SIR GEORGE GREY.
SIR GEORGE GREY, who died on Saturday, was the last survivor of the band of Whig statesmen who possessed an almost unbroken monopoly of power from 1832 till 1867. A near kinsman of Lord Grey, and 'possessing the further advantages of University distinction, legal experience, and con-
siderable rhetorical powers, he entered the Reformed House of Commons under the most favourable auspices, and found the way to office rapid and smooth. From 1834 onwards, his name is to be found with unfailing regularity in the list of every Liberal Ministry, until Mr, Disraeli put an end to the supremacy of the ten-pounders, and revolutionised the condi- tions of English political life. The early years of Sir George Grey's Ministerial career wore spent at the Colonial Office, which he represented in the House'of Commons during the Melbourne Administration, and it was acknowledged on all hands that he discharged with spirit and skill the thankless task of justi- fying mistakes and excusing indiscretions which the incom- petence of his official chief, Lord Glenelg, perpetually cast upon him. It was not, however, till the return of the Whigs to office in 1846 that Sir George Grey found the place for which he was best fitted, and which he afterwards filled by a kind of prescriptive title, with a few brief interruptions, for twenty years. The post of Home Secretary is one in which few reputations have been made, and not a few have been lost. Sir George Grey occupied it both in troubled and in quiet times, and showed himself equally qualified for the cool manipu- lation of emergencies, and for the humdrum business of routine administration. In 1848, the year of revolutions, when the menaces of the Chartists and the panic of the London middle- class would have driven many a statesman to a fussy display of exaggerated vigour, with the phlegm of a true Whig he. never lost his head for a moment, but laid his plans with a quiet and unobtrusive firmness which was infinitely more dis- concerting, and before which the whole danger melted as if by magic into thin air. The ignominious collapse of Feargus. O'Connor and his followers on the 10th April, 1848, was un- questionably the most dramatic triumph in Sir George Grey's administrative career ; but he exhibited for many years the same cold and yet strenuous effectiveness, in all the multifari- ous duties of an office of which no one in our time has had so complete a mastery. It is, indeed, as the typo of a class of administrative statesmen in which the Whig party has been especially fertile, rather than for any brilliant personal qualities of his own, that Sir George Grey will be remembered. He was a fluent and forcible speaker, and could always hold his own in debate, but has no claim to a place among the orators of his day. His name is not associated with any im-
portant legislative measure, and he seems to have kept steadily aloof from the popular movements of his time. In neither of the groat political achievements of the era between the two Reform Acts—the reform of corporate institutions and the re- construction of our fiscal system—did he take any conspicuous part. Like most of the Whig leaders, fiona Lord John Russell downwards, he was only converted to Free-trade at the eleventh hour. The old Whig formula of "civil and religious ‘1.1.berty " appears to have summed up his political creed, and AI/ was only nly upon questions which put it directly to the
ch, for instance, as the endowment of Maynooth, the emancipation of the Jews, or the simplification of the Parliamentary oath—that ho showed anything like seat enthusiasm for legislative reform. Although he retained his in the House of Commons till 1874, his active career came to an end with the passing of the second Reform Act, i and it is tolerably certain that he would not have found him- self at home in a Cabinet which g Cab' t ' h had Mr. Gladstone for its
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head, and Mr. Bright for one of its members. Indeed, both his ideas and his sympathies lay within such a narrowly cir- cumsoribed range, that it seems at first sight difficult to believe that he was regarded by successive Premiers as an indispensable colleague, and that his name was not unfrequently mentioned as that of a possible leader of the Liberal Party. The ex- planation is that Sir George Grey possessed qualities which in the every-day work of Government are as useful and almost as rare as Mr. Disraeli's power of re-creating a de- moralised party, or Mr. Gladstone's of attracting and swaying the enthusiasm of the people. It would be absurd to compare Sir George Grey in point of originality with Mr. Lowe, or of profundity with Sir Cornewall Lewis, or of culture with Sidney Herbert ; yet he was a more successful administrator than any of them. With no ambitious dreams to distract him, and few extraneous interests to divert or divide his attention, his whole powers were concentrated on the work of his office, and the consequence was that the resources of his cool and resolute sagacity were always available, whether to deal with the trumpery details or to confront the graver crises of administrative work.
It is impossible to escape the suspicion that the type of statesman of which Sir George Grey was an example, and of which, in varying degrees of capacity, the early years of the present reign afforded many instances, is growing far rarer than it used to be. We do not, of course, mean to suggest that either party is lacking in men of considerable administrative talent. But the conditions under which political life is carried on have been so largely transformed, that there is some danger lest men like Sir George Grey, who are administrators pure and simple, should find the avenues to the higher official posts closed to them. Administrative experience is no longer a necessary passport to a seat in the Cabinet, and each Premier in turn finds that he has fewer places to dispose of to states- men who have no other recommendation. To a large extent, no doubt, this is the result of the democratising of politics which has gone on ever since Mr. Disraeli gave us household suffrage, which compels mon in the position of Lord Salisbury and Sir S. Northcote to devote their autumn holiday to platform-speaking, and which secures for speakers like Sir W. Harcourt and Mr. Lowther, who have caught and can keep the ear of the people, a substantial share in the good things of official life. And if the conditions under which administrators of Sir George Grey's type came to the front no longer exist, neither, it would seem, do the men who would be moulded as he was by them. The cool, practical dexterity, and the clear, though contracted vision, which were united in him with such strong party fidelity and such a limited political ideal, form a combination which was not uncommon among the abler of the young Whigs of fifty years ago, but which is not often to be met with now. Whether the wider sympathies and more varied interests of the new type of Liberal statesmen will be found to yield equally good fruit in the purely administrative field, we feel by no means sure.
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