A change of Ministry only made matters worse. The first act of Lord Derby's new Government was to cut down the vote for Kaffraria without warning from £40,000 to £20,000. The expenditure had been authorised: £20,000 had been spent. What was to be done? Sir George was left with a province to administer, and not a penny piece with which to fulfil his treaty obligations and pay the salaries of the chiefs. Once more the Governor stepped into the breach, and redeemed the credit of the Queen's Government by paying £6,000 out of his own pocket. Two years elapsed before Downing Street, without any application on his part, refunded the money.

It is not surprising that Sir George Grey looked with scant sympathy upon the arrangement by which the Boers had been allowed to establish two slave States under the disguise of Republics in the heart of the South African continent. He reported truthfully to Downing Street that the Sand River Convention and the deed constituting the Orange Free State amounted to a declaration on the part of the English that they abandoned the coloured races to the mercy of the two Republics, and he warned the Imperial Government that the interests of Britain would suffer from such disregard of engagements solemnly entered into. A warning the justification of which, if other justification be wanting, the evidence in the Jameson trial supplies only too well.

Downing Street does not love to have Cassandras in its service, and the strained relations between the Colonial Office and its brilliant and successful Colonial Governor daily became more difficult. It was at first hoped to provoke him into resignation. But behind the Colonial Office Sir George Grey saw Her Majesty, and his loyalty to the Queen forbade his taking offence at the censures and insults of Downing Street. "I have only remained here," he wrote, "because I thought I was useful to Her Majesty and to my country." If they wished to get rid of him they must tell him so frankly. They did not do so then, but they bided their time. They worried him about trifles-refusing, for instance, to pay for two thousand pairs of boots for the German Legion that he raised to safeguard Bombay. He groaned in spirit, but he consoled himself, as many a man has done before him, by the thought that, though Downing Street might be intolerable, not even Downing Street should drive him from the service of the Queen. He wrote :—

"I am here beset by cares and difficulties which occupy my mind incessantly and wear out my health. I feel that I have conducted Her Majesty's affairs for the advantage of her service and the welfare of her subjects, whose love, gratitude, and loyalty I have secured for the Queen, and I certainly feel it hard that the reward I should receive should be to have my spirit broken by having accounts which I feel are entitled to the approval of Her Majesty's Government disallowed, thus throwing me into new difficulties; and that this should be done in the uncourteous way it is, and in letters which as an old and loyal Government servant sorely wounds my feelings, is still worse.'

It was indeed well for Britain as well as for Africa that there was over and above the discourteous and unsympathetic officials the Lady of the Land, diligently reading all his despatches, and heartily sympathising with her gallant knight in the midst of his difficulties with Downing Street.

But the end was near at hand. In response to a request from the Colonial Office, Sir George Grey drew up a despatch, in which he set forth with lucidity and earnestness the truth about South Africa. He tore to ribbons the Colonial Office fiction that South Africa was worthless, that its people were disaffected, and that the best thing for Britain was to abandon the continent. "The countries which lie beyond the Orange River," he wrote, “are very fertile and productive. Some of them are so to the highest degree. Their extent may be said to be boundless, and in many portions they are capable of carrying a very dense population." In opposition to the Colonial Office policy of shunting the white States and governing the Kaffirs by the sword, Sir George expounded the opposite policy of federating the whole of the South African States and civilising the natives.

This was at the end of September, 1858. A few months later the Volksraad of the Free State passed a resolution in favour of union or alliance with the Cape. In 1859 Sir George communicated the resolution of the Volksraad to the Cape Parliament, suggesting that they should devise a form of feudal union without which the South African States could hope neither for safety nor success.

He was at once rebuked by the Colonial Office, and when he explained and defended his action he was recalled. But the story of that recall and of its sequel bears so directly upon the relation of the Queen to the Empire that it must be told in some detail.

DEA EX MACHINÂ.

VI. THE QUEEN AS Downing Street had its chance at last. "The dangerous man" at the Cape had committed the unpardonable sin―he had dared to advocate the federation of Colonies and States which it was the fixed idea of the Colonial Office not to federate but to abandon. "You have committed yourself to a policy of which Her Majesty's Government disapprove on a subject of the first importance."

That charge was true. They were for disintegration, he was for consolidation. They were for scuttling out of South Africa, he was for laying broad and deep the foundations of an Empire worthy of Britain and her Queen. They were confident that South Africa was a waste and howling wilderness that would hardly keep halfstarved antelopes, and that was haunted by rebellious Boers and irreclaimable savages whom it was not worth powder and shot to keep in order. He knew that it was a fertile domain, rich in minerals, fat with pasture, the destined home of millions of the English race, Their one idea was to shake off all responsibility for the white States and reduce all responsibility for the government of the natives to a minimum of territory in which rudimentary order was maintained by a military garrison. He was for shouldering responsibility, performing duty, federating the European States, and preparing for an indefinite expansion northward of the approval of tribes anxious to share the blessings of civilisation. The two were as opposed as light and darkness, Ahriman and Ormuzd. It was the Little Englander versus the Imperialist, the scuttler against the expander. No wonder then that when the scuttlers and Little Englanders entrenched in Downing Street found that this "dangerous man," who had saved India by his reinforcements at the same time that he had pacified Africa by his presence, was now on the eve of uniting the whole of Austral Africa in a self-governed Federation, the decree went forth that the axe must fall, and that the too-successful Governor must be recalled.

Lytton the novelist was Colonial Secretary. The Under-Secretary was Carnarvon, who, twenty years later, was to endeavour in vain to carry out the Federation Sir George Grey was on the point of completing. The Earl of Derby, the Rupert of debate, was Prime Minister. His son, Lord Stanley, had been at the Colonial Office and had done his fair share of worrying the Governor. When it was decided that Downing Street must be avenged, and that Sir George Grey must go, the Cabinet was confronted by the opposition of the Queen. Her Majesty and the Prince Consort made no secret of the fact that they sympathised entirely with Sir George Grey and not at all with his assailants in high places. But officialdom was not to be denied. The decree was passed by the Cabinet. But it was necessary to secure the Royal assent. The circumstances were so critical that the Prime Minister, accom→ panied by the Clerk of the Council, himself waited upon the Queen at Windsor in order to communicate to her the unwelcome news.

The Queen was indignant. Nor did she refrain from expressing herself freely to the Minister who demanded so shameful a sacrifice. Her Majesty, as more than one

E

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of her Ministers has reason to remember, is capable of expressing her convictions with emphasis and pungency. On the present occasion Lord Derby had a very stiff time of it. Her Majesty protested against the dismissal of a Governor whose sole offence was his loyalty to the Empire. It was a monstrous and unprecedented thing that a representative of the Crown who had succeeded in accomplishing everything given him to do should be cashiered because he proposed to do more than any one had believed to be possible. What the Queen actually said is not on record. But Mr. Greville's account of what Lord Derby told him when the long interview was over gives us a sufficient hint as to the nature of the Queen's remonstrances. "The great services which Sir George had rendered, especially in the late trying crisis in Imperial affairs,

had disposed her strongly in his favour, and it was with feelings of repugnance that she contemplated his removal." Sir George Grey in his final despatch probably expressed much the same thing as was uttered by the Queen when he wrote: "If Her Majesty's possessions and Her Majesty's subjects are saved from threatening dangers, and Ministers gratefully acknowledge this, whilst the Empire receives no hurt, is it a fitting return that the only reward he should receive should be the highest punishment which it is in the power of Her Majesty's Ministers to inflict?"

Lord Derby, however, was obdurate. Ministers in full Cabinet had decided Sir George must go, and he must insist. Of course when a Minister insists the Sovereign has no alternative but to submit if she is not prepared to receive his resignation. Sorely against her will, and vigorously expressing her repugnance to the unjust act,

Her Majesty gave way.

But as Lord Derby travelled back to town he was gloomy and reserved. When they parted at the station Lord Derby said, "I am afraid that we have done a bad thing to-day in recalling Sir George Grey from the Cape." Bad day's work it was; but Downing Street, exultant, lost no time in recalling Sir George, in order, as it was expressly declared, that they might more effectually retrace the steps which he had taken towards federation.

When the news of the summary dismissal of Sir George became known in the Colony which he had governed with such brilliant success for five years, "the tidings staggered and excited the country from one end to the other." Blacks and whites, English and Dutch, alike bewailed the arbitrary removal of the ablest Governor the

Colony had ever seen.

EARL OF DERBY, K.G.
(Engraved from a photograph by Mayall.)

Petitions were signed everywhere praying for his restoration. The petition of the Fingoes to the Great Queen Victoria declared :

:

"To day our hearts weep; they are dead because of this. We say, Has, our Queen forsaken us or not? Having deprived us of our father, we are now orphans indeed.' throw us away. Regard our prayer and send back our chief, that he may and comfort us by taking away our crying."

No, our Great Queen, don't again come and live with us,

The same kind of thing was said, in more restrained English fashion, by every one in the Colony. But the despatch of the Colonial Office was decisive. Sir George Grey broke up his establishment and sailed for England.

And then it was that a strange thing happened. For even while Sir George Grey was penning his final despatch on July 30th, 1859, the whole scene had changed. Lord Derby's Government, defeated in the Commons, had ceased to exist. After much consultation and intriguing, Lord Palmerston was installed as Prime Minister The Colonial Office was entrusted to the Duke of Newcastle. Then it was that Her

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Majesty, seeing her opportunity, seized it with right hearty goodwill. When the Duke received the seals of office the Queen urged him at once to cancel the orders issued by his predecessor for the recall of Sir George Grey. The Queen was urgent and insistent. The Duke was personally favourable to Sir George, whom he had originally appointed Governor. Hence it was his first official act to write to Cape Town, August 5th, re-appointing Sir George Grey to the Governorship.

Sir George, however, was by this time on the sea. It was not until he reached England that he heard the news of his re-appointment. It was later still that he had the supreme gratification of hearing that this act was due to the direct personal intervention of Her Majesty. Not in vain had the poor Fingoes expressed their confidence in " our great Queen Victoria." Even before their petition reached her hands she had anticipated their wish and restored to South Africa the Governor of the Queen.

Now Sir George Grey was re-appointed, but not even the utmost influence of the Queen and the Prince Consort could induce the hidebound Little Englanders of that day to permit him to crown his good work in South Africa by achieving the Federation for which we are now praying in vain. To all his representations the Cabinet was obdurate; the condition of his re-appointment was the abandonment of the cause of Federation. Only the Queen was for it. Oh, if Her Majesty could but have had her way! Alas! it was forbidden, and through a long and dolorous way we have had to tread as the result of the popular folly of those days.

There is no question as to the attitude of the Queen in this case, for all the facts are on record. Who can say how many blunders she may have averted of which the world hears nothing, and will hear nothing? It was the greatest of chances that we ever heard of this. Sir George Grey, being now an old and privileged person, has told the story himself. Even if exception may be taken to it in detail, there is no question as to the substantial accuracy of the leading features of this remarkable narrative. The broad facts are these. Downing Street, representing the officials and politicians chosen by the vote of the people, did all that could be done to hamper and at last to cashier one of the ablest and most brilliant Colonial Governors, in order that it might be free to fling away our Imperial heritage in South Africa. But while Downing Street was playing this game of treason to the Empire, the Monarch was counteracting, so far as personal influence could go, the fatal policy of disruption and dismemberment. It was her praise which sustained the daring pro-consul in his administration of peaceful union, and it was her will, emphatically expressed at the fortunate moment, that succeeded in reversing the decision of the Colonial Office and in reappointing in August a Colonial Governor cashiered in July. History, with this narrative before it, will not have much difficulty in deciding whether it was the Sovereign, or the politicians elected by the constituencies, who deserved best of the Empire.

When Sir George Grey came to London, he had ample opportunity of learning who had been the friends of the Empire and who its foes from the personages themselves. Mr. Rees says:

"Sir George Grey was received with great cordiality and kindness both by the Queen and Prince Albert. The Prince informed him of Her Majesty's approval of the measures taken by him, and the policy of confederation which he had pursued, expressing without hesitation her opinion that the plans proposed were beneficent, worthy of a great ruler, honourable to herself, and advantageous to her people.

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Before his departure to resume the duties of his Governorship, Sir George had opportunities of seeing and conversing with the Prince Consort. In Albert the Good he found an earnest sympathy both with the colonies and colonists, and he was beyond measure pleased to be told by the Prince that, in his opinion, if a nation ceased to take a real interest in every part of its dominions, and to do all the good it could on the outskirts of its power, it would be like a tree which had ceased to grow-the time of decay would have commenced. He perfectly agreed with Sir George's views as to opening up new country. He said that he and the Queen had read all that Sir George had written on the subject, and that it was greatly to the Queen's regret that she had been led to consent to his recall, and that she had done much to get that decision reversed."