secured his reappointment by a new Ministry even before he had set foot on his native shores. It is a wonderful story, and yet it is one which nearly every one has forgotten -this famous and fateful tale of the struggle between Downing Street and Windsor Castle. And as it has been so completely forgotten, and as the old problem of the Empire has just now re-emerged with almost unaltered features, I cannot do better as a contribution to a truer appreciation of the value of the Queen to the Empire than to tell, however briefly, the story of Sir George Grey.

III. SIR GEORGE GREY.

There have been in the Victorian era two Sir George Greys. One, he of Falloden, at one time Home Secretary, is now represented in the House by Sir Edward Grey, the most promising—but for his indolence—of all the younger Liberals. The other, the Sir George Grey-" the God's Englishman" of whom Olive Schreiner wrote—is still with us, old and well stricken in years. He was born in 1813, a few months after his father, Colonel Grey, had fallen at the head of the forlorn hope that stormed the fatal breach of Badajoz. After a brilliant career at Sandhurst, he entered the army when eighteen, and before he attained his majority he had received so deep an impression of the misery and destitution prevailing in Ireland and in some parts of Great Britain, that he turned with passionate longing to the promise of a brighter and happier future in the unpeopled fields of the Greater Britain beyond the seas. He had not long to wait for an opportunity of service in the Colonies. Lord Glenelg sent him out when only twenty-five years old as the head of a small expedition of exploration in Western Australia. He was lying at Plymouth waiting for H.M.S. Beagle to start on its voyage for New Holland when King William died and Victoria was proclaimed Queen. Her Majesty's proclamation was dated just nine days after the issue of Sir George Grey's commission. He carried out his mission with such distinguished success, in the face of such imminent perils by sea and land, that no one was surprised when in 1841 he was appointed the first Governor of the Colony of South Australia. He was only twenty-eight. As the Queen was the youngest of our Queens, so Sir George Grey was the youngest of our Colonial Governors. The experiment was justified by its results. "In South Australia he had found discontent, mutiny, want, despair; he had left, after four years of patient and unremitting toil, contentment, peaceful industry, and prosperity." So successful was he, indeed, that at the end of the four years, when the state of New Zealand left Britain apparently face to face with "the abandonment of the island in disgrace or the extermination of their aboriginal inhabitants," Sir George Grey was dispatched with a free hand to restore peace and order. His success here also was phenomenal, almost miraculous. "Sir George Grey found New Zealand in a position of imminent peril; he left it in perfect safety. He came to it at the crisis of a savage war; he left it in profound peace. On his arrival it was bankrupt; on his departure it was solvent and flourishing." Lord Grey, then Colonial Secretary, declared that “the contrast between the state of things at the end of 1830 and that which he found existing on his arrival at the end of the year 1845, is so marked and so gratifying that it is difficult to believe that so great a change should have been accomplished in the short space of five years."

Nevertheless, when Sir George Grey came home, the Colonial Secretary would not see him. He was in disgrace because, forsooth, he had dared to suspend an Act of Parliament, passed in ignorance by the Legislature at Westminster, which would have broken faith with the natives, dishonoured Britain, and precipitated a bloody war. His action was condoned by Parliament, but the Colonial Office never forgave him for his bold, uncompromising assertion of the necessity for allowing the Governors of distant colonies a certain suspensory power over the Acts of the Imperial Parliament.

His words are significant and very much to the point :-"When Parliament, for want of sufficient information, legislates wrongfully or unjustly for a distant nation subject. to its laws-unless the high officers of the Empire will take the responsibility by delaying to act until they receive further instructions--the Empire cannot be held together. . . . In declining, therefore, to break promises which I had made as Her Majesty's representative . . . I felt that I did my duty as a faithful servant of my Queen and country, and will cheerfully undergo every risk and punishment which may follow from my having

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vaal, and in 1853, still bent on the policy of reducing the burdens
they insisted that the Orange Free State must also be abandoned. As there was
opposition on the part of the Colonists who clung to their unnatural mother-
country, a bribe of £5,000 was employed to secure their acquiescence, and on
March 11th, 1854, the English flag was hauled down. Delegates were then on their
way to London protesting against this surrender, but Downing Street declared it
was too late. "The authority of the Queen had been already too far extended.
England could not supply troops to maintain constantly advancing outposts. So far

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as South Africa was concerned, this reasoning was unanswerable, as Cape Town and the harbour of Table Bay were all that Great Britain really required there."

And yet at that very moment Downing Street was drifting headlong into a mad and insensate war with Russia, in which, before it was ended, more English soldiers lost their lives than would have enabled us to have policed all South Africa from the Cape to the Zambesi. Nations, like individuals, occasionally go mad, and seldom was there a more startling illustration of this fact than the pinch-penny chuck-farthing policy enforced in South Africa, at the very moment when tens of thousands of lives and a hundred millions of treasure were being lavished on the worse than purposeless war undertaken in defence of the unspeakable Turk.

The moment he set foot

Sir George Grey went out to the Cape as Governor. in South Africa he applied himself to the redress of grievances. His first act was thoroughly characteristic. Everywhere he found disbanded Hottentot soldiers were centres of disaffection. Inquiring as to the cause of this, he discovered that Downing Street had, in fact, cheated these poor fellows of three-quarters of the pension which they had been promised. Forthwith the honest Governor issued a proclamation in the Queen's name, promising the Hottentot soldiers that, out of the love borne them by Her Most Gracious Majesty, she had determined that the exact amount promised should be paid, and that all arrears should be settled if claimed before a certain date. The Cape Parliament raised the money needed, all Hottentot disaffection ceased as by magic, the Queen was delighted; but Downing Street was furious. It had practically been proclaimed in the Queen's name as a promisebreaker; and although the charge was true, the greater the truth the greater the libel, and the blacker the mark which Colonial officialdom put against the name of the "prancing proconsul." He did not mend matters by his next action. Theophilus Shepstone had secured the provisional approval of the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, and, through him, of Downing Street, for a great concession, by virtue of which he would have established himself as a subsidised but independent king of a great Zulu settlement, which he proposed to form in No Man's Land, a fertile hill country lying between Natal and British Kaffraria. Sir George Grey roundly condemned the whole transaction, and convinced even the Colonial Office that it must be stopped, and stopped it was.

Having thus brushed away the perils threatening the peace and security of South Africa, Sir George set himself diligently to pacify and to civilise the great region committed to his care. In these years of patient justice-doing and civilising labour in the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey laid the foundations of the prestige which subsequently facilitated the northern extension of the Empire under the Chartered Company to beyond the Zambesi. By utilising the agency of the magistrate, the missionary, the schoolmaster, and the trader, the Governor, who ruled almost as dictator in the name of the Queen, succeeded in establishing throughout the tribes in South Africa a deeprooted confidence in the justice and love of the Queen. As the Fingoes said in a petition to the Crown, "We are a blessed people under Queen Victoria. We are like children who have a father in all things to preserve, feed and help them." No man knew better than Sir George Grey how to utilise the native sense of reverence and loyalty to a person by ever putting the Queen's majesty in the forefront. He was the representative of the crown, acting for and by the express authority of the Queen. All that he did of good he represented as coming from the love and goodness of the White Queen beyond the Seas. And as a result he succeeded in impressing upon the mind of the natives of South Africa a living conception of the existence of a beneficent semi-divine Terrestrial Providence beyond the black water, which has been no small element in securing the tranquility of our possessions and the readiness of the

tribes beyond our border to submit to the civilising sovereignty of the Queen's rule.

Forty years and more have passed since Sir George Grey first inoculated the black man with a vivid though vague sense of the Queen's love and the Queen's power. But to this day the Great Idea operates like a magic charm in many a Kaffir kraal. It was to see the Queen that Lobengula sent his Envoys; to see the Queen that Khama and his brother chiefs journeyed to London town. The Queen has no sovereignty over the Transvaal that can be helpful to the poor Kaffirs who were handed over to be dealt with as goods and chattels by the Boers; but not even the infamy of our double desertion has eradicated from the native mind the suggestion that the Queen is the friend and helper of the black man, a very present help in any time of trouble. In the mines of the Rand so well is this known that I have been told by residents in Johannesburg that one of the familiar dodges of unscrupulous speculators who wish to limit the output of gold, is to spread abroad in the native quarters the report that the Queen is dead. On the day after that ill rumour circulates among the Kaffirs no native will venture into the mines. For deep in the recesses of his simple mind the news fills him with a sense of gloom. It is as if the sun were eclipsed in mid-heaven, or as our ancestors phrased it in the evil days of Stephen, as if God and his Saints were dead. The shadow of personal loss, of an extinguishing of one of the confidences which are as the lamps of life, lies heavy on the untutored toiler when he hears the cruel lie that "the Queen is dead," and sometimes days elapse before he can be induced to resume his work.

The influence which the Queen exercises over native tribes is by no means confined to South Africa. Mr. Castell Hopkins remarks that "it is, indeed, a question if the Queen's name is not better known and more important to large masses of the world's population, than of the name of the country over which she primarily reigns.” He quotes as illustrating this the address which a Maori Chief presented to Sir George Bowen in 1869

"O my guests," said Kawana Hunia, of the Ngatiapis, “she is our Queen as well as your Queen— Queen of Maoris and Queen of Pakeha. Should wars arise we will take up our rifles and march withersoever she shall direct. My cousin Wiremu went to England and saw our Queen. He returned. When you landed in this island he was already dead. He died fighting for our Queen. As he died we will die, if need be--I and all my chiefs. This do you tell our Queen. I have said."

This impression, so beneficial to the security of the Empire, was not produced by acquiescing in the prejudices or tolerating the cruel customs of the savages. Sir George Grey was a propagandist of civilization to his finger-tips. While in South Africa he suppressed witch-doctors, that murderous tyranny; he undermined and supplanted without bloodshed the power of the savage chiefs, and in order to win the natives from faith in the efficacy in witchcraft, he founded the Grey Hospital, utilising as builders of this beneficent institution the soldiers who, in the profound peace which his policy secured, were no longer needed for operations of war. This hospital, where black and white received equal care, attention, and comfort, has been for nearly half a century a great object-lesson to the native as to the science and the benevolence of the Queen's rule.

There was one fierce rally on the part of the Kaffir chiefs againt the civilising sovereignty which was reducing lawless despots to the level of British citizens. Inspired by a native girl, who appears to have been a trance medium able to give tests as to the reality of her communication with the spirits of departed chiefs, 200,000 of the Kaffirs, including 60,000 fighting men, slaughtered their cattle, burnt their crops, and prepared to launch their whole force upon the Cape Colony. Sir George captured all the chiefs, and the leaderless horde, incapable of aggression, perished of starvation

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in the midst of a self-created wilderness. Sir George Grey did what he could to rescue the remnant of the force which had menaced him with destruction. Migration was organized, public works instituted, taxes were levied, and the Queen's writ ran everywhere in Kaffraria, where but a few months before 60,000 men were banded together to loot the colony and massacre the colonists.

IV. THE QUEEN'S APPROBATION.

It was almost immediately after the pacification of Kaffraria that Sir George Grey came upon the supreme moment of his destiny. One such moment comes to all of us, but seldom do we rise to meet it with such prompt heroic resolve as did Sir George Grey. In the month of August, 1857, a steamer touched at the Cape bringing the Governor a despatch from Lord Elphinstone reporting the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny. It is difficult to us, who have the memory of the mutiny ever at the back of our minds, to realise the absolute disbelief which prevailed fifty years ago as to the possibility of any danger. John Bull was so absolutely certain that the Sepoys would be true to their salt, that when the mutiny broke out he had only 40,000 white soldiers in all India and 250,000 Sepoys. During the Crimean War there had been a noisy agitation against the Government for not recalling all the white garrison from India in order to reinforce the trenches before Sebastopol! Hence it was some time before the public at home realised what the rising at Meerut and the fall of Delhi meant. Fortunately the Governor of the nearest British colony was a man of ready wit and keen imagination. Sir George Grey saw in a moment that our Indian Empire was shaken to its base, and that unless instant help could be given the British would be driven into the sea, and without hesitation he decided to denude the Cape of its garrison and military stores and send every available soldier in hot haste to India. In three days after receiving the terrible news a man-of-war and three transports sailed from the Cape for Calcutta. Salus populi suprema lex. The Empire in India was in danger. Everything depended upon the immediate reinforcement of its small and hard-pressed garrison. Sir George Grey did not hesitate. Had Sir George Grey flinched from assuming the responsibility he shouldered without hesitation we might have had to reconquer India from the sea.*

Sir George Grey reported his act to the Home Government. The Colonial Secretary expressed the greatest satisfaction; but what was much more acceptable was the communication in which the Colonial Secretary wrote as follows:

"October 20, 1857.

"In writing to me on the subject of your last despatch, the Queen has commanded me to express to you in a private letter her high personal appreciation of your services, and her gratification at the loyalty of her subjects at the Cape.' You will at the same time receive Her Majesty's approbation of the measures you have adopted in an official form.”

Here we have an instance of the way in which the eye of the Sovereign cheers and encourages her agents. The influence which Westminster Abbey has in stimulating patriotism and in unifying the sentiment of race is well known. The Queen is a living influence of the same kind, and as much superior to that of the Abbey as life is superior to death. The Queen's approbation, expressed in a thousand cases of which the world hears nothing, is to her subjects more, much more, than the formal thanks of Parliament or the approval of their official superiors.

* Lord Loch, who was on Lord Elgin's staff in 1857, has written to me pointing out that it is a mistake to believe that Sir George Grey had the honour and responsibility of diverting the troops destined for China to the seat of war in India. The statement is made in Rees's "Life of Sir George Grey," from which I quoted it in the Review, but a comparison of dates shows that Mr. Rees had been misinformed. Sir George Grey has no reason to grudge to Lord Elgin his fair share in sending the reinforcements which saved India.