. A violent scene took place one day, May 28, 1864, in the Executive Council. Grey then positively refused to issue certain Orders in Council, relating to proclaimed districts, till he had definitely ascertained what extent of land the Ministry proposed to confiscate.
On the demand of the Governor the Ministers stated the extent of the confiscation they proposed. They craved territory enough to defray the war expenditure and provide for military settlements. Once Grey had definitely ascertained that it would amount to eight millions of acres, he unhesitatingly opposed it. He resisted it as ''contrary to law and equity, contrary to his duty to the Imperial Government, and not in accord- ance with the responsibilities imposed by the presence and aid of the British forces and the expenditure of large sums of British money. ' ' He would not drive a nation to despair. He drafted a proclamation, offering a free and absolute pardon to all Maoris who surrendered, took an oath of allegiance, and made such cessions of land as the Governor and the General (not the Ministry, it will be observed) approved. Should Ministers refuse to acquiesce, he would adhere to his intention of issuing the proclamation. His decision excited the wrath of the Colonial Ministry. Hostile and angry communications passed between the Ministry and the Governor. It rained minutes and memorandums. A witty ex-Minister said they were living under a Memorandummiad ; the historian describes it as a slough of despond. The Secretary of State supported the Governor, urging him to act on his own judgment. With this force at his back the Governor felt strong enough to defy his Ministry. "A just, satis- factory, and permanent peace has been indefinitely postponed by the vacillation and indecision of his Excellency. ' ' So wrote Attorney-General Whitaker, and with this Parthian arrow the Ministry passed away.
It was succeeded by a Ministry with Sir Frederick Weld as Premier. Suddenly, the Governoi showed him- self unexpectedly pliable. He had always held a high
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opinion of Weld, who belonged to an old English Catholic family, and had something of the manners that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere. In 1876, when Grey was an unofficial legislator, he warmly eulogised Weld. He was now willing to do for Weld what he refused to do for Fox or Whitaker. On December 17, 1864, he issued a pro- clamation confiscating "all the lands in the Waikato taken by the Queen's forces," and all lands north of a certain boimdary line, practically the whole of the Waikato plain. As Mr. Rusden wittily says, the Governor's conscience had stretched from Ngaruawahia to Raglan. In 1867 General Peel left the Disraeli Ministry because there was nothing so elastic as the con- science of a cabinet Minister. Only three years earlier he might have found that there was one thing more elastic still — the conscience of a colonial Governor.
An Armed Truce.
The war was struggling to its close. The Maoris writhed in the toils of the troops like Laocoon and his sons in the folds of the serpents. They never had the smallest chance. More than seventeen years had passed since Grey had informed the Colonial Office of the com- parative increasing strength of the colonists and the increasing unlikelihood of a successful rising on the part of the Maoris. They had risen, but they had been every- where defeated. Their brave fight and flight at Orakau — the fight and the flight of the lion — were considered to be their last stand. After the capture of Wereroa the war was held to be virtually at an end. The campaign in the Waikato was deemed to be brought to an end by the Maoris' evacuation of Maungatautari in April, 1864, and leading chiefs — the indomitable Rewi, the Christian Waharoa, and others desired that the war should be con- sidered as being at an end. In anticipation of its ending, on September 2, 1865, the Governor gratified the confis- cationists by annexing large blocks of specified lands belonging to the Ngatiawa and Ngatiuranui tribes, which were to be duly set apart as eligible sites for colonisation. Yet, in a proclamation declaring the war
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at an end, the Governor stated that he would respect the lands of all the loyalists and restore those that had been taken from them, Tvhile commissioners would be sent to place them in possession. We read with profound regret--- that these and other repeated promises remained unful- filled. Awards solemnly made in the new Native land courts were never carried into effect.
A Disagreeable IncEdent.
Proclamations might declare the war at an end, but the troops were still kept on a war footing. General ^Chute marched down the west coast storming and destroying the pahs. Indeed, some of its ugliest incidents were still to excite horror on one side and simulated indignation on the other. An English officer on duty with the troops in New Zealand— Colonel Weare— wrote letters to his brother in England, a clergyman, denounc- ing the war as being conducted in a " degrading and brutalising manner," asserting the greed of the colonists for land as its sole end, and attributing the barbarities that were committed to the wish of the colonial Govern- ment to have no prisoners. He gave a specific instance. He told how a Maori prisoner of war had been butchered without a trial by order of the General, and as a death- sentence could be carried out only after it had been approved by the Governor, the charge against the General was equivalent to a charge against the Governor. The accusations were communicated to Grey by Mr. Card- well, now Secretary for War, in a despatch marked, *' confidential." Grey ignored the superscription, flouted the Secretary, and laid the confidential despatch before his Ministers, who were as deeply compromised as the Governor himself. With the Ministry at his back. Grey passionately retorted the shameful accusations, which Weare afterwards withdrew, and demanded an inquiry. Cardwell was indignant at the breach of confidence and induced his colleagues likewise to regard the breaking of the seal as an offence against official, if not personal, honour. Never was Grey forgiven. His successor. Sir George Bowen, was twice guilty of a similar breach of
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confidence, but he, a lighter nature, was let off with a reprimand. His offence was venial; Grey's sin was mortal and unto death — official death. Vainly did he solicit an inquiry into charges backed with so little weight of authority. It was refused by Lord Carnarvon in 1867 and by his successor, the Duke of Buckingham, in 1868. He was condemned without trial, and the condemnation was fatal — fatal to the official and fatal to the man.
Open Defiance.
The measure of his offences was now complete and the cup of indignation brewed at the Colonial Office full to overflowing. In July, 1867, his old enemy, the Earl of Carnarvon, took the extraordinary course of attacking his own subordinate in his absence and in a chamber where, if he had been present, he could not have defended himself. The pretext was that Grey had kept him in ignorance of things happening in New Zealand that he had a right to know. The charge was amazing. When he had been first appointed to the governorship of New Zealand, Lord Stanley instructed him to keep the Home Government in constant touch with the Colony by the writing of frequent despatches. He did not need the injunction. In every colony where he had resided he had been, of all Governors, the most copious despatch- writer. His despatches from New Zealand in particular are little less than a history of the colony from his own point of view. If he did not write voluminous despatches to Lord Carnarvon, it may have been that he bitterly remembered how he had been recalled from South Africa at his lordship's instance. But it is more probable that he did not narrate certain events because he did not believe that those events had happened. He had not done the things he was charged with, and therefore he could not say that he had done them. The earl, it seems, had the grace to apologise, and, in any case, it was less a definite charge that he made, than an outbreak of old resentment or distrust. That was in July, 1867. Grey's anger at last boiled up and boiled over. Four months later he wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, the new
GOVERiSrOR OF NEW ZEALAND: SECOND TERM 159
Colonial Minister, in terms where his passion is hardly veiled. If the Colonial Office required of him blind acquiescence in their behests, he for his part owed it no obedience, but only owed his duty to the Queen and the Empire. He had a right to withstand those who had committed violent acts or supported others in doing them. And he would show that he had a will as strong as their own, recking nought of consequences. All was now said. He had flung down a gage of defiance. If it had any self-respect at all, the Colonial Office could not but accept the haughty challenge.
His Virtual Recall.
The great department was not slow to take up the gage of battle. Grey had once been its pride and fondling. It freely and without solicitation gave him one high and responsible post after another. Long before he had reached middle age, and while he was still young in its service, it bestowed on him one of its highest distinctions. In its hours of difficulty and danger it fell back upon him when others of its servants failed it. It destined him for the most exalted position in its gift. It lavished praise on him in despatches, in Parliament, and in semi- official treatises. It permitted him to do what it condemned and recalled other Governors for doing. It meekly accepted snubs at his hands. It pardoned rebel- lion. It could not pardon open defiance. In May, 1867, the Duke of Buckingham wound up a general despatch with the offhand announcement that, next time he happened to be writing to the Governor, he would inform him of the name of his successor. It was as if one should conclude an animated conversation with a knock-down blow.
It appears that the assommeur was not the Duke. He afterwards, when Grey visited him in Loudon, disclaimed all knowledge of the insult and all intention of giving offence. The despatch was written (as we know, from the biographies and autobiographies of high officers of the Department, that such despatches are commonly written) by a clerk m the Colonial Office. None the less,
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it bore the signature of the Minister and carried all the weight of his authority. It was not formally a recall. The Governor's six years' term was up, and the despatch simply drew his attention to the fact. The Colonial Office denied that it was a recall. Yet it appeared to him- self in that light, and it was accepted as such by Ministers and throughout the Colony.
A recall it practically was. At his age, in the prime of his strength, with more than twenty years of active service ahead of him, and not yet qualified for a pension, he would have naturally been appointed to another governorship. No other was offered or mentioned. He might have been sent to more populous Australian colonies, such as Victoria or New South Wales. The governor-generalship of Canada might once more have been dangled before his eyes. He might have claimed, as it is understood that Governors are permitted to do, a year's additional service in New Zealand. Of all or any of this, not a word. He would be informed of the designation of his successor — and the rest was silence- He was at Queenstown, on Lake Wakatipu, when the obnoxious despatch was received, and the news, which he made no attempt to disguise or withhold spread like wild- fire. The shock was great. His pride, his self-consequence were deeply wounded. When he was recalled from the Cape, he entered London like a conqueror, knowing that the verdict against him had been already reversed, and he treated the matter jovially. It was far otherwise now. He was unceremoniously called away from a Colony to which he had been twice commissioned in hours of stress and danger. He had been its Governor for periods amounting to fifteen years in all, at first with virtually uncontrolled powers, then with high authority and unequalled prestige, at all times the peer of the greatest in his special vocation — the rule of nascent communities in their relations with barbarous indigenous peoples. He had done great things for them and for the Empire — and this was his reward. ' * The gods declare my recompense this day." Now he was superseded by one who was scholarly and cultured indeed, but did not possess a tithe
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of his governing force. He was going Home in disgrace, and he would re-enter London like a condemned male- factor. He appealed to the Queen, whom he believed to be favourably inclined to him, and the appeal was heard. But his Sovereign, who had aided him before in crises of his fate, could no more help him now than Apollo could aid Orestes in the grip of the Furies.
His Departure.
He did not at once return to England. The Executive Council and both chambers of the Legislature passed votes of respectful sympathy and eulogized his courage in withstanding the calumnious assailants of the Colony and his devotedness to its interests. The citizens of Wellington organized a grand send-off in the harbour on the day appointed for his departure. By one of those pei*versities that so often did him wrong, though he seemed more on his guard against them than other men, he refused to take part in the demonstration. Instead of letting himself be triumphantly escorted to the steamer by a flotilla, he took refuge, of all places, in the house of an ofiScer of the Treasury, who ever after spoke of the act as the proudest distinction of his life. There, in his bor- rowed tent, Achilles sulked till ''the tumult and the shouting" died away. Then, in the dark he skulked on board of the ship that conveyed him to Auckland, en route for his hermit-island of Kawau, where he lay perdu till the hour of parting struck. Once he emerged. A public banquet was given in Auckland in his honour, and his successor. Sir George Bowen, who had arrived from Queensland to take over the reins of government, as if he were going to do something that required apology, somewhat defiantly informed the Colonial Office that he intended to be present on the occasion. The devolution of office should have been no more melancholy than the handing over of authority by the retiring to the incoming president at Washington, when the ceremony takes place in the presence of a crowd; but the circumstances made it tragic. It was the last public dinner he ever attended, or the last but one. Twenty-six years later he declined
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162 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
a banquet given in his honour by the Colonial Office in London, accepting a luncheon instead. In February, 1868, he shook the dust of the Colony off his feet, doubt- less inwardly resolving that he would never again set eyes on it. After vainly offering the Colonial Govern- ment his mediation with the rebel guerilla chief, Titoko- waru, he set sail for England to seek justice at the hands of the British Government for the foul wrongs he believed it had done him, to solicit further employment if he could not have that, and to wreak his revenge upon it if he could have neither. He was to have neither. He was never again to be employed by the Colonial Office, and the only justice he was ever to receive from it, save the barren honour of a public entertainment, was a tomb in St. Paul's.
Chapter XXII.
AN ENGLISH PROXENOS.
Thirteen thousand miles away from it, Grey remained the friend of the Colony in which he had spent the greater part of his days. He might well have been appointed Agent-General or High Commissioner for it in London, and it is known that in later years he would have accepted the office, which was created in 1870; but the interests of colonial politicians had to be regarded, and perhaps he was distrusted by Ministers, while he might not have been a persona grata at the Colonial Office. He was to act like a Greek proxenos, keeping watch and ward over its relations with the Motherland, as Rudyard Kipling professed to sit on the boimdary of Maine like the watch-dog of the British Empire. As there were once volunteer laureates in England, Grey was for a brief space, before the office had been created, a volunteer Agent-General. He was the intermediary between the colonists and the Colonial Office, but he failed to avert the total withdrawal of the troops from New Zealand. Yet once he was to render it a signal service.
Te Kooti.
Evidently inspired by Grey, Mr. Rees tells a strange story that is authenticated by the source from which it comes. An irreconcilable Maori chief, Te Kooti Riki- rangi by name, had risen in rebellion. It is proved, and it was known, that he had fought on the side of the colonists in the Waikato war. His reward was that he was transported to the Chatham Islands, with the prospect of being interned there for an indefinite time. Indignation at his ill-usage led him, as indignation against the colonists led so many of his couutiymen, to revolt against Christianity and found a new religious
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sect, whicli was suppressed. Resenting his slavery, he and his followers seized a ship that lay in the harbonr, and compelled the officers to navigate it to New Zealand. There, on the east coast, at Poverty Bay, near his old haunts, he landed in force, and for months he led the colonial troops and their Native allies a dance. Four months after he had landed he swooped down on the English settlement at Gisborne and massacred a large number of its population. A thrill of horror went through the Colony. A still greater danger threatened it on the west coast, where Titokowaru was on the war-path. The colonists were terror-stricken and dreaded a rising of all the Hau-Hau tribes. A reward of £1,000 was offered for the body of Te Kooti, dead or alive. The Governor and the Premier appealed for aid to the loyal Maoris. Yet at this very time the British Ministry was finally with- drawing its last regiments. Lord Granville scornfully asked the colonial Ministry whether it was not exaggerat- ing the magnitude of the danger. He had good grounds for his scorn. It is now proved that there were never more than 2,000 Maoris under arms, and there were 220,000 colonists. Where was the need of Imperial aid? The panic at length spread to the Colonial Office and the English Ministry, which then conceived an extraordinary design. Speaking through Mr. Rees, Grey revealed — presumably, for the first time — the plan of the Ministry for settling the affairs of New Zealand. A proposal, definitely formulated and drawn out in detail, was laid before the Cabinet— probably, by the Secretary for the Colonies. It provided that constitutional government should be provisionally withdrawn from New Zealand, and that General Gordon, who afterwards acquired a tragic fame as the Egyptian victim of the Gladstone Ministry, should be appointed dictator, like an ancient Roman, with absolute powers. The proposal was by no means so outrageous as it now seems. One half of it, at least — nay, both halves — had been publicly advocated, and by persons in authority within the Colony itself. A high legislative officer, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, openly advised that the constitution
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should be suspended in the North Island, proposed that the Home Government be asked to resume the control of Native affairs, and held that the North Island should be governed by an Imperial Commission. The Superin- tendent (elective governor) of the province of Otago spoke to the same effect. The policy of self-reliance, he asserted, had failed. All wars with the Maoris were matters of Imperial concern. Mr. Justice Richmond declared that it had become impossible to enforce the law in the North Island. In January, 1869, at a public meet- ing held in Auckland, a petition was adopted, praying for the suspension of the Constitution as demanded by ' ' the evident incapacity of the ' ' local government, and the petition was forwarded by the Governor to the Colonial Office. A petition from Southland (the southern division of Otago) was to the same effect. The Governor weighted the recommendations with his own urgencies. Another Indian mutiny might break out, and massacres like those of Cawnpore and Delhi were to be dreaded.
A Proposed Dictatorship.
In receipt of such alarming statements and prognostics, is the British Government of the day to be blamed if it contemplated the appointment of a dictator? Before it decided, it resolved to take the counsel of the Englishman who knew New Zealand best — of the Governor who knew it supremely well. A military officer was sent to wait upon Sir George Grey and solicit his advice. Sir George prudently asked time to consider the proposal, and mean- while, on this pretext, he cunningly retained the document that had been left with him. He condemned the scheme. Colonists who had for a decade and a half enjoyed representative institutions would never submit to the withdrawal of them and would themselves rise in mutiny at the mere mention of a dictator. By his own account, Grey's opposition to the proposal extinguished it, and it was never heard of again. He carefully preserved the document, however, and it is now in his archives.
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Would Grey himself have accepted the mission which he refused to another? He certainly would. No position on earth would have appealed more magnetically to his ambition — an ambition that had its noble side. He would have gone out once more to New Zealand, but as an ordinary Governor, with extraordinary powers. He would have proclaimed martial law in certain disturbed districts, as he several times did during the Wellington war of 1846 and the Wanganui war of 1847. Had he deemed it necessary, he would not have scrupled to place the whole North Island under martial law — which is, of course, the same thing as suspending the Constitution. Te Kooti would have been captured, as he was. The rebel Maoris would have been conquered, as they easily were. The loyal Maoris would have proved themselves devoted and serviceable, as under Rangihiwinui they did. And the neutral Maoris would have gone over to the winning side. Then the ban would have been removed, and the colony would have become the peaceful com- munity it had long been. And Grey, who knew how to arrogate the credit that should often have redounded to others, would have been deemed the wonder-worker of it all.
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 ances- tors 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
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Carnarvon was then ruler at "the OflSce," and he was neither a Satan nor his ally, but he was implacably con- vinced 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 twentj^ years of administrative and legislative activity ahead of him. The world lay all before him. What path of activity should he choose?
A Piatfopm Oraton.
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. Button gives the substance of a long speech made before the Legislative Council of South Australia about 1844, expounding his land policy. The Wellington /S'^^ec^aior 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 condones ad popuhim 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
IN THE DESERT 169
lifted ; 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 inex- perienced orator held the attention of so choice an audience while he enlarged on the obligation and neces- sity of foreign missions. It was the contention of Max Miiller 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
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moulded 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 b}" 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 emigra- tion 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
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Colony, Kafraria, Natal, and into the Orange State. He had watched yonng and already robust communities grow up in such countries. He had a glowing imagina- tion 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 pos- sessing 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 non- existent, gaols empty. Above all, he lauded the political condition of these happy countries. There reigned perfect equality. There aspiring young men might enter any yjrofession 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 transfoi-mation-scenes revealed by his wonderful lamp? Well might the eloquent s])eaker 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. Re proposed that it should be conducted by the agency of parishes
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and 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 settle- ments, 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 ques- tions, 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 there- fore 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 lord- ship, 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
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obviously 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 ot¥, 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
174 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
of Liberalism in the London daily press, the Daily Neivs. 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 parlia- ment in Ireland, with a single administration,by proposing that there should be four legislatures, with four adminis- trations, 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 con- founding 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 legis- lature 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 inter- vene or vote on matters of purely English, Scottish, or Welsh concernment.
The project met with little notice when it was pub- lished ; public opinion was not yet sufficiently advanced to give it a favourable reception. It had an unmistakable
IN THE DESERT 175
reception 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. Glad- stone, 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 Rule 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 legisla- tors, 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 contenmed 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
176 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE GEEY
he was compromising the party and conscious that he was compromising himself by association with certain Eadical irreconcilables, he resolved on a great sacrifice. As Salinguerra, in Browning's epic, banished himself to Padna, 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 Par- liament. 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 recipro- cated 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 Aus- tralia 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
IN THE DESEET 177
thing. ' ' The letter was sympathetic with Stokes and con- demnatory 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 nodes, if not coenasque, deorum those walks and talks must have been. During his intermittent \'isits 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 conjunc- tion with whom (he veraciously affirmed) he devised the economic doctrine of *Hhe unearned increment." He met with Spencer at the Athenaeum. 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 soiree 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 Athenaeum 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." Oarlyle he saw at Chelsea;
N
178 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
and Carlyle wrote of him, with some exaggeration: "he is born of the Tetragonidae, 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 aflfinity with the then republican. Rhoda B rough- ton 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.
Chapter XXIV.
AT KAWAU.
It had long been the dream of Sir George Grey — which he used to say he shared with Mrs. Browning — to with- draw from the turmoil of public life to a solitary island and there live at peace with himself and the world. In one form or another it is a natural and common aspira- tion. If the days of the years of our pilgrimage are seventy years, should we not treat its last decade as a Sabbatic period and spend it in preparation for the final change! A Scottish legislator, belonging to the historic family of Baillie of Jerviswoode, deliberately forsook the world at sixty and then wore himself out by the intensity of his devotions. The great Dr. Chalmers also looked forward to a seventh decade of Sabbatic rest, but was doomed to spend it amid the turmoil of ecclesiastical strife. Carlyle too dreamt of a closing period of peaceful retirement, but worked on till he was close on seventy, when the oestrus of moral dyspepsia had bitten into his soul and poisoned his last years. Gladstone likewise made strenuous efforts to wrench himself from public life, in order to dedicate himself in seclusion to some lofty task befitting the gathering of the shadows, but was, once and again, rapt up and carried away by the genius of politics. Just so did Grey meditate a complete self- banishment from the world, though he was only approach- ing his sixtieth year and was still in the prime of his powers. Probably with a view to such a closing sabbath he had purchased an estate where he might be as retired as he pleased and yet not too far from such society as he cared to see.
Kawau, or Shag Island, is one of a group of emerald isles that gem the sapphire sea near the head of the Hauraki Gulf. It is a vision of beauty. Rounde<:l
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180 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
masses of low hills contimially open up to the pedestrian wonderful new scenes, as every turn of the steamer on Loch Lomond discloses some enchanting new prospect. The shy deer could be seen flitting to and fro, and on the heights the bounding wallaby and kangaroo were descried. Trees, shrubs, and flowers from every quarter of the globe made it a garden of delights. In this earthly paradise did the disillusioned statesman find the peace that he sought? For one thing, there was never complete retirement. To a succession of visitors the colonial LuGullus extended a hospitality of mind as well as of hearth, and among crowds of excursionists he played the patriarch with unostentatious simplicity. Did he have a single visitor, of any education, he would devote him- self to his guest, hardly ever leaving him to himself, planning excursions for him, walking with him, and above all talking with him. Upon this favoured indi- vidual he would pour forth all the treasures of his mind, all his reminiscences of the past, and all his hopes for the future. Many times over he must have thus talked through his whole past life. There was no incident in his past career that might not come up for narrative or discussion. Such visitors as Froude he completely sub- jugated, and the chapter in Oceana devoted to Sir George is a tribute to his fascination. Baron Hiibner, reputed son of old Metternich, came to see the ex-Governor, and was no less eulogistic. Not of Circe's train assuredly were they, and yet cooler heads or more instructed minds would have judged him differently. Few New Zealanders of any importance visited him there, and he did not wish to see them. He desired to be left to himself.
Such visitors were for the beautiful summer or still finer autumn months, when Kawau looked its loveliest. During the rainy season, when for weeks or sometimes for months it was hardly possible to go out of doors, did he ever undertake the works of erudition we know he at one time contemplated? The materials for some of them had been deposited at the Cape, whereas the man
AT KAWAU 181
who could have used them best, now that Bleek was gone, was held at a distance of 7,000 miles remote from them ; but with a splendid second collection at his elbows, he need not have lacked materials. The requisite gifts and somewhat of the necessary culture were there, but the equally indispensable stimulus was wanting. Though he could speak for three hours at a stretch, and tour the Colony for weeks when fired by a cause, he was incapable of continuous solitary application. Hence, the further translation of legends and myths, the elucidations he could have given (for he saw into the heart of them and severely condemned some of what he deemed John White's perversions of them), and the works of com- parative mythology he might have composed, were never made and never written.
High thoughts doubtless visited the soaring spirit. A drama of his composition, probably produced in those years, has been found among his papers ; it appears to bear traces of his lofty spirit. Light literary sketches show his humour. In those same years were nurtured the principles and springs of action that were to give him a fresh lease of both public and natural life. But darker humours were too often in the ascendant. Ghosts of the past came unbidden — memories of great things done, indeed, but also of insult, humiliation, and defeat. Hypochondria — not that of the wounded spirit or of the dreamer astray in an alien world, but begotten of thwarted ambition and outraged pride — laid her mad- dening fingers upon him in the hot, still sunshine or in the silent watches of the night. Children alone, always loved by the childless man, could scare away the evil spirit. From such vampire-moods he was happily rescued by a welcome summons to action.
Chaptee XXV. LEGISLATOR AND PREMIER.
After losing the battle of Pultava, Charles the Twelfth, of Sweden, lay for three years at Bender, in (what was then) Turkey, sunk in torpor, and "lost to life and use and name and fame." Then, one day, he suddenly woke up, his kingly strength came back to him, and he rode, with hardly an attendant, across snow-covered Europe to the gates of Stralsund. For five years Grey remained in seclusion at Kawau, waiting, or rather kept, as we can now perceive, for an appropriate summons to action. It came at last. The fighting spirit of the old warrior answered the call, and he went forth to battle. As if in tardy recognition of his claims as the creator of the Provincial system, he was elected Superintendent of the province of Auckland. His tenure of the office was not a success. His autocratic habits were incompatible with the position of an elective Lieutenant-Governor, and public men who were well acquainted with the facts positively asserted that he would not have been re-elected, had the occasion arisen. But it was destined never to arise. He had entered the Legislature and was now deeply involved in the conduct of political measures of prime importance.
M.H.R.
He re-entered public life in no half-hearted spirit, but plunged into the thick of it. The same year that saw his election to the Superintendency witnessed his election as a member of the House of Representatives. It was a notable event. The greatest Governor the Colony had known stooped from his viceroyalty to take his seat as an ordinary legislator in the popular chamber of a country which he had once autocratically ruled. The
182
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LEGISLATOR A^^D PEEMIER 18c
event was yet not quite nnprecedented. Half-a-century earlier John Quiney Adams, one of the most distin- guished of American presidents, returned to the legislature where he had once sent messages as a sovereign, and likewise took his seat in the popular cham- ber. Twenty years earlier Grey's greatest rival, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the real founder of the colony of New Zealand, entered the newly-created legislature, and he also sat in the more powerful chamber. Grey was to surpass both Adams and Wakefield in the brilliancy he shed upon the office.
His Attitude.
When a man who has held superior ofiice condescends to fill one of a somewhat lower kind, he may be advised to assume a position of lofty impartiality. Such an attitude was taken by Sir Robert Peel in his closing years. It was scarcely possible for Adams, on fire with abolitionist zeal, or for Wakefield, whose distinctive ideas had been assailed by Grey's legislation, to become ''the acknow- ledged arbiter in public questions and moderator of political dissensions." A sagacious and experienced official — the Clerk of the House of Representatives — counselled Grey to make himself the judicial Nestor of public life in New Zealand. Never for a moment did he intend to pursue — never for an hour was he capable of pursuing — any such policy. If ever such moderation was possible for so imperious a nature under any circum- stances, it was doubly impossible now. The Ministry of the day was bent on destroying that part of the Con- stitution which was pre-eminently his handiwork, if any part of it were his — the Provincial institutions. To the grief of seeing the constitution he had drafted mangled by ill-informed Ministers on the advice of treacherous colonists was to be added the mortification of witnessing the last living relic of it killed. All the pride of a parent in his offspring or of an author in his work, all the anger of an autocrat who saw the creatures of his hands rel)el- ling against their maker, poured itself out in speeches
184 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
of a kind never before heard in a House where the style of public speaking had been much above the average level of that of colonial legislatures.
A Pi^oposed Dichotomy.
Grey sought to avert the event he most dreaded and preclude the complete abolition of the Provinces by pro- posing a modified form of it. He moved a series of resolutions, of which the gist was that, while the Central Government should be retained for matters of general concern, two administrations should be created for the North and South Islands separately. There was much to be said for the proposal. A fundamental opposition between the two islands was created by the dif- ferent distribution of the Maoris. They were spread all over the North Island, at some parts in dense masses; they were but thinly sprinkled over the South. This deep-lying difference was the generating point of a whole series of oppositions that usually placed the public opinion, and consequently the Parliamentary representa- tion, of the two islands in different camps. Wliile the South Island, over the greater part of which the colonists hardly came into contact with the Maoris, was largely philo-Maori, the very differently-situated North Island, where the settlers were almost everywhere at the mercy of the natives, was fanatically anti-Maori. The argument for the bifurcation from this point of view was urged by Grey in two long speeches, spoken on August 3 and 16, 1876 — one filling fifteen, the other sixteen, columns of Hansard, and it was earnestly, passionately, sometimes nobly urged. As always, he was egoist, promenading his own part in the history of the Colony, as when he told how he had himself legislated singly for the Colony by drafting its Constitution. He displayed before the General Assembly "the pageant of his bleeding heart," as when he said that he ' ' would bear the injuries heaped on" him. He was no lamb, and he did not bear them in silence. He referred to "an attack of a grievous kind made on" him "within a few days," and for the first
LEGISLATOR AND PREMIER 185
time he produced an authoritative letter, written years before, that vindicated him against it. He was persistent, and repeatedly on these and other occasions he was called to order by other members or by the Speaker. He made passionate appeals. "The Premier has shown through- out this session a determination to destroy me," he declared. ' ' I stand before the House appealing to it and possibly pleading for my life," cried melodramatically the former Governor of the Colony. He aggrandised the subject by making large allusion to the doings of the Pitts and Addingtons, the Wellingtons and Peels. He exalted the theme by representing the occasion as being the first when an Anglo-Saxon community had enjoyed the privilege of shaping its own constitution. He denounced the existing constitution as "a mutilated and contemptible form of a constitution," though he had just claimed it as his own, and the chief mutilation was the non-elective character of the Legislative Council. He sought to excite dread by declaring it his belief that a war of races was imminent in the Colony and might even now break out. He was still suave in comparison with his later utterances; he asserted that he had "no intention of blaming the Secretary for the Colonies, no desire to offend him. ' ' He was still loyal in a way. ' * We love our Queen," he said, ''and will ever remain loyal to her ; ' ' but he did not love what the Duke of Wellington called "the Queen's Government."
Abolition.
In a like strain he spoke when the bill itself was actually under discussion. His passion and his rhetoric overflowed in Demosthenic orations. What rather detracts from the value of these masterpieces is that, of all the disasters predicted as the consequences of the abolition of the Provinces, not one has come to pass. As territories with semi-sovereign powers the Provinces have been condemned by history, while they naturally survive as administrative units. He did not content him- self with oratory or stop with appeals. Stretching his
186 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
rights and presuming on his position and his past, he telegraphed to the Secretary of State, urging him to dis- allow the Act. Needless to say, he was not listened to. He could not avert the fate of his beloved Provinces, but he helped to precipitate the doom that awaits all destroyers. The abolitionists were themselves abolished, and Grey, with a band of young and able adherents, known as ''Greyhounds," entered into their places.
A Grey Ministry.
Like the British constitution, the new Ministry was not made, but grew. On October 8, 1877, a motion expressing want of confidence in the Government was moved by Mr. Larnach and was carried. As is the rule, Mr. Larnach was invited by the Governor, the Marquis of Normanby, to form a Ministry. He never made the attempt. Having been put forward by the Provincial party, of which Grey was the real leader, he at once gave way to his chief, who proceeded to select colleagues. On October 15 Grey stated in the House that he had been appointed Premier, and that he had also assumed the position of Colonial Secretary and Commissioner of Customs. He then made a declaration of the Ministerial policy. The Ministry was still unstable, and a few days later he announced its reconstruction. He had dropped the office of Colonial Secretary, but retained that of Commissioner of Customs. A few months afterwards the shifting, but not yet shiftless, cabinet was again reconstructed, and it was made more representative of the strength of the party by the inclusion of two new and strong Ministers. The good and kind, if also self- important, Mr. Ballance was appointed Colonial Trea- surer, and the Herculean energy of Robert Stout found the cumulative offices of Attorney-General, Minister of Lands, and Minister of Education, in addition to his private practice as a lawyer, mere child's play.
Grey's entry into office was a dramatic event. He had been High Commissioner, Governor-in-Chief, Lieutenant- Governor; finally, he was Premier. He had it now — ''king, Cawdor, Glamis, all," and most honourably had
LEGISLATOR AND PREMIER 187
he played for it. What will he do with it? asked the Colony, still admiring, reverential, trustful. He soon showed what he would do with it. For thirty years he had had a feud with the landed monopolists. He had quarrelled with the New Zealand Company and contended against the Canterbury Association ostensibly because they had sought to exclude the poorer settlers from the soil. He had fought a stout battle with worldly-minded missionaries who had "bought" land from the natives at a rate per acre sometimes below the price of an old song. He now told the great landowners that if they would keep their wide pastoral tracts, they should pay for them: he imposed a tax to confiscate the "unearned increment." Nor would he allow them to keep their domains unconditionally. He introduced a measure authorising the State to acquire by amicable treaty or compulsory appropriation, possession of such private lands as might seem suited for settlement. He further showed his democratic spirit by altering the incidence of taxation. Declaring that the tax-gatherer should no longer enter the homes of the poor, he emulated the reforms of Peel and Gladstone by repealing the cus- toms duties on 43 articles, including such necessaries of life as tea and coffee. All his life temperate, though never an abstainer, he would not, however, encourage drinking-habits in the working-classes, and he proposed a duty of a penny-halfpenny on beer. As a mate to his land-tax, he founded an income-tax by taxing the incomes of corporations and companies. He crowned his financial reforms by bringing forward bills to enact manhood suf- frage, with the single vote, to redistribute seats on a population basis, and to create triennial parliaments.
Grey thus laid the chief planks of the so-called Liberal platform. Unfortunately for him and his policy, his Ministry lacked driving force. It could not even carry so reasonable a measure as the proposed beer-tax. Grey showed his intractableness by refusing to accept the electoral bill which the Legislative Council had, as he believed, emasculated by rejecting the clauses enfranchis-
ing the Maoris.
188 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE GREY
To complicate the situation, a wave of commercial depression swept over the Colony. The Government was in no way responsible for the calamity, which none the less brought discredit upon it. By just such ' ' accidents ' ' had the reforming measures of the great Turgot and the Russian dictator, Loris Melikoif, been defeated. The land revenue on which Grey relied fell off. The unem- ployed were mutinous, and they blamed the Government. The very supporters of the Government maintained that the Colony was in an unsound financial position.
His Ministers abandoned their chief. The Attorney- General retired in consequence of the ill-health of his law-partner. With Ballance, the least quarrelsome of men, Grey, the most quarrelsome, unfortunately quar- relled. Ballance, who had a strong sense of personal dignity, resigned. Ever afterwards Grey spoke of him with bitterness. These two able men gone, Grey was left to fight the battle of his policy single-handed. He fought splendidly, but his small fluctuating majority had for- saken him. He asked the Governor, the Marquis of Normanby, for leave to dissolve the House, and it was refused. Hence his implacable enmity against Lord Normanby, which, years afterwards, took every form of insult and mockery. "He treated Lord Normanby brutally," said one of Normanby 's successors. Sir William Jervois, to the writer. At a meeting of the Executive Council "he shook his fist at me," Lord Nor- manby told Major Campbell, long the able Clerk of the House of Eepresentatives. And when Normanby had been appointed Governor of Victoria, the insolent Premier crowned his discourtesies towards his official superior by refusing the Government steamer, the Hinernoa, to convey him to Australia. Nor, it seems, was this English gentleman less discourteous to Lady Normanby.
Having unceremoniously got rid of Ballance (after- wards Premier of the Colony and one of his truest dis- ciples) Grey felt constrained to assume the office of Treasurer himself. Probably, a more incompetent Treasurer never was. He knew absolutely nothing about
LEGISLATOR AND PREMIER 189
finance. He had no grasp of details. Mathematician though he was or had been, he had no notion of figures. He had every possible qualification for being one of those ''babies in finance" with whom one of his successors was to class another.
He had a further disqualification for the office. He was not a vigilant guardian of the public purse. Once in his days, imder stern compulsion, he had been, in South Australia, economical and retrenching; everywhere else, he had been spendthrift and extravagant. So was it now. An Australian Premier boasts that he sits on the Trea- sury chest with all his weight, and he is a ponderous man. Grey sat by the Treasury chest with the lid open, and he recklessly shovelled out its contents to all comers. As a consequence, when he was driven from office, he left the Treasury empty, as his successors did in 1884 and 1887. Nor was this all. So low had the credit of the Colony sunk that the incoming Ministry could not for a time go on the London market in order to raise a loan. Grey left the Colony on the verge of bankruptcy.
But we are anticipating. The dissolution Lord Normanby refused was conditionally granted by his suc- cessor, Sir Hercules Eobinson, on August 8, 1879. Defeated in the House, the Premier appealed to the Colony. Li a series of glowing popular harangues, some- times delivered from the balconies of hotels to crowds in the streets, he introduced the oratorical stumping-tour, which a yet greater demagogue was then inaugurating in England. If eloquence could have won the battle, the victory would never have been doubtful. General elec- tions followed. When the House of Representatives met, Grey made a magnificent defence, ^ ut it was still uncertain to which side the balance inclined. One doubt- ful member, the facetious and eccentric Vincent Pyke, voted against the Ministry and so turned the scale. By two votes Grey was driven from office. Early in October he resigned, having occupied the Treasury bench for almost exactly two years.
190 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
His Deposition.
On October 15, 1877, he had announced his acceptance of the Premiership. On October 15 (a fateful day with him!), 1879 he declared: ''I stand here as an outcast among men — first of all, deposed from those benches, and, secondly, having abandoned the position I held as the leader of a great party. ' ' What had happened ? His followers had informed him that they would no longer submit to his high-handed ways or obey that tyrannical will. He had not "abandoned" the leadership of the Opposition; it had abandoned him. The verdict of his contemporaries was, and apparently the judgment of historians is, that his defects of character and faults of temper — his arrogance and his irascibility — ruined his Ministry, defeated his policy, and made his leadership impossible. Let this be admitted to the full, and his failure as a leader is not thus completely accounted for. He was in advance of his time. Almost all the measures he proposed were right in themselves and were ultimately carried; they were only premature.
His mood, in adversity, was not conciliatory. Like Gladstone, he was more imperious in Opposition than on the Ministerial bench. "I will drag them (the Ministers) as my slaves," he haughtily cried, "at the wheels of my chariot. They shall pass those measures" of his, which they had thwarted. "Though they hate me, they shall not go into the lobby against me, ' ' he declared.
He was a true prophet. The Electoral Representation Bill, enacting manhood suffrage, passed by his immediate successors in office, was his own bill — not the one he had last brought forward, but an earlier one ; and it was made law by the aid of four Auckland members, belonging to Sir George Grey's party, who agreed to support the Government only on condition that it carried out Grey's policy.* Not till 1889, though he strove for it in every session, did he succeed in excising the freehold qualifi- cation then enacted and passing a bill restricting each citizen to the exercise of a single vote. His Triennial
* Drummond, The Life and Work of Bichard John Seddon, p. 157.
LEGISLATOR AND PREMIER 191
Parliaments Bill was likewise passed into law by the opposite party, which, like Peel, "found the Liberals bathing and stole their clothes." Grey continued his self -assumed tasks. In pursuance of his own early policy, now forty years old, in 1883 Grey carried through both Houses an Annexation and Confederation Act, authoris- ing New Zealand to annex any islands in the Pacific Ocean not claimed by foreign powers. The Act never received the royal assent. In 1886 he introduced a Land Settlement Bill, empowering the Government to acquire landed property for settlement, either by amicable purchase or by compulsory appropriation. Such lands weie to be retained by the Government and leased on a quit-rent, though Grey must have been aware that quit- rents had not been a success in South Africa. The funds for purchasing them were to be raised by means of land- bonds. His plan was superseded by the simpler system proposed in the same session by Mr. Ballance and ultimately carried out by Sir John McKenzie. On several lines Grey was the true founder of the policy applied, expanded, and developed by the Ministries that have been in office since the accession to power of the so-called Liberal party in 1891.
Chapter XXVI. IN OPPOSITION.
A Greek Gift.
I am in a position to affirm that in the early months of 1884, he was looking forward to entering into political office before the end of the year. He expected to defeat the Atkinson Ministry in the ensuing parliamentary session, and he was confident that, after fighting a general election, he would be appointed Premier. Alas, for the vanity of human expectations! Living in a fool's para- dise, he was unaware that, months before, one of his particular political friends had joined another politician in an arrangement — it would be rude to call it, as hostile politicians called it, a conspiracy — that would for ever exclude him from office. They purposed to deal well by him. They offered to let him nominate, from the dwindling band of his followers, two members of the cabinet. What were they going to do with himself? They could not wish him to remain in the Assembly in order to thwart the measures of the Ministry from which he had been deliberately excluded. They proposed that he should become Chief Commissioner in the King Country. The proposal dazzled him for a space. Under certain conditions he might well have accepted it. It was just such a position as he had refused to Shepstone in South Africa, but Shepstone was Shepstone and Grey was Grey. It was not ill-advised. Had he been his old self, he might safely have been entrusted with a quasi- absolute rule over the Maoris. He (as he said of himself in relation to Tawhiao in 1863) would have ''dug around" the King tribes ' ' with good deeds ' ' till their rebellion fell, and they returned to their allegiance. He would have sought to carry out the work of amalgamation between the two races. He might have arrested the decay of the
192
IN OPPOSITION 193
Maori race. He miglit have won them all back to Christianity, as indeed he aided in extinguishing Haiihan- ism. He would have introduced civilisation, letters, and the arts. But he could not be trusted. There was no saying what he would do. The new Ministry had no mind to commit itself to rash experiments or dangerous pro- jects. In order to keep the Chief Commissioner in check, he was to be sandwiched between two Assistant Commis- sioners, who would have been controlled from Wellington. He would have seen himself outvoted by his own colleagues and thus reduced to impotence in his own court. He refused to accept the position, and he thence- forth acted as if he had been deliberately humiliated.
Parliamentary Intrigues.
The Ministry that made him the offer was flung out, after an existence that lasted only a few days, and its defeat was followed by a maze of intrigues. The member who moved the defeating resolution was asked to form a cabinet, and the preposterous jDolitician made the attempt. Calling on Sir George to invite him to accept a seat in the new Ministry, he was for a moment listened to with mock gravity, and then dramatically bowed out of the room, with an ironical ' ' good morning, Mr. So-and- So !" Grey was himself sent for, and it was believed that he attempted the impossible task. His own incredible account of the matter was that he had been endeavouring to bring together the members of hostile parties. In truth, so little had he abandoned the expectation of entering upon office that, during the Ministerial crisis in 1887, he twice took steps with that object in view.
All intrigues were ended for a time by the return to office of the conspiring ex-Ministers. Grey was definitely left out in the cold, and towards the Ministry, with one of his own former colleagues at its head, he assumed an attitude of irreconcilable hostility. The first and chief weapon that he resorted to was to move a resolution of want of confidence, and during the session such resolu- tions followed in quick succession. They were resultless.
o
194 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Members quickly perceived that he was carrying on a vendetta against the Government, and they soon let it be understood, by both words and votes, that they would support no such motions. Grey did not therefore discon- tinue his assaults on the Ministry. To one of these the Premier of the day replied by a long-meditated and violently personal attack. The scene that ensued was so painful as to be unreportable. Next day Grey was in a pitiable state. From that hour he grew ever more embittered. His character seemed to deteriorate. Till then, under the severest disappointments, he had kept an inner sanctum secure against all assaults of the Evil One. Now the citadel of his spirit appeared to be taken and its holy of holies ravaged. He had been capable of bright- ness, of illuminating flashes, of sage and mellow wisdom. Now his very mirth was gruesome, and the dignity of bearing he had seldom lost before was shattered. The cloudy pillar had turned, and he henceforth pursued an ever-darkening path.
A Vendetta.
He set himself with an inexorable purpose to turn out of office the Ministry that had used him so ill. He refused to sit on the same Parliamentary committees with the Premier, and when the Premier rose to speak, Grey left the chamber. In the following session, of 1887, he enjoyed the gratification of seeing the Ministry decisively defeated in the House. A dissolution was obtained, and he saw his opportunity. For the third time he went on an electioneering tour through the Colony. He spoke at the chief cities and at some of the larger townships. He was listened to with curiosity, with respect, with admiration. He gained no followers, but he gained his end. The Ministry, by the confession of its head, had never a majority in the Assembly. We may add that it never possessed the confidence of the Colony. Grey had there- fore an easy task. The Ministry suffered a decisive defeat. The Premier and several of his Ministers lost their seats. Their party was scattered to the winds. It was not a defeat. It was a rout.
IN OPPOSITION 195
While he powerfully contributed to the result, Grey took no %'isible part in the debacle. He had come back from his oratorical tour in a state of complete nervous prostration. For a week or more he lay between life and death. Then his inexhaustible vitality reasserted itself, and, after some weeks of confinement to the sickroom and the house, he emerged with his strength unimpaired. He enjoyed his convalescence and spoke of it as a luxurious sensation. He next played a pretty little comedy. While the elections were being fought out, he ostentatiously sat in the Parliamentary Library, in the building lately burnt to the ground, professedly pursuing from book to book a research on the ethnical relations between the Portu- guese and the blacks of South Africa! ''General elec- tions ! " " Contested seats ! " He had not heard of them. "Happy or unfortunate results?" He took no interest in them. Of course, it was all a pretence. In reality, no one inwardly rejoiced more at the result, though his exultation was discreetly veiled. He had cause for lamentation as well. He had lost his last follower. The little band he had nominally led in the preceding Parlia- ment vanished into space, and Grey realised his own political ideal of one-adult-one-vote. Complete desertion was the guerdon of the man who had twice governed the Colony through long and critical periods, rescued it from bankruptcy, given it a political and an ecclesiastical con- stitution, endowed it with its Provincial governments, subjugated and pacified the Native race, and whose mere residence in it reflected distinction on the Colony.
His revenge was not then consummated. The day came, in 1893, when there was to be a conflict for the Premiership between the ex-Premier referred to and the Minister who was acting as Premier. Grey threw all his weight into the scale of the Acting-Premier. When Mr. Seddon, whom no one had before suspected of lacking self-confidence, hesitated to accept the Premiership which the Governor almost thrust upon him, he appealed for counsel to Grey. Grey's advice was unquali- fied and almost peremptory. Once and again he urged
196 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Seddon to accept the office; he assured him of his com- petence; he seemed afraid that Seddon would refuse. Just so had he pressed Seddon, fifteen years before, when Seddon had likewise been hesitant, to stand for a constituency. He became one of the "Greyhounds," so loyal did he prove. Ever afterwards he leant on Grey and would seek counsel of him during the Parliamentary session. To Grey it was owing that Seddon did not stand aside in favour of his rival. Gre^^ strenuously supported his nominee and follower. "I have never met with a manlier man, ' ' he said of him. And when Seddon went to London, Grey renewed acquaintance with him and thus gave him public countenance- Seddon, for his part, con- stantly associated himself with Grey and represented himself as the continuator of his policy.
Alone.
Did the strong man ever feel dispiritment, or the self- sufficing nature shiver in its loneliness ! Close observers did discern traces of momentary weakness, but none were visible to the public eye. He did, indeed, sometimes desire wholly to transfer his activity from the wrangling arena of the Legislature to the public platform, and, becoming a true demagogos, or leader of the people, gain his ends by popular agitation; but for that a sparsely- settled country was not ripe, and in the passionate per- sistent pursuit of his ends there was no relaxation. With scientific sap and mine he continued his assault on the classes and institutions that were obnoxious to him. What was it that sustained him f His enemies — and their name was legion — had a consistent account to give of his motives.
The Grov«rth of the Radical.
* ' He was no democrat, ' ' they asserted. ' ' He had never been a lover of the populace. The fineness of his organ- ization, 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,
IN OPPOSITION 197
largely 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 isola- tion. Delivered up to the Furies in the shape of his own angry passions, he plotted revenge. Opportunities offering, he instituted a systematic vendetta 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. Aristocrate par gout, 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 enrage.''^
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 Glad- stone 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 Glad- stone, 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
198 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
seventy-one he adopted the doctrine of the nationalisa- tion 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 federa- tion of peoples. ''Age did not wither" him. In his last years he still had youtlifulness 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 hj a wave of advanced Liberalism, with the intellectual leaders of the day and all "young England" on the crest. The author of a once- popular book, Ginx's Bahy, 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 Diaholi must have his place. The germinating impulse came from without. Estrangement from the governing class was its motive. It was a Eadicalism of revolt. The rebellious passions — outraged pride, hatred, revenge, thwarted ambition — supplied its nutriment. And never since Burke, Byron, or Lameunais 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
IN OPPOSITION 199
scepticism or the imderlying fanaticism! We have traced the rebellious spirit throughout Grey's career, and are not likely to imderestimate its power, but deep below all its manifestations bunied unquenohably 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."
The Evolution of a Rebel.
The story of his career is the evolution of a rebel. We perceive the genesis of the rebel in his flight from school. He broke away from the army to head an exploring expedition. He started on a second journey of explora- tion without awaiting the sanction of the Secretary of State and consequently without knowing that it had been withdrawn. In South Australia the autocrat was matur- ing and the future rebel in training. There he drew bills on the Imperial Government after he knew that his predecessor's bills had been dishonoured. He incurred unauthorised expenditure there, though with a benevolent end — the improvement of the natives. During his first term in New Zealand, when he refused to give effect to the political constitution fashioned in the Colonial Office, the rebel flung his first bold, and yet in terms respectful, defiance. In South Africa, when he put the Fingoes and the German Legion on full pay against the instructions of the War Office, when he continued his enlightened administration of British Kafraria in spite of the reduc- tion of the necessary English Parliamentary vote, when he diverted to Calcutta the British troops touching at the Cape, when he sent out troops, horses, and specie to India during the ^Mutiny, when he re-enrolled the German Legion and despatched it to Bombay, and when he pro- moted the federation of South Africa in a manner opposed to the instructions of the Colonial Office, his rebellion was full-blown. His second term of office in New Zealand was nobly humanitarian as regards the
200 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Maoris, and his squabbles with his Ministers were in a good cause. But again he quarrelled violently with the Colonial Office, with the War Office, with the generals in command of the troops, with the Commissary-General, with his Ministers. At last; his rebellion rose to the point of defying the Colonial Office. The spirit that would neither obey nor brook disobedience had grown incorrigible.
Grey was thus a rebel all his days. Was he in error all his days! With Carlyle, we must distinguish. Was the law or the power he rebelled against that of the world, an earth-born force, a creature of error, where it was not an emanation of the Pit? Then his rebellion was justified. Was it "the eternal law of God Almighty in the universe?" Then were his revolt grave indeed, kindled by infernal fires, led astray by marsh-lights. During the early years of Grey's life, at least, it was in the main a justifiable rebellion, even if it was the rebellion of a would-be autocrat. During his later years it was the revolt of a defeated autocrat. He now burned what he had worshipped, and, being unable to govern, he rebelled against all government. But he was no vulgar rebel. His aims were, in a manner. Promethean. He was ever eager for the prosperity of the individuals he knew. His eloquence rose to its highest point when he painted the possible future of "the unborn millions." He resisted monopolies. He fought land-grabbers, lay and clerical, individually and in mass. He was valiant in defence of human rights. His war against corporate exclusiveness was lifelong. He would have thrown open the closed pro- fessions. He founded libraries and aided art-galleries to which all had free access. No human being should be shut out from the loftiest possibilities of our common nature. The lower races excited his compassion and engaged his sympathies: he seemed to see in them, not so much the wrecks of a fallen humanity, as the germs of a nascent civilisation. In the artizan he recognized an equal — to others ; in the schoolboy he discovered the poten- tialities of future fame. If he was a rebel, he was therefore endowed with a rebel's nobler qualities. For,
IN OPPOSITION 201
we repeat it, this man was of heroic lineage and cast in imperial mould. If, instead of the mimic arena of a British colony, he had been given a kingdom or a continent for a theatre, he would have achieved lasting renown. He had been promised the Governor-General- ship of Canada and might have aspired to the Viceroyalty of India, where, at an earlier date, he might have been a Clive or a Hastings.
He had a rebel's fate. Whether it is at St. Helena, Friederichsruh, or Kawau, inevitable defeat is his por- tion who sets his will against the nature of things. But in the lives of all there is an earlier period, when the recalcitrant will was in alliance with that same nature and was its organ, when alone that work was done which they were sent here to do. That fruitful period in Sir George Grey's life is to be found in his career as Governor of South Australia and New Zealand, before these colonies had been granted responsible government. It is different with his High Commissionership at the Cape. There again are two i^eriods. Till 1858 he was still loyal to the Empire, if he was often enough disloyal to the department which controlled his relations with the Empire. Had he been placed in the position of a Roman dictator, he would have been acting legally and con- stitutionally. In 1858 his initiation of South African federation was undoubtedlj'', in the judgment of the Colonial Office, an act of disloyalty to the Empire. The attitude he then assumed was the attitude of a Cirsar to the Roman Senate. Had he possessed a military force, he was capable of attempting a South African Pharsalia. It was the rebellion of ''the man who was born to be king." With his condemnation and recall began the down-grade movement and the retuiu of the curve.
The rebellious temper thus matured unfitted him to be a constitutional Minister. The testimony of his col- leagues is to the effect that there was no living with him. There have been constantly recurring specimens of that type. Burke, Chateaubriand, Brougham, and Fichte were all men whom a domineering spirit and an irascible temper made impracticable. All were, in consequence,
202 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
driven from the offices they held and stripped of the influence they should have exercised. Burke and Fichte, at all events, remained loyal. AVhat thoughts seethed in Brougham's ill-balanced brain we do not know. Chateau- briand, the elder Comte d'Haussonville informs us, meditated an eighteenth of Brumaire. And Sir George Grey, at least in his wilder moods, schemed an Imperial revolution.
Speculative Mutiny.
On the eve of his second abdication Napoleon, walking with Lucien and afterwards with Benjamin Constant in the garden of the Elysee, heard the acclamations of the crowd, crying: ''long live the Emperor!" and calling for arms. For a while the Emperor gazed at the surging masses in silence, pondering over the suggestion made to him by the tempter, Lucien, of heading the crowd, raising France, and sweeping away both legislature and nobles. To his everlasting honour he put the temptation from him, saying: "I will not be a mob-king. I did not come back from Elba to deluge France with blood. ' ' So did Frederick William, in 1848, refuse "a swine-crown" at the hands of the Parliament of Frankfort.
In his abandonment and implacable rage the old Governor, spurned by the Colonial Office and scouted by the colony he had so long ruled, harboured treasonable designs against the Imperial Government. On a memor- able occasion, to a single auditor, on the midnight streets, with earnest accents that betrayed not a trace of insin- cerity, for a space of two hours, he propounded a project of a military rising, by means of which he would gain command of the British army and take possession of all the agencies of government. It would serve no end to detail his plans, which had evidently been carefully elaborated. At no time since the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 has a dynastic revolution in England had a ghost of a chance. At no time since the accession of Elizabeth could an adventurer or an insubordinate noble or official have succeeded in raising a revolt. The design was little better than midsummer madness. Had the narrative been
IN OPPOSITION 203
told about him in Lis lifetime, he would have answered as Bishop Blougram answered Mr. Gigadibs, ''the literary man," who playfully threatened to expose the bishop's heresies. Grey would have disavowed the reporter as the victim of a practical joke, the sport of his mocking humour.
It can only be said that he seemed in deadly earnest. The scheme was so comprehensive and coherent, so minute and detailed, that it must have been a subject of thought with him through months and, perhaps, years. It was consistent with his public utterances. ""Who is the Secretary for the Colonies?" he scornfully cried in the House of Representatives. "We know absolutely nothing of him ; we care absolutely nothing for him, ' ' he rejoined, answering his own question. It was con- sistent with his public action. His bills for the election of future Governors of New Zealand, his proposal for the election of the Governor-General of the Common- wealth and the Governors of the States, had no other significance. It was the culmination of a long course of rebellious utterances and actions. Happily, it exhaled in words, and, in charity to his memory, it deserves oblivion. He seemed himself desirous to forget it. He never returned to the subject, and, in his lifetime, his solitary auditor respected the confidence (not given as such) with which he had been so strangely entrusted.
Chapter XXVII. .
AUSTRALIA REVISITED.
A quasi-triumphal winding-up of his colonial career was staged for him in Australia. He was appointed or elected a delegate from New Zealand to the conference on Australian federation held in Sydney in the autumn of 1891. From one point of view he was not very suitably chosen. He had long been firmly opposed to the federa- tion of New Zealand with Australia. He believed that the employment of coloured labour would be necessitated in Australia by the semi-tropical climate of its northern States, and he professed to dread the reaction on New Zealand of the establishment of virtual slavery. This foregone conclusion did not preclude his acceptance of the nomination, and of course he was a prominent per- sonage at the conference. He made one great speech and one notable proposal.
In the speech he deftly interwove his reminiscences of the eminent men with whom he had been associated in public life, and it is said that the face of the next-most distinguished member of the Conference, who had a similar weakness, was a study while Grey unwound his beadroll of remarkable names. Among his tales of bygone days he did not fail — in conversation he never failed — to tell of the visit of Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) to New Zealand in 1852, and of their long rambles by the sea-shore in Wellington, revolving many things, like Achilles. Nor did he forget Sir John Gorst and his commissionership in the Waikato, though one may doubt whether he related its tragi-comic denouement with the gusto and the unsuppressed merriment of the same narrative when privately told.
His notable proposal was that the Governor-General of the Commonwealth and the Governors of the component
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AL'STEALIA REVISITED 205
States should be elected by the people of the Common- wealth and the States. It was an old notion of his. Session after Session, for a dozen years, he moved the reading of a bill providing that the Governor of the Colony should be elected by the colonists, not appointed by the Colonial Office. Whether or not members believed him to be actuated by vindictive motives, his persevering efforts met with no success. He had now an opportunity of proposing the same innovation on a larger scale. He made a long and impressive speech. Judged by results, it was a total failure. Out of over half-a-hundred dele- gates only two supported the motion — that Eadical stalwart, C. C. Kingston, and, less from conviction than from compassion, we may suspect, Dr. (now Sir John) Cockburn. Grey was not spared. On the larger as on the smaller arena he was openly accused of perversity, of impracticability, and even of disloyalty.
Having flung his gage of battle in the face of the Con- ference, he went on a tour through Australia. He had been summoned from South Australia to govern New Zealand, but he expected to return to it when his work there was done. He now returned after forty-five years — two-thirds of the space of a long lifetime. He re- entered Adelaide on his seventy-ninth (or rather his eightieth) birthday, and in the afternoon he was welcomed at the Town Hall, but, after attempting to speak, he was too deeply affected to continue. He was banqueted in the evening, and his genuine gratification overflowed in memorable words. "Old age is a crown of thorns," he might have cited from the Talmud, but to him, he said, it was "a period of the greatest happiness he had ever known." On the following day he addressed his proper audience, the Adelaide democracy, and the more select circles of Adelaide, as thenceforth of all Australia, perceiving his late-born affinities, held aloof from him. He proceeded to democratic Broken Hill, and then ensued a long procession of receptions and speeches at a chain of towns across the Continent. On one day, May 23, the almost-octogenarian delivered no fewer than
206 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
five speeches. His reception in Sydney crowned the tour. Twice at least he spoke in the provincial metropolis to enthusiastic audiences — once in the Centennial Hall, when an immense audience made the event, it was said, "more than magnificent." And the tour was wound up, as the veteran sailed back to New Zealand, with one of those cordial send-offs which Australia gives to those whom it delights to honour. Yet, with all its warmth, the tour fell far below the quasi-royal progress of Mr. Seddon, who, fifteen years later, passed from province to province like their sceptred sovereign. As was afterwards the case in London, Grey was only a spectacle; Seddon was a power.
Grey 's last days in New Zealand were the beginning of a somewhat prolonged euthanasia. Hankering to return to the arena of active life, he weakly agreed to be re-elected for a division of Auckland, but, saying that, if he went to Wellington, he believed he should die there, he never reappeared in the halls of the Legislature. Three years more he lingered in scenes once loved, and then he suddenly took his departure.
Chaptee XXVIII.
HIS LAST YEARS.
His work iu New Zealand was done, and he had long been eager to be gone. His departure at last was unex- pected. In 1894 he left his home in Auckland, intending only to journey to the south of the Colony. Then, finding on his arrival at Wellington, that a steamer was on the point of sailing for England, he suddenly decided to return to the Old Country. There was some merriment in the Colony when the sudden decision was made known. He was irreverently compared with a humorous character in Dickens who was on his way to be married, when he came to a church. ''Hilloa! here's a church; let's go in and get married." "Hilloa! here's a steamer," Grey seemed to have said to himself ; " we will go to England. ' '
The comparison was amusing, but it did him less than justice. He had always been impulsive in his actions, and when he was in England in 1868-69, he would order his luggage to be packed at an hour's notice and depart for who knew where. He had no mind to spend his last days in the colony that had cast him off, and where every familiar scene reminded him of past glories. He had long before intended to return. In 1883 he cancelled his orders for periodicals in order to leave at the beginning of 1884. Then things happened which rendered it advis- able or imperative that he should remain. He remained sorely against his will. His longing still pointed homewards.
An unexpected event seemed to open a door. Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had nothing to hope for, resigned the office of Premier, and Lord Rosebery, who might welcome the support of a distinguished name, suc- ceeded him. This it was that, happening just then, precipitated his departure. The stern Puritan was gone ;
207
208 LIFE OP SIK GEOEGE GREY
the good-natured patrician, whose political position was a little shaky, would be more avvenante. Grey had a gala voyage and enjoyed a little of the consideration that had for years been denied him. London saw —
" Old Salinguerra back again ; I say, Old Salinguerra in the town once more."
But it was not on the baleful errand of the Florentine chief. It was on a mission of international peace, racial union, and world-wide federation. A few gleams of wintry sunshine gladdened the old man's heart. He was granted the as yet untarnished honour of a Privy Couneil- lorship, and he really seems to have believed that the high but empty distinction would give him free access to the Sovereign, who could consult him on State affairs apart from her responsible advisers. He was feted, interviewed, biographied, and made the lion of a brief London season. Before a gathering of the National Liberal Club he delivered a great address on federation, which the Marquis of Ripon, who presided, described as **the most eloquent speech he had ever heard," and which showed how much public life had lost by his exile. He had thus some apparent success. He was none the less disappointed. He found little interest in Pan- Anglican federation. He kindled no enthusiasm. He gained no adhesions. No leading public man identified himself with the cause or accepted his policy. Its time was not yet come.
His final return to England was fruitful in reconcilia- tions. He was reconciled to the Colonial Office and to his country. Still more pathetically, within sight of the eternal shores, the stern heart softened, and the long- widowed man was formally reconciled (through the inter- vention of the Queen, it was said) to the wife from whom he had been parted for four and thirty years. And so, amid the roar of Pall Mall or, later, in the stillness of Bath, the world-wearied statesman found the "Sabbath" he had vainly sought in Pacific solitudes.
It is not publicly known whether his wife was with the old man at the last, or whether she survived him.
HIS LAST YEARS 209
Apparently, she did not. Otherwise he would hardly have bequeathed his entire means to his relatives in New Zealand. Like so many other great men, he left no son to perpetuate his name. A son had been born to him in Adelaide, but he lived only a few months. Grey's belief that his wife neglected her child was said by well- informed persons to have been the root of the later unhappy differences. Here a veil must be drawn. The matter concerned themselves alone, and he never invited discussion on the subject. But it affected his public position, took the halo off the reverence that should have accompanied old age, and possibly contributed to embitter his temper.
None of the loved scenes was around him when he passed away, no old familiar faces. New Zealand acquaintances had urged him to return to the Colony, where he would have had a fitting end and national exequies. He would not go back. Every town had been the arena of triumphs, indeed, but also of slights and humiliations, of painful remembrances, of angry contests and disastrous defeats. He died at Bath on the night of September 18, 1898. But for the generous action of the Colonial OflSce, he might have been buried, as he died, in obscurity. Much to its honour, the Department, forget- ting its long-buried animosity against its insurgent servant, appealed through Lord Selbonie, Under- Secretary for the Colonies, to the Dean of St. Paul's to bestow on the old Governor the honour of a tomb in the cathedral where some of England's greatest men of action lie buried. There he was solemnly laid by the side of one of his successors in South Africa, Sir Henry Bartle Frere. All England felt that his memory had been deservedly honoured.
Gi^oup-deaths.
Genius sets, as it rises, in constellations. In 1832 no fewer than four of the dii majores passed away — Scott, Goethe, Bentham, and Cuvier, while three at least of the dii minores — Crabbe, Mackintosh, and Gentz— attended
i
210 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
the august shades. In 1859 the great names of Macau- lay, the younger Humboldt, and Mrs. Browning, of Hallam and De Quincey, were eclipsed. Again, in 1880-2 a still loftier group — Carlyle and Emerson, Lord Beaconsfield and George Eliot — ascended Olympus, with Longfellow and Dante Rossetti to hymn their threnodies. So was it when George Grey was gathered to his fathers. He had been coeval in birth with a band of distinguished men — poets, novelists, scholars, and men of action; he was coeval in death with two of the most illustrious statesmen of the age. Bismarck, the terror of Europe, fell like a mighty tower that had before been rent by an earthquake from base to summit. Gladstone, the standard-bearer of Liberalism throughout the world, fell like a secular oak that had for centuries battled with storms. Even by the side of such giants Grey's depar- ture was not unobserved. They were almost peers in greatness. All alike belonged to the race of nature's kings, and in this respect one was not unworthy of the others. For Gladstone alone can sanctity — such sanctity as is predicable of men of action — be claimed, but Bismarck, though merciless, was true to his own stern conscience even as Cromwell was, and if Grey was savage and vindictive, he was possessed by aims and animated by aspirations that burned to ennoble his kind. Gladstone alone, perhaps, winged his flight to the paradise of a pure fame; Bismarck and Grey will expiate their undoubted offences through a generation of cleansing purgatorial fire. Already have death and a single decade partly wiped the stains from the brow once radiant and a character intrinsically noble.
Chapter XXIX.
THE MAN.
Physical.
The appearance of Sir George Grey and his bearing were distinguished. Originally tall, though latterly shrunken, he had never carried his height well ; as late as his seventy-fifth year his step, like Gladstone's, was still light and elastic. The head, well covered with gray hair, was of an average size, but the convolutions of the brain must have been many and fine. The soft blue eyes reflected the well of poetry that lay deep in him. A fierce moustache, cropped so close as to make it resemble bristles rather than human hair, betrayed the ineradic-- able savagery that was also deep. The firm chin and jaw were fit organs of the iron will. On the whole, the face had in it, when in repose, nothing of greatness. In animation, when every line and feature obeyed the per- ceptions of the mind and the passions of the heart, it was legible as a printed page, luminous as a trans- parency. When lighted up with humorous appreciation, it broke into a million wrinkles, best described in Aeschylean phrase. In anger, though he was deemed a dangerous man, he did not pale, as dangerous men are said to do, but face, neck, and scalp flushed red. It may be proof of the wholesomeness of his blood and tlie essen- tial sweetness of his nature that when, at the unexpected sight of a political opponent, a flash of hatred trans- formed his features, and the irregular nose lengthened to a point, his face never blackened. The imperious look, as of one who would brook no disobedience, though he might be guilty of it, was perhaps the most characteristic. The visible ardour of middle life gave way in old age to a pathetic expression of moral defeat, as if it were love for his fellows and not lust of power that had met so
rude a repulse.
211 pa
212 LIFE OF SIB GEORGE GREY
Evolution of his Physiognomy.
Five portraits of Grey are speaking and significant. The one from a painting by Richmond, taken in the fifties and prefixed to the first volume of the English edition of Mr. Rees's biography, is assuredly that of a good and kind, yet firm and strong, man, who has a striking resemblance to the great preacher, Robertson of Brighton. No trace is there of the later savagery.
A photograph taken at Capetown in 1861 reveals a notable change. The beautiful symmetry of the features in Richmond's perhaps flattered portrait has disappeared, and the mouth, possibly by the fault of the engraver, is distorted into an expression of obstinacy and perversity. "It is the mouth of a thoroughly unscrupulous man," said a good judge who saw it. Self-assertion, carried to an extreme has brought him to this ! In later years his mouth was concealed by his bristly moustache. Had he inherited his mother's sensitive and quivering, yet firm, lips, how very different a man he might have been, and how different a career he might have had !
A third portrait prefixed to the second volume of Mr. Rees's work and possibly belonging to the seventies, shows a complete revolution. The ardour visible but latent in the earlier physiognomy has kindled in the eyes and whole gaze into an inward flame. The early Vic- torian whiskers have been replaced by a moustache, already cropped close, but not yet bristly or quite savage. In a fourth, belonging to the eighties, the hirsute moustache, as of the Wild Boar of the Ardennes in Quentin Durward, and the hardened face, reveal patent savagery and a deep moral descent. A savage vindic- tiveness, a fanaticism of rebellion, a defiant self-assertion are its notes.
A still more tragic change is disclosed by a fifth portrait which hangs in the Public Library at Auckland. The self-assertion and the savagery have almost disap- peared,, quenched in a strange new expression — that of irremediable moral defeat. It must have been taken in the late eighties or early nineties, when he at last
THE MAN
213
realised that, in public life at all events, he was a beaten man. This fifth portrait pathetically embodies the final summing up of a long and active life. We are reminded of the words of Hildebrand: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile." Some such sentiment would translate the physiognomy of the old Governor as, in his last years in New Zealand, he walked, almost deserted, the streets of the city where he had once trodden as an almost absolute ruler.
His Health.
A medical practitioner whom he transferred from New Zealand to the Cape to superintend his scheme of South African hospitals. Dr. Fitzgerald, referred to Grey's delicate health during his first term in New Zealand. He himself mentioned, a little theatrically, that he had drafted the constitution of the Anglican Church in New Zealand ''on a sickbed in Taranaki." He was subject to severe spasms of the heart. Yet he must have had extraordinary powers of endurance. He had the large feet we associate with the explorer, and in his expeditions in Western Australia he performed exploits that would have been beyond the capacity of most men. His powers remained nearly intact to an advanced age. When he was past seventy, he would leave Auckland after breakfast, arrive at Kawau in the evening without having partaken of lunch, and immediately set out to show a visitor round the island. At times, in 1888, he was so exhausted that he could hardly stand, but he could not be induced to take a seat. Two or three years later he frequently walked on a Sunday afternoon from Pamell (Auckland) to visit an acquaintance residing in Epsom— a journey of some miles— and people who saw him tottering wondered how he was ever to get back, but he rejected aid. His power of rallying was an old feature that baffled prognostics. On a stumping tour through the Colony in 1879, when he was Premier, he would arrive in a steamer in a state of prostration, but as the hour approached for addressing a public meeting, the old
214 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
war-horse woke up at the sonnd of the trumpet, and he proceeded to the hall and delivered an impassioned address. After a similar tour in 1884 he returned to Auckland more vigorous than when he set out. It was otherwise in 1887, when he came back from such a tour in a state of complete prostration, from which it took him weeks to recover. There was therefore a tough vitality that rose afresh from weakness and (more than half spiritual) preserved him through apparent failure to win for him, just before the end, a semblance of victory.
Intellectual.
His mental faculties had the same quality of dis- tinction as his appearance. He had a predilection for great things and high themes. His mind had affinities with grandeurs. Through all the declamation of the French poet he felt the greatness of Victor Hugo, and he keenly resented an irreverent biography of him that contained sentences which, he probably felt, might be applied to himself. He admired the theatrical proclama- tions of Napoleon. He had natural elevations, rose without an effort, and sustained himself, like the albatross he so well described, with hardly a stroke of the pinion. He was born to soar.
An Inductive Reasoned.
In boyhood, and again in youth, when he was an ensign in a regiment stationed at Dublin, he came under the influence of a man who influenced many men, including some New Zealand colonists — the remarkable and eccen- tric Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, and he claimed that the growth of his mind had been affected by that teacher of teachers. Whatever he may have learnt from him, he never learnt the art of reasoning, at least in syllogistic form. For this, at all times, he evinced a notorious incapacity, and often the ratiocination of his Parliamentary speeches in later years evoked the emphatic contempt of his fellow-legislators. But, if his faculty of deductive reasoning was in defect, a far higher
THE MAN 215
power — the commanding faculty of inductive reasoning — was of lordly proportions. It was first sliown in his despatches from New Zealand, and next in those from South Africa. Through the long and very interesting succession of these you always perceive, under whatever obscurations of masked passion or undisguised per- versity, the inductive reasoner who is travelling slowly to his end along a devious route with many a winding and turning, and with not a little bowing and scraping and all manner of deprecatory formulas ; when at last he arrives, you i3erceive that he has gained his destination by the path the easiest for him to follow and the best to convince his reader (the powerful Secretary for the Colonies or his still more potent Under-Secretary) that the end was one to be supremely desired or else most anxiously shunned. Such despatches exhibit, as many of his speeches exhibited, a higher species of logic than the scholastic. It would be easy to convert any of the more elaborate into a sorites — a chain of syllogisms.
His Constructiveness.
Flowering out of this high faculty arose another of a still higher type — the grand power that Kant named the architectonic faculty, and which Herbert Spencer claimed as one of his distinctive attributes. It was strikingly shown so early as 1851, in an address to the New Zealand Society that was worthy of Guizot, when he sketched a lofty programme for the historians of New Zealand, who should study its history as "tending to illustrate and clear up the history of the entire human race, and of all time, considered as one harmonious whole." It was effectively shown in the drafting of a political and of an ecclesiastical constitution, and in the imaginative construction of two or three great federa- tions. Such efforts demand high, almost the highest, powers of the human mind. Not all who essay them succeed. The formation of political constitutions lias often tempted the thinker. Locke drew up a constitution for Carolina that proved unworkable and was transitory.
216 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
Eousseau drafted a constitution for Corsica, and Bentham one for Eussia, neither of which was ever brought into operation or treated seriously. It was far otherwise with Grey's constructive efforts. The con- stitution that he drew up for New Zealand was, with amendments, which he regarded as mutilations, sanc- tioned by the British Parliament, and remained for twenty years in successful operation. The constitution he drew up for the Church of England in New Zealand laid the basis of the constitution by which that Church has ever since been governed. He schemed a confedera- tion of the South Sea Islands which might well have been effected. He planned a confederation of the South African States such as is on the eve of realisation. "Dotham's dreamer dreamed anew," and he dreamt of a federation of all English-speaking peoples, which the twentieth century may see realised. Evidently, he possessed the architectonic faculty in a high degree. A not infelicitous parallel with Herbert Spencer might be traced. The philosopher who organized the sciences of life and mind, society and morals, and who meditated the reconciliation of antagonist philosophies in a synthetic system, was the complementary half of the colonial Governor who first gave a constitutional framework to a colony and a church, and who sought to bring many diverse races under one political system.
His linaglnation.
His breadth of view and his large schemes were directly connected with an imperial imagination. He had the vivid visual realisation of one who saw things in the concrete. A defeated Premier had appointed himself Speaker of the Legislative Council and created a number of his friends members of the Council. To Grey it was "like a king entering the Chamber surrounded by his retainers." A condemned House of Representatives, which awaited dissolution and yet legislated for its successor, reminded him of "the living governed by the dead." All appeared to him in picture. John Bright
THE MAN 217
had a vision of America, from the frozen North to the glowing South, as ''the home of freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every nation and of every clime." Grey's vision may not have been nobler than that, but it was wider, deeper, and richer. He had a vision of a grand Pan-Anglican federation, where the two great races of the world would blend harmoniously into a living unity and exhibit a new social type. All these things he saw with his bodily eyes, and he spoke and wrote of them with the passion of belief proper to a seer. He made others see with him, when his perceptions were true. It was thus he convinced them.
Perhaps it was a corollary of the predominance of imagination in his mind that, though he had perceptions which nothing escaped, and an extraordinary memory which let slip nothing it ever held, he had no grasp of details; and when a measure was under discussion, he was frivolous in the cabinet, useless on a committee, and silent in the legislature. His projects of taxation would have made Turgot or Gladstone smile, so childishly futile were they. His reasonings for or against a tax were also puerile.
The same high faculty of imagination gave elevation to his oratory. Did a great cause move him? Breathing thoughts came at will, and burning words seemed to come of themselves. Passion kindled them. Indignation heated them white. Others cite poetry when they should be eloquent ; his eloquence was poetry.
His CultuB^e.
Like many imaginative men, he was not deep in reflection or formidable in argument. His culture was tinged with dilletantism. He had the taste for Italian poetry more characteristic of his generation than of ours. He had learnt German at Sandhurst, and been intoxicated with Schiller, like German students of a bygone time, but with neither that nor any other literature was his acquaint- ance extensive or exact. In earlier j^ears he must have read or rather gleaned abundantly, but in later years he
218 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
read practically nothing. Proud of his long-sightedness, he must have made a vow, like Swift, that he would never use spectacles, and though he so far condescended to infirmity as to use a magnifying glass, on most occasions he depended on his unarmed eyes, and they increasingly ceased to serve him. More and more, he was therefore, like Swift and Herbert Spencer, thrown back on his own thoughts, and he was often thus, like them, plunged into hypochondria.
His knowledge of men was wide and deep, yet in one instance a conspiracy that for ever excluded him from political office was matured under his unperceiving eyes. It is not that, like Wallenstein, in a similar case, he was too magnanimous to be suspicious. The experience of a long life had made him all eyes to his fellows' treachery; but, for once, he was misled by his belief in one who played him false. Either he did not always accurately measure the men he had to cope with and the environment he was placed in, or else he was blinded by passion. His conversation was witty, genial, discursive, interminable : he talked on for ever, and you wished him to talk on for ever. It was literary, political, egotistical ; a score of times over he must have talked his auto- biography right through. On rare occasions it would blaze out into wild revolutionary schemes that might have emanated from Bedlam.
Moral.
His moral qualities ran parallel with his intellectual. His high ambition, hampered throughout life, his sub- jugating will, often thwarted, and his passionate persistency were but the emotional side of his large views. His attributes, with all their defects, were those of the born ruler. His pride was that of the savage chiefs he once ruled over, and it would well have become an absolute monarch, but it made obedience on his part difficult, and co-operation with him all but impossible. The path of his life was strewn with broken friendships, and he was latterly on speaking terms with not one of
THE MAN 219
the colonial leaders. The point of honour once touched, he was implacable. Henceforward, with no moment of weak relenting or relaxed vigilance, he pursued his foe as the bloodhound his quarry, but in a manner fatal to himself as well as to his victim. His self-possession was perfect, and his courage rose as danger thickened, yet it was rather military than civic courage. With a bishop on his right hand and a chief-justice on his left, he was ready to defy Imperial Parliament. With his Ministers behind him, he could flout the Colonial Office. With the people at his back he could have gone from opposition to revolt and from revolt to revolution. Before a blast of unpopularity he was a mere reed. It was as if his foundation were not on the adamant of principle but the quicksands of pride.
His Sympathies.
His sensitiveness to the changing humours of the populace may have sprung out of the keenness of his sympathies. The sight of injustice or oppression roused him almost to madness. Distress in every shape excited his compassion. There may have been some affectation in carrying medicines to a sick man at ten o'clock at night, but there was none in walking a long distance day after day to visit an invalid, at a time when his bodily strength was failing and he looked frail indeed, though the iron will of old remained indomitable. His generosity did not, as a rule, take a commonplace form, save when, as in the Queensland floods of 1890, the object appealed to his imagination. But, like Bessarion and other celi- bates, he had a costly passion for founding great libraries, and the philological library that he presented to the Cape places him of right, in the opinion of Max Miiller, by the side of Sir Thomas Bodley.
His Tact.
He was accused of wanting tact by mediocrities who had none, though no woman ever had more. By a fine instinct, which was half perception and half sympatliy,
220 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
he seemed to know far in advance when he was approaching dangerous ground. Like the Maori female guide who conducts the tourist over the quaking and steaming sides of the hills near Kotorua, he infallibly picked his way among the pitfalls of social intercourse. He followed the turns and windings of his interlocutor's talk with sympathy, with approval, at times with con- demnatory silence, but always with full appreciation.
Unclubbable.
Holding somewhat aloof from his fellows, though cordial when he met with them, he went little into what was called society. He did not follow the example of King Edward and many colonial Governors by dining with his subjects. Pride may have had something to do with it, but higher tastes and aversion to the loss of time involved had more. In his later years he went almost nowhere. Now and then, but very rarely, he dined at Government House, Wellington, and he often visited invalids to whom he wished to show a kindness. When he finally returned to England, he was little more associative. In earlier days he had rather cultivated the territorial and official aristocracy. He was fond of relating — and Mr. Rees has enshrined the narrative — how, at the Duke of Argj^ll's house in London, he had foregathered with men of political and literary dis- tinction, and had easily held his own with them on topics of importance. He particularly delighted in the break- fasts that were then fashionable, before Londoners became too much engrossed to breakfast late. His table maimers were charming, and his conversation unaffected and delightful.
His Hunnoups.
His humour was genuine, free, and unforced, answering like a flash to all demands on it. As Liszt said of Chopin, "his caustic spirit caught the ridiculous rapidly and far below the surface at which it usually strikes the eye.'* He was no great laugher and seldom laughed heartily.
THE MAN 221
Sometimes, when a pointed retort made him realise the tragedy of his situation, his laugh was almost gruesome. His smile was various, often delightful, always charming. It was fashioned less by the mouth than by the eyes, which would stream over with merriment, and by the whole mobile face. Few faces were capable of lighting up as his was at some stroke of wit or some humorous situation. It then grew beaming, luminous, and radiant. But whether of amusement or appreciation, of scorn or anger, his expression was total and organic. He was all smiles or all frowns, all allurement or all menace. His anger, especially, was formidable. His voice, ordinarily feeble, suddenly grew powerful and harsh or threatening. The complete transformation of his countenance when he saw a hated political opponent showed how much anger is a devil's passion. In him it was not the righteous indignation of the just man. The mood grew upon him. After his return to New Zealand in 1869 he would often, in his solitude, sink into black rages at the remembrance of some bitter injustice or some abominable outrage. He could at times be seen in the Parliamentary Library sitting absorbed in melan- choly thought or on fire with some internal consuming passion. At such times he seemed to respire flame and wrath, as Saul breathed forth slaughter and threatenings He was then almost unapproachable. Was he in his house? His niece would send one or more of her children into his room, and their caresses or innocent guileless ways would lay healing balm on the wounded spirit. But for them, and but for the few honours he received in England, he might have passed his last years as Swift spent his, and the world might have witnessed such another spectacle as Johnson and Taine have so vividly painted.
His Religion.
The religion of the man of action is usually traditional or orthodox. All the social forces by which the ruler is himself ruled tend to breed in him a hereditary awe of the Upper Powers. Herbert Spencer has proved, and
Q
222 LIFE OF SIR GEORGE GREY
all history confirms the argument, that the earthly and heavenly hierarchies are inseparably connected. Which- ever may be first — whether the spiritual is the earlier, as Dionysius the Areopagite, Quinet, and Fustel de Coulanges maintain, or whether the celestial is modelled on the terrestrial, as Voltaire would have said and Spencer asserts — the two closely reflect one another. Hence the secular arm commonly supports the ecclesias- tical, and George III. made it a rule to stand up while the Hallelujah Chorus was being performed, as if it had at least an equal claim to such an honour with the National Anthem. The religion of the governing classes is usually conventional and is rarely personal, as with Cromwell, or sceptical, as with Frederick the Great, or philo- sophical, as with William von Humboldt, or universally tolerant, as with Alexander Severus or Akbar. It is now and then innovating, as was shown by Constantino and the early European kings who accepted Christianity and, at a later date, Protestantism. Sometimes it is reac- tionary, as with the Emperor Julian and the many sovereigns who have apostatized from Protestantism to Catholicism, but then the reversion is towards more religion, not less.
Grey's religion was that of the ruler or the ruling class. He was an orthodox Anglican, and, although he associated familiarly with avowed freethinkers, two of whom — the President and the Vice-President of the Freethought Associations of New Zealand — were members of his cabinet in 1877-8, and in private he was tolerant of dissent, he never abandoned his early position. His first book is strongly impregnated with the religious sentiment, and he avows that in times of trial he sought for consolation and support in religious beliefs and the perusal of the Bible. It is difficult for those who knew him in the last twenty years of his life to take those simple confessions quite seriously and equally difficult to doubt his sincerity. Religious faith of some kind was deeply ingrained in him. During his West Australian explorations, when more than once
THE MAN 223
death seemed imminent, he fell back on religious con- solations, and almost fifty years afterwards he did the same thing. He kept the Bible by him in 1838-9, and in 1884 he got up, as he confessed, at five o'clock in the morning to read the New Testament — in the original, it was understood. Yet there were few outward manifes- tations of belief. He quarrelled violently with the missionaries in New Zealand, but on just grounds. Therein resembling jiersons so unlike as Milton, Bismarck, and Henry Drummond, — all of them pro- fessedly religious men — he did not, in later years at least, attend Divine worship. In 1884, at a time of great trial and possible calamity, he began to conduct religious worship at Kawau on Sunday mornings. He read the Church of England service with simple dignity and with some impressiveness, but delivered or read no discourse. His library was not lacking in religious books. He pos- sessed a complete set of the once-famous Tracts for the Times, and he had the works of Theodore Parker. To these in his trouble he had recourse, but found "some- thing wanting" in them, as well he might. What is warning — is it not? — is what Christians call the Cross of Christ — the gaining of eternal life through death to self and the world. That profound perception of the law of sacrifice and the darkening of **the Father's" face, or of the world and the cosmos, to the innocent wronged one generates a deeper theology than Parker in his optimism ever knew. It is also the supreme lesson which men of Grey's stamp never learn.
The problem is much of the same character as Bis- marck's professions and practice present. "Fancy Bismarck believing in a God!" it was said when Busch's candid reminiscences, flavoured with pious declarations, were published. Bismarck was probably as sincere a believer as Cromwell, whose sincerity is not now so often disputed as it used to be. We shape the Deity in our own image, and the God of Cronuvell, Bismarck, and Grey was doubtless a very different being to the Heavenly Father of the Gospels or the Christ-God who supplanted him.
224 LIFE OF SIE GEOKGE GREY
In spite of his surprising perusal of the New Testa- ment, Grey was not a New Testament Christian. The Beatitudes by no means expressed his ideal of life. He was not humble. "Blessed are the merciful" did he read — he who never spared? "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst" — but one's sense of congruity is too severely shocked. He let the sun go down upon his wrath. Often cruel, hard-hearted, oppressive, tyrannical, relentless, and savagely vindictive, he was at times an old savage, whose heart had never been softened by religious influences, but only hardened by tragic experiences of life. His was an unawakened mind, and, though he speculated on many topics, he never allowed his clear intelligence to play on any of the mysteries of the Christian faith. He probably would have said, with Lord Acton, that he was not conscious of ever in his life having "held the slightest shadow of a doubt about any dogma of the" Church of England. His (believers in revealed religion would say) was an unconverted nature, where the primitive passions had never been purified in Heavenly furnaces and the principles of the natural man had never been illuminated by Divine light. We need not too harshly condemn one who had many a hard battle to fight, and who generally fought for the good cause. Only a few fighting statesmen — Cromwell, Guizot, Montalembert, Gladstone, McKinley,— have in the strife preserved "the whiteness of their souls."
A "Tropical Man.
a
Carlyle, who not unjustly appraised him, would have said that Grey belonged to another class than those to whom the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount apply, and must be judged by a different code of ethics. He looked, indeed, an alien figure as he flitted about among the colonial legislators, who doubtless also felt that he did not belong to them or their kind. He was of the great race of the uehermenschen — the giants whom Renan and Nietzsche have set up for the homage of "the dim common populations." The passion of subjugation
THE MAN 225
and domination laj' at the base of his character. He realised Nietzsche's idea of life as consisting essentially in aggression — in the appropriation and subjection of all that is alien and feebler; accompanied or not — and it mattered little to him whether it was or was not accompanied — by hardness and oppression; and issuing in the imposing of its will, its forms of thought and feeling, on others, and the incorporation of those others with itself or, at least, their exploitation for its own ends. He was of the same lineage as Julius Caesar, Frederick, and Napoleon, if not of the same stature. And yet, who knows? These mighty hunters of men were made great by their surroundings. Had they been planted down in a British colony sixty years ago, they would have shown no greater faculties than Grey displayed; and had Grey been placed in the wider environment of Canada or India, or been set to govern a kingdom or an empire, he might have revealed himself one of the colossi of man- kind. His earlier days were passed in circumstances where one of Nietzsche's "tropical men" was possible and was required, and his doings in those days must be judged by a standard adapted to the time and the place. He lived on into an age when powers or limitations that he lacked were needed, and his special attributes were an offence. He was then a living anachronism and his life a tragedy.
A IVIakei* 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 sei-vices Sir George Grey has rendered to par- ticular 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 insig- nificant 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
226 LIFE OF SIK GEORGE GREY
from 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. Jnst so, as one remembers, did the eminent Grecian come home from a tour in old Hellas and have nothing to say about the country of his predi- lection, 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
THE MAN 227
mingled blood and culture; but he 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.
INDEX.
ADDERLEY, Sir C. {Lord Norton). Drafts N.Z. Constitution, 80 ; attacks Grey, 95 ; on condominium, 145.
Amalgamation of Maori and white races, believed in by Grey and others, 59.
ANGAS, G. p. a founder of South Australia, 24 ; introduces German im- migrants, 25.
Arnold, T. On the right of occupancy, 55 ; cited by Earl Grey, 55.
BALLANCE, J. Appointed Treasurer in Grey Ministry, 187 ; resigns or
expelled, 188. Bell, Sir P. D., Colonial Minister. Pinds incriminating map, 142; Maori
policy, 142. BLACKS, West Australian. Employed by Grey as labourers, 13-4 ; grammar
and dictionary of language compiled by Grey, 14-5. South Australian. Brought under colonial jurisdiction by Grey, 25 ;
employment found for by Grey, 26 ; educated by Grey, 26 ; conciliated, 26. BLEEK, W. H. Compiles bibliography of Grey Library, 135. BOWEN, Sir G. Succeeds Grey in N.Z., 161.
Brown, Prof. J. MacmiUan. Adversely criticizes Polynesian Mytlwlogy, 68-9. Buckingham, Duhe of. Recalls Grey from N.Z., 159 ; refuses enquiry, 158.
Cameron, Gen. Sir D. Refuses to attack Weraroa, 148-9 ; breach with Grey, 150.
Canterbury Association. Grey's relations with, 74.
CARDWELL, E., Secretary of Colonies and latterly of War. Supports Grey's resistance to project of N.Z. constitution, 58 ; supports Grey's resistance to confiscation of Maori territory, 154-5 ; communicates accusations, 157 ; resents Grey's betrayal, 157.
CARLETON, H. Vindicates H. Williams, 48 ; author of Page, etc., 65.
CARLYLE, T. Attracted by Grey, 172 ; supports Grey at Newark, 172-3 ; intercom'se with Grey, 177 ; conflicting estimates of, 178.
Carnarvon, Earl of. Recalls Grey, 126 ; attacks Grey, 158 ; refuses inquiry, 158.
Church, Anglican, constitution of. Drafted by Grey, 87-8 ; its real author- ship, 88-9.
Clarke, — , Catechist and Protector of Aborigines. Condemned, 49.
COGHLAN, Commodore. Defends Grey's account of W. Australia, 12.
Colonial Office, Grey's relations with. Pavourable, 17, 18, 27 ; coolly received, 94; in N.Z.^ friendly, 153; hostile, 157-9; spumed, 167-8.
Constitution of N.Z. Authorship of, 79-31 ; provisions, 81-3.
Darwin, C. Grey's intercourse with, 176-7.
DERBY, Earl of [Lwd Stanley). Eulogizes Grey's administration of S. Australia, 27 : appoints him Governor of New Zealand, 31.
228
INDEX 229
DISSAELI, B. Oa N.Z. constitution, 58.
Domett, A. Premier under Grey, 142 ; Maori policy, 142.
DrummoNC, J. Life and Work of R. J. Seddon, x.
ELGIN, Earl of, and China contingent, 120-1.
Eyre, E. J. Stationed on borders of S. Australia, 26 ; Lieutenant-Governor in N.Z., 29.
Federation of South Sea Islands schemed by Grey, 122 : federation of S. Africa designed by him, 122-4 ; his ideal, 123 ; his action, 123-4 : arrested by Imperial Government, 125.
FAIRBURN, — . Landed missionary, 48.
FlTZGERAIiD, J. E. Edits pre-constitutional N.Z. Hansard, 65 ; accuses Grey of authorship of Maori War, 143.
FiTZROY, Admiral. Precedes Grey in N.Z., 31.
Fox, Sir W. Attacks Grey, 76 ; indicts Grey, 77 ; aids in drafting N.Z. constitution, 80 ; as Premier gives friendly reception to Grey, 139 ; accompanies Grey in interior, 141 ; accuses Grey of authorship of war,
144-5.
GAWLER, Col. Second Governor of S. Australia, 21.
German Legion in S. Africa, 107-17 ; Grey introduces, 107 ; squabbles over with War Oface, 107-10 ; re-enlisted for India, 116-7.
Gladstone, W. E. On N.Z. constitution, 58, 81 ; introduces Selwyn to Grey, 86 ; jockeys Grey out of Newark, 173 : hostile to Grey's Home Rule, 175 ; receives cablegram from Grey supporting Home Rule, 175.
GODLEY, J. R. Attacks Grey, 76 ; Grey's divine revenge, 76.
Gregory, Asst. Surveyor-General. Vindicates Grey's explorations in W. Aus- tralia, 11.
Grey, Col. Father of Sir George, 4.
Grey, Earl (Lord Howick). Opposes Grey's appointment as Governor of N.Z., 30-1 ; transmits political constitution for N.Z., 51 ; on Native right of occupancy. 53 ; suspends constitution, 51-3 ; eulogizes Grey, 58.
Grey, Sir George. Birth, 2 ; coevals, 2 ; ancestry, 2 ; name, its orthography vindicated, 3-4 ; education, 5 ; flight from school, 5 ; classical and mathe- matical attainments, 5-6 ; German culture, 0 ; military career, 6.
Appointed to explore South-Western Australia, 7 ; first journey, 8 ; second journey, 9-10 ; discoveries, 10-1 ; explorations reviewed and con- demned by Stokes, 11, but vindicated by Gregory and others, 11-2.
Appointed Resident in S.W. Australia, 13 ; government and employment of blacks, 14.
Compiles vocabulary and constructs grammar of language, 14-5.
Describes blacks, 16 ; states marriage laws and originates department of Sociology, 16-7.
Appointed Governor of South Australia, IS ; a military Governor, 20-1 ; makes retrenchments, 21-3 ; recasts system of taxation, 23 ; redistributes population, 23-4 ; his success eulogized in British Parliament, 24 ; meets with Imperial approval, 27 ; solves black problem, 25-6 ; brings blacks under jurisdiction of courts, 25 ; finds employment for blacks and educates thorn, 26 ; his unsucccss, 26.
Sends natural history collections to England, 27-9; answers inquiries, 29; aids explorers, 29.
Appointed Governor of New Zealand, 30; had aided N.Z. from 8. Aus- tralia, 32 ; arrives in N.Z., 32; restores financial equilibrium, 32 ; reduces
230 INDEX
Grey, Sir George— cont.
Buapekapeka, 33-5 ; seizes Eauparaha, 35-8 ; suppresses trouble in Welling- ton district, 37 ; ends war in Wanganui, 40-1 ; criminal blunder there, 41.
His relations with missionaries, 42 ; hints treasonable charges against Henry Williams, 43 ; takes action against landed missionaries, 44 ; his triumph, 49-60.
Receives from Earl Grey political constitution, 51 ; resolves to suspend it, 52 ; aided by Selwyn and Martin, 51-7 ; constitution withdrawn, 58 ; Grey knighted, 58.
His high ideal of the IMaoris, 59 ; designs amalgamation with whites 59-60 ; organizes the race, 61-2 ; sets up courts, hospitals, schools, 61-3 fosters agricultural and public works, 62-3 ; his strong Maori sympathies, 64
Collects and translates Maori mythology, 65-8 ; publishes Jmcrnal, 67 publishes Polynesian Mytlwlogy, 67 ; characterized, 68-9 ; translated, 69 influence, 69.
Relations with New Zealand Land Company, 70-4 ; with Canterbury Association, 74 ; with Otago Association, 75.
His absolutism, 77 ; resists agitation for self-government, 77-8 ; passes ordinance establishing Provincial councils, 78-9 ; drafts political constitution, 81-2 ; authorship disputed, 79-82 ; constitution mutilated in London, 82-3 ; devises system of rural administration and land settlement, 84 ; plan thwarted, 85 ; drafts Anglican church constitution, 86 ; authorship disputed, 88 ; plan developed, 89.
Leaves New Zealand, 90 ; regrets of colonists, 91 ; Maori laments, 92-3 ; ill-received at Colonial Office, 94 ; enthusiastically received at Oxford, 95.
Appointed High Commissioner in South Africa, 96 ; administration of British Kafraria, 97-100 ; new schemes, 97-8 ; segregates Kafirs, 98 ; sets up schools, hospitals, public works, 99-100 ; suppresses a Kafir rising, 100-3 ; Kafir subsidy reduced, 103-4 ; continues schemes at own cost, 104 ; question- able results, 105.
Receives German Legion, 106-7 ; squabbles over it with War Office and Colonial Office, 108-10.
Defeats Shepstone's scheme of a Zulu province, 111-4.
Sends troops to India to suppress Mutiny, 115 ; with this view conciliates Native chiefs, 116 ; levies German Legion and dispatches it to Bombay, 116-7 ; advises use of Maoris, 117 ; imagines he diverts to Calcutta China contingent, 117-8; hallucination discussed, 117-21.
Schemes South African confederation, 122-3 ; takes action, 123-4 ; recall, 125-7 ; his reinstatement, 127, 129 ; at Cambridge, 128, 169.
Second term in South Africa, 129 ; entertains Prince Alfred, 130-1 ; founds great library at Cape, 132 ; unfortunately allocated, 133 ; its treasures, 134-5 ; its bibliography, 135 ; its fame, 135-6.
Second term in New Zealand, 137 ; fails to avert war, 138 ; directs seizure of Tataraimaka, 142 ; new scheme of organizing Maoris, 139-41 ; scheme fails; 141-2 ; reputed author of war, 143-5 ; condominium (separate administration of Maoris) abandoned, 145-6 ; takes Weraroa, 147-50 ; breach with General Cameron, 150 ; hostile relations with Ministers, 151-5 ; friendly relations, 155 ; intervenes on behalf of Te Oriori, 152-3 ; friendly relations with Colonial Office, 153 ; hostile relations, 157-9 ; opposes extensive confiscation of Maori territory, 155 ; yields, 155-6 ; defies Colonial Office, 158-9 ; virtual recall, 159-60; departure from N.Z., 161-2.
Consulted by Imperial Government on N.Z., 165 ; its critical state, 164-5 ; dictatorship proposed, 165 ; condemned by Grey, 165.
Refused further employment by Colonial Office, 167 ; later, applies to be sent to S. Africa, 167 ; resorts to platform, 168 ; as an orator, 169-70 ; advocates scheme of emigration, 170-72 ; attracts Carlj'le, 172-3 ; candidate for Newark, 172-3; supported by Carlyle and E. Jenkins, 172-3; retires, 173 ; devises Home Rule scheme, 174 ; disowned by Liberal leaders, 175 ; literary and scientific associates, 176-8 ; leaves England, 176.
INDEX 231
Gbey, Sir George — C(ynt.
Returns to N.Z. and retires to Kawau, 179; life there, 179-81 ; enters House of Representatives, 182 ; opposes abolition of Provinces, 183, 185-6 ; proposes dichotomy, 184 ; appointed Premier, 186 ; his advanced policy, 187 ; asks for dissolution, refused, his resentment against Lord Normanby, 188 ; break-up of Jlinistry, 188 ; appointed Treasurer, 188-9 ; stumps Colony, 189 ; defeated in House, 189 ; resigns, 189 ; deposed from leader- ship, 190 ; his policy bills passed, 190-1 ; land scheme, 191 ; offered High Commissionership in King country, 192 ; refuses, 193 ; tries to form Ministry, 193 ; incessant attacks on Ministry, 193-4 ; Premier attacks Grey, 194 ; effect on Grey, 194 ; Grey's revenge, 194, 195-6 ; stumps Colony, 194 ; urges Seddon to accept Premiership, 196 ; re-elected to House, 206.
His Radicalism, 196-9; his rebellion, 199-202 ; his mutiny, 202-3.
Revisits Australia, 204 ; takes part in Federal Conference, 204-5 ; tours Australia, 205-6; returns to England, 207; welcomed and feted, 207-8; death, 209 ; buried iu St. Paul's, 209 ; his peers in death, 210.
His physique, 211 ; evolution of physiognomy, 212-3 ; health, 213 ; intellect, 214 ; an "inductive reasoner, 214-5 ; architectonic, 215 ; his imagination, 216-7 ; his culture, 217 ; character, 1, 2, 218; sympathetic, 219 ; tactful, 219-20; inscrutable, xi ; unclubbable, 220; humour, 220-1; passions, 221; religion, 221-4 ; an overman, 224-5 ; a maker of Australasia, 225-7.
Grey, Lady, wife of Sir Gewge, 13 ; separated from, 209 ; reconciled to, 208.
Grey, Major, brother of Sir George, resident of Greymouth, N.Z.
Grey, Mrs., mother of Sir George, 4.
Grey of Groby, Lord, reputed ancestor of Sir George, 4.
Heke, hone. Arrives at Ruapekapeka, 33 ; bequeaths land to Grey, 35.
HENDERSON, Prof. George. Life and Times of Orey, viii, ix.
Home, Sir Everard. In command at Ruapekapeka, 23-4 ; bequeathed books to
Grey, 35. Huxley, T. H., Grey's relations with, 117.
Indian !\Iutiny. Grey sends aid against, 115-21 ; levies troops, 116-7 ; imagines he diverts China Contingent, 117-20.
KAPRARIA, British, Grey's administration of, 97-100 ; administration of justice, 97-8 ; Native reserves, 98 ; schools, industrial and high, 98-9 ; hospitals built, 99-100 ; doubtfully successful, 100 ; public works, 100 ; cost of system, 104 ; Imperial subsidy reduced, 104 ; Grey's behaviour, 104 ; resiilts, 105.
KAWAU, Grey's island home. Retires thither, 179; an earthly paradise, 179-80 ; his Sabbatic period, 180-1 ; sells, in 1886-7 ; and thenceforth resides in Auckland.
KAWITI. Commands natives at Ruapekapeka, 33-5.
KOOTI, TE. Banished to Chatham Islands, 103; escapes, 164; lands at Gisborne and massacres, 164 ; excites panic, 164 ; proposed suspension of constitution, advocated by colonists, 164-5 ; dictatorship planned by Colonial Office, 165 ; deprecated by Grey, 165.
Land policy of Grey, 83-5, 191.
Lang, Dr. J. D. Indicts Anglican missionaries in N.Z., 47.
Lecky, W. E. H. Grey's intercourse with, 177.
232 INDEX
Lubbock, Sir J. Applies to Grey for information, 29.
Lyell, Sir C. Has scientific communication with Grey, 29.
Lyttblton, Lord. Attacks Grey, 96.
LYTTON, Sir E. Bulwer. Instructs Grey to devise S. African federation, 122 ; recalls and condemns Grey, 126.
Making, F. E. Account of taking of Ruapekapeka, 33.
Mill, J. S. Grey's intercourse with, 177.
Maori mythology, collected and translated by Grey, 66-9.
war in Auckland, 32-5; in Wellington, 35-40; in Wanganui, 41-2 ; in
Waikato, 143-56 ; its origin, 137-9 ; Grey fails to avert it, 138 ; surrender of Waitara, 142 ; seizure of Tataraimaka, 142 ; authorship of war, 143-5 ; defence of Orakau, 146-7 ; taking of Weraroa, 147-50 ; fizzles out, 156 ; struggle over confiscation of territory, 153-6 ; guerilla war, 162.
Maoris. Amalgamation with colonists advocated by Grey, 59-61 ; organized by Grey, 61-2 ; chiefs pensioned, 61 ; land policy, 61 ; Native police, 61 ; courts created, 61-2 ; hospitals set up, 62 ; education, literary and indus- trial, 62 ; employed on public works, 62-3 ; agriculture, 63 ; Grey's sym- pathy with, 64 ; new scheme of government devised by Grey, 138-41 ; proves abortive, 141 ; condominium established and abolished, 145-6.
Martin, Sir W., Chief Justice. Supports Grey in resisting proposed political constitution, 56-7 ; publishes pamphlet condemning confiscation proposals, 154.
Maunsell, Archdeacon. Supports Grey against Colonial Office.
Missionaries in N.Z. Their ideal, 42 ; a theocracy, 45 ; land purchases, 46-9 ; several dismissed, 49-50 ; their influence, 42 ; eulogized by Grey, 43.
Newcastle, Duke of. Refuses to meet Grey, 94 ; defends him, 95 ; appoints him to S. Africa, 96 : on confiscation, 154.
New Zealand Company. Its aims, 70 ; procedure, 71 ; pinioned by Governor Hobson, 71 ; land purchases, 71-2 ; embarrassments, 73 ; demise, 73 ; Grey's relations with, conflict, 39, 70, 73.
NORMANBY, Marquis of. Grey's relations with, 188.
Occupancy, Native right of, 53-5 ; iu England and India, 54-5 ; disputed by
Earl Grey, 55 ; advocated by Chief Justice Martin, 56-7. Orakau, defence of, 146-7.
ORIORI, TE, Grey intervenes on behalf of, 152-3. OTAGO Association, Grey's relations with, 75. OVERLANDERS. First described by Grey, 16-7, 25. Owen, Sir R. Receives natural-history collections from Grey, 29.
PAKINGTON, Sir J. Attacks Grey, 94-5. PEEL, Sir F. Defends Grey, 95.
RANGIHAEATA. His hostility to N.Z. colonists, 37; maintains guerilla war,
37, 40 ; submits, 40. RAUPARAHA, Te. Physiognomy, 35 ; character and history, 35 ; hostility
after Wairau massacre, 35-6 ; capture of by Grey, 37-8 ; ethics of capture,
38-9 ; effect of, 39-40 ; his forgiveness, 39-40. REES, W. L. Life of Sir Oeorge Grey, vii.-viii.
INDEX
233
RUAPEKAPEKA. Taking of, 33-4.
RUSDEN, G. W. His History of New Zealand characterized. RUSSELL, Lord J. Proposes Grey as Governor of S. Australia, 20 ; eulogizes him, 24.
SELWYN, Bisliop G. A. Introduced to Grey by Gladstone, 86 ; co-operates with
Grey against new constitution, 51, 55-7 ; encourages Grey, 87. SHEPSTONE, SirT. Proposes creation of Zidu province, 111-2; thwarted by
Grey, 114. Stafford Sir E. Attacks Grey, 76 ; claims Radical constitution, 79. STEPHEN, Sir J. Permanent Under-Secretary for Colonies. His character as
an official, 19 ; influence in appointing Grey to S. Australia, 19-20 ; to
N.Z. 30. STOKES, Commander. Condemns Grey's representation of W. Australia, 11. STOUT, Sir R. Appointed to Grey Ministry, 187 ; resigns, 188 ; attacks Grey
194 ; Grey's revenge, 194-6.
TAWHIAO, Maori " King." Confidence in Grey, 39 ; visits Grey, 39. TAYLOR, Sir H., Clerk in Colonial Office. His character and influence, 18-9. TAYLOR, Rev. R. H. His land purchases, 47. Thomas, Sir G. step-brother to Sir George, 5, 30.
WAKA Nene, aids British 41.
WAKEFIELD, E. G. and N.Z. Company, 70; instructs his brother about
missionaries, 42 ; enters N.Z. Legislature, 183. WANGANUI, war at, 40-1. Wareaitu, judically murdered, 42.
WELD, Sir P. Attacks Grey, 76 ; Premier, 155-6 ; Grey yields to him, 155-6. Wellington district, war in, 37-40. WERAROA, Grey takes, 147-50. WherO WHERO, Te. Aids British, 40. Williams, Archdeacon H. His treasonable letters, 43 ; land purchases 46-9
dismissed 45-6.
ZULU province, proposed by Shepstone, 11-2 ; defeated by Grey, 112-4.
printed bt Whitcombk and Tombs Limitbd
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