LORD MIN TO.

Lord Minto. By John Buchan. (Nelson. 21e.)

IN this age so many men have fought battles or directed events which have affected the world that it is difficult to focus attention on any biography, but Mr. Buchan has added a charming and forceful personality to our gallery of Empire. In a brief space he depicts the triumph of character and tradition which brought the two highest Imperial offices in the gift of the Crown to a man known only as a sportsman and a solidier, who, to use his own phrase, had spent some intervening years in pursuits "which led nowhere."

The achievement gives scope to Mr. Buchan's gifted pen. The rollicking freebooters of the Border and Minto's immediate Whig progenitors are given their share of the credit for the shrewdness and cheerful suavity which had to do duty for administrative experience and intellectual training. The Elliots had filled no inconsiderable space in history. Minto's great-grandfather, the Governor-General, had served many offices ; he had helped to impeach Warren Hastings ; he was the friend of Burke ; he had stood at the bar of the House of Commons with Mirabeau and had entertained him at Minto to the perturbation of Lady Elliot's household staff. Minto had no such claims. The new Democracy, which denies to the human being those advantages of breeding which govern racehorses and pedigree stock, would regard it as pure coincidence that out of twenty-nine Viceroys of India, Lords Elgin and Hardinge, besides Minto, could point to predecessors who had filled that office. But Minto had not even the usual training for high office which was a sine qua non in the Vic- torian era, when if good horsemanship, keen soldiering and agreeable manners had been sufficient credentials, Whitehall would have been in a state of siege if there svas a place to give away.

The memoir deals with a novel situation and commends Itself by its balance. Like Trevelyan's " Macaulay " and Churchill's "Lord Randolph," it notes defects and spares us lengthy developments. We cannot in 1924 find time for exhaustive details of policy even if the protagonists be Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. Character has an interest more abiding than State papers. Minto gave up some years to the Turf ; Mr. Buchan shows us what the Turf can do in training character. In no form of sport is the margin between straight dealing and foul play so narrow and yet so clearly defined. Its votaries have clear-cut views of conduct. Thirty years ago Lord William Beresford was the doyen of the Turf in India. Of ordinary business he kriew nothing, but on returning to England he was induced to join the boards of the Whitaker Wright companies. He promptly scented irregu- larities and withdrew his name. "I don't understand it," he said, "but it's not straight." Minto, aeLord Morley said of him, avoided dangerous paths "as an elephant declines to put his feet on rotten ground."

His military career showed a like singlemindedness. The drybones of soldiering which led to ordinary promotion depressed him. He was only happy when with Wolseley in Egypt, Roberts in India, or anywhere that quick decisions had to be taken or hard fighting had to be done. He had a dis- taste almost amounting to contempt for the twists and turns of Parliamentary life, at a time when so far as foreign rela- tions, national economy and civil progress are a guide, Great Britain's system of government was unchallenged. We like him all the better for the frank avowal of a weakness which a subtler man would have exhausted himself to conceal.

Mr. Buchan's book will appeal to all sorts and conditions of men. To those who loved Minto, and they were many, he presents the record of an unselfish life, unspotted by the world. To those who believe that the foundations of the British Empire are based not on statesmanship but on character, he shows the resource which a country gentleman with Turf and Army training may bring to bear on the highest positions. Many who have held with the late Lord Salisbury that a man who has popular manners and gives good dinners can discharge the functions of a Constitutional Viceroy will learn from Minto's life that the greatest attribute of a Governor is to be able to interpret to Great Britain the ideals and aims of a Dominion, and conversely to interpret to the Dominion the difficulties and intricacies of the Mother Country.

In view of the present tendency to appoint " show " Governors to the most important posts, this lesson may be considered specially appropriate. Indeed, of all doctrines one of the strangest is that a Constitutional Governor-General with his limited powers has no influence on policy. The very reverse is the fact. Colonial statesmen are called to the helm with very brief experience. The stronger the Minister the more anxious he is to avail himself of the knowledge of an eminent and unbiassed outsider, whose counsel, however veiled, may, like that of Civil Servants in this country, have far-reaching effect.

Minto did not easily pass through the Whitehall sieve to Canada. Mr. Chamberlain,- then Colonial Secretary, asked pertinently, "What qualification has he for the post beyond any other popular Peer ? " His record of influence on military affairs in Canada, when Military Secretary to Lord Lansdowne twelve years before, stood him in good stead, but on appointment the supreme position and qualities of Sir Wilfrid Laurier set off his inexperience.

Like Mr. Chamberlain, who averred "lie had learned more between sixty and seventy than in any previous ten years," Minto "swelled visibly." As his Viceroyalty went on he was forced more than once to play a strong hand, even to trying a fall with the great Laurier himself. But he earned from him in the end the unique commendation, "Lord Minto was very stiff, but he was the most Constitutional Governor we ever had."

Despite the great popularity attained by both Lord and Lady Minto in Canada, the appointment to India in 1905 was even more remarkable. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the lamentable situation which caused the retirement of Lord Curzon from the Viceroyalty, but Mr. Buchan has perhaps hardly done justice to the gap left whet that masterful influence and powerful brain was withdrawn. Moreover, if centralization was to be drastically curtailed, the task was one challenging the widest official experience. Two or three of those statesmen most qualified for the appointment were unavailable. Minto was known to be courageous and sedative, but he was as little equipped for the task as an amateur for a contest with a trained athlete. He was in truth a very dark horse, preoccupied with Canadian rather than Indian models, and in literary equipment deficient" in style. The record of his government is the more remarkable.

At first he was almost "snowed under" by papers. Ms tendency to put questions aside for the nonce was the despair of officiala accustomed to the direct and trenchant activities of Lord Curzon. But. gradually his horses came back to him. He conunandedeonfidence ainOng eoilettgiret and sabordinaths; he inspired affection amongst native Princes ; above all.

he tactfully and resourcefully dealt with the autocrat who sat at the London end of the cable.

To the political world it will come with a thunderclap to realize that the main responsibility for the changes known as the "Morley Minto Reforms" rested not with the man of letters at Whitehall, but with the sportsman at Simla. The beginning of 1906 found a statesman nearly seventy years of age at the India Office who, apart from a life of study, had been for twenty years of Cabinet rank. The chasm between his experience and that of the Viceroy was immense. Moreover, Morley was a masterful man as to high policy, studious about

trifles, meticulous as to personal dignity. His own "Recol- lections," pleasant reading as they are, give in extenso the exhortations, criticisms and occasional rebukes which he addressed to the Viceroy, but omitting Minto's replies, form throughout a one-sided narrative. History, so written, centred all initiative in Whitehall. The veil is now lifted.

As regards the Reforms, Minto was able to say to his Council in January, 1910 :—" They had their genesis in a note of my own addressed to my colleagues in August, 1906.

It was due to no suggestion from home ; whether it was good or bad, I was entirely responsible for it." Apparently he

pressed the initial step, the appointment of Mr. (afterwards

Lord) Sinha to the Viceroy's Council against the protest of the King and the doubts of the Home Cabinet, and followed

it by extending the powers of the new Councils. "The Tory Viceroy," as Morley loved to say," was bolder than the Liberal Minister." But these Reforms could only be justified in Minto's view by a most strenuous assertion of the British Raj. He challenged Morley's vehement dictum as regards foreign politics that "The Governor of India is by no means the man on the spot," and insisted that India should have a say in all that concerned Persia and Central Asia. He passed a series of Acts, regulating explosives, seditious meetings and the Press, which went very hard with the late anti-Coer- eionist Irish Secretary. He declined, in the teeth of a Cabinet Resolution, to release deportees "until they could be released with due regard to the internal peace of India." After a series of such differences he obtained from Morley in December, 1908, the generous tribute : "I am swimming in a popular tide through victories which are not my own."

Is it not a paradox that the veteran so potent in Council and Parliament owed success in a business in which he was wholly unversed to the tyro administrator to whom Mr. Montagu as Indian Under-Secretary somewhat slightingly alluded in his Budget speech as "tile agent" of the Secretary of State ?

The truth is that Minto brought into the business a know- ledge of the world and of men which, granted time, will always tell, though to how many politicians in these days is time granted ? Morley on his side, though occasionally peevish from overwork, was in essentials loyal to the core. His dictum, "I am bent on doing nothing to loosen the bolts," should be a classic to-day. Though a sentimentalist, he was never of those who were "revolted by an execution but not shocked by an assassination." His foible, as Mr. Buchan tells us, was attempting direct government by fits and starts, re- lapsing into the personal rule, and narrowing Indian institutions at the top while broadening them at the bottom. He was not a good judge of men, and had occasion to repent some of his appointments, which gave serious trouble in India. In minor matters, his attempts "to govern India with a penknife" were trying to those on the spot. Minto deserves infinite credit, not only for his stalwart resistance on vital points, but for drawing out the kindly and sympathetic qualities which made Morley one of the most attractive of men, and thus steering the partnership through five trying years.

The difference of outlook is well summed up in the fol- lowing. Morley wrote : "If reforms do not save the Raj, nothing will." Minto rejoined : "The Raj will not dis- appear in India while the British race remains what it is. We shall fight for the Raj as hard as ever if it comes to fighting, and win as we have always done. My great object is that it shall not come to that."

Minto left India in a blaze of popularity, owing his great success with natives to an intellect which was not subtle but shrewd, which had a flair for the essential, and which in moments of crisis took everything seriously but nothing tragically.

iro us countrymen generally he was hardly known. England reeks little of her great administrators abroad, and allows them to be engulfed in the crowd on their return. He might have hoped for many years to enjoy his old haunts and pastimes with a charming family and heaps of friends, after twelve years' strenuous service abroad. But as with Canning and Dalhousie India had taken toll of him, and he passed away just before the call of 1914 found his country "ready but all unprepared," to be followed by the "wonderful boy", who fell at Ypres too soon but not too early to show the inheritance of chivalry and capacity from his father. Mr. Buchan's narrative should live longer than most biographies MIDLETON.