BOOKS.
LORD MAYO.*
THIS is an excellent and most readable book, but it is in no way a biography of Lord Mayo. Mr. Hunter has given us a lucid and most interesting history of the' work waiting to be done when Lord Mayo arrived in India, and of the way in which it was done ; of the difficulties in his path ; of his measures, his legislation, and his projects for the future. He has, moreover, told us much of the way Lord Mayo was brought up, and has described his death in a very touching manner ; but of Lord Mayo himself, of his personal character and capacities, he tells us next to nothing. He does explain why he had so little education that he said of himself, " If I had ever been educated, I should have done a good deal ;" but he does not tell us why he was selected for office, why Mr. Disraeli thought him an effi- cient Minister, or why an expiring Ministry risked an explosion of popular annoyance, to send a poor Irish Peer to the Viceroyalty of India. That Lord Mayo was a genial man, we see ; that he was a quick man, who could get to the kernel of a subject at a glance, we are told ; and that he was a determined man, we can believe ; but of what the man was who possessed these qualities, we know as little as we did before opening the book. We do not even know how far he was responsible for his Indian work, for the credit of it all is assigned to him ; the able men who helped him are passed over with mere words of praise ; and of the Anglo-Indian theory, that Lord Mayo was an abler man in India than at home, because two men of very original minds—the brothers Sir John and GeneralStrachey—guided his councils and filled his mind with their views, we hear nothing at all. It is not unfair to them officially that we should not, for the ruler who has wisdom enough to take good advice is entitled to credit for the success of the course advised, but it is most unfair to readers who expect a biography, and not official annals. Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's few words about Lord Mayo, in his valuable chapter on legislation, vague as they are, con- tribute as much to our knowledge of him as Viceroy as the rest of the book Though Lord Mayo did me the honour to leave a very wide dis- cretion in my hands, ho kept a watchful eye on the proceedings of the Legislative Department, as on those of every other department of the Government. In every matter which he regarded as sufficiently im- portant, he was sure to interpose with equal promptness and decision. The whole scheme and principle of the Marriage Act, for instance, was most carefully considered by him, and the result finally attained was due to a great extent to his careful consideration of the matter. I do not like to trespass on what is your peculiar province•in telling the story of Lord Mayo's life. But I cannot leave the subject without saying that, of the many public men whom it has been my fortune to meet in various capacities at home and in India, I never met one to whom I felt disposed to give such heartfelt affection and honour. I hope you will succeed in making people understand how good and kind, how wise and honest and brave he was, and what freshness, vigour, and flexibility of mind he brought to bear upon a vast number of now and difficult subjects."
If the reader is very patient, and watches for every reappearance of Lord Mayo's own form above the waters of narrative, he may discern something of the actual man, and will find, we think, that he had in mental nature, though not of course in power, a most singular resemblance to Sir Robert Peel ; but the position of a wild duck in a lake, bobbing his head up now and then to breathe, and so becoming visible, is hardly the position in which one expects to find the subject of a biography in a memoir written specifically for his glorification. We shall devote the rest of our notice to Lord Mayo's personality, merely adding that nothing could be better than the historic portion of these volumes, which lack nothing except some description of the very influential Court around the King.
* A Life of the Earl of Mayo. By W. W. Hunter, B.A., LL.D. 2 vols. London : Smith, Elder, and 0o. Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo, was born in 1822, the son of Robert Bourke, grandson of the fourth Earl, and Miss Jocelyn, granddaughter of the Earl of Roden. His father, the eon of a Bishop of Waterford, was a quiet man of a religious and rural turn of mind, living at Hayes, in Meath, and occupying him- self with the ordinary duties of a country gentleman. He seems to have been a genial, kindly man, who shared his boys' sports, taught them in-door games, and told them carefully that they must .contrive to get on in the world by their own exertions. The another was a woman of fine character, with a great devotion to .duty and an unusually cultured mind, and she was unusually loved, but neither of them cared much about their children's education. The boys had a tutor of course, and the girls a governess, but the -tutor was chosen for other qualities than learning, and if the boys liked out-door games or private reading better than lessons, nobody worried them much. Richard learned very little, but he picked up French in Paris, he mixed as a young man in good society, he travelled over Europe, and he had from a child a fondness for studying Irish questions which was of itself a political education. He worked hard during the famine, -took to agriculture and field-sports, and in 1847 was elected for Kildare as a moderate Conservative. He was a very moderate one. The one fact about Lord Mayo's mind which
• does come out clearly in this book is that it was not Conserva- tive, but Peelite ; that it had a habit of pondering, and gradually .and very slowly constructed out of masses of facts a policy which 'was often startlingly Liberal. Though a Tory by birth and political connection, and married in 1848 to a lady from a Tory -house—Miss Wyndham, daughter of the first Lord Leconfield- -and for years a Tory official, he felt strongly how little sympathy be had with his party. He believed in Tenant-right, he despised 'the Orangemen, he doubted of the Establishment, though not of Protestant Episcopacy, he abhorred military rule in Ireland, and • he had at heart, like all impartial men who have really studied Ireland, a belief in the propriety of endowing the Roman Catholic .creed. He wrote in 1868 to Lord C— :-
L1 Regium Donum has made the most republican body of men in the 'United Kingdom, the Presbyterian ministers, loyal and contented. llaynooth abuts the month of many a priest who would otherwise be a rebel. The convent schools, Catholic reformatories, convict houses of refuge, &c., are all working well. The granting of commissions to Roman Catholic and Presbyterian chaplains for the Army brought more gratitude than you could have supposed from so small an affair. the Irish Church binds to England the more influential portion of the • community. I only proposed a vote of a few hundreds a year (I believe it would have been under a thousand) for a Catholic university. I feel certain that time and the decline of religions rancour would have .developed it by degrees. Equality is gradually being gained among the Churches by the elevation of the character and the status of the Roman Catholic clergy, and by their rapid acquirement of wealth. The feeling of inferiority is fast passing away among them. The policy Tender which this has taken place] is a sound one. But since the day that Pitt was forced to abandon emancipation and endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy as a portion of his Union scheme, the most powerful Minister has never been able to advance more than a very abort step at a time. It is, I firmly believe, the only policy by which Protestantism and the British connection can be maintained in more than one-half of Ireland."
So strong were his convictions, that his party ties made him wretchedly unhappy, and on his appointment to India, writes a colleague :—" The one great feeling which seemed to animate -him was joy at being at last free,—to do, to think, and to act as be himself found to be wisest. He seemed to me to be like a man Who, having been for some time denied the light of the sun, was suddenly brought into the open day. The only expression which could give utterance to all that was passing within him were the two words, At last.' " It is probable that Mr. Disraeh's inner agreement with him in his views, an agreement of which Lord Mayo was aware, was the real cause of his appointment to India ; but opposition from his colleagues was disarmed by their knowledge of his sound judgment, his quickness in work, and the calm serenity which he derived partly from his admirable physique and courage, but mainly from a certain grave sweetness of temper, which, little as Englishmen acknow- ledge it, is not infrequent in Irishmen, and renders its happy possessors capable of a patience less mercurial men cannot display. The storm of invective with which his appointment was greeted only moved him to a feeling of pity for his colleagues, who must be suffering so much.
Mr. Hunter's account of Lord Mayo in India is, as we have said, only a history, amid which it is'most difficult to detect pre- cisely the Viceroy's share, or even his own self-originated views. It would seem clear, however, that he personally forced on the Indian Governments—for on this matter the subordinate Governments have a voice—the policy of restoring a financial equilibrium, and
insisted on the income-tax, which, however, he gradually, as he saw the iniquitous oppression it produced, made up his mind to abandon ; that he either devised or accepted heartily the policy of maintaining the autonomy of the Native States, while holding a severe control over their Princes; that he denounced the notion of a Japanese policy of seclusion in the East as impossible ; that he discerned that " the Central-Asian question is a bugbear, if pru- dence is observed ;" and that he disliked reforms of a revolutionary character, such, for instance, as the fusion of the Indian armies, not because he deemed them unwise, but because they inter- fered with smaller and more certain projects of improve- ment. He desired above all things to combine efficiency with economy, and with this end took into his own hands the Public Works Department, with its endless labour and worry. He was, in short, personally a Peelite Viceroy, very painstaking, very determined on economy, very much inclined to believe that if you could remain quiet long enough, suspicious States would trust you, and slightly indisposed to all great or dreamy projects. Add to this that his stately but genial manner, his bodily presence, and his possession of the calm of mind which im- presses Asiatics, gave him a great hold upon the natives with whom he came in contact, and the reader has nearly all of the person- ality of Lord Mayo obtainable from this book. He was not, we think, a great man, lacking imagination ; but he was an excellent administrator of the Peelite type, one who needed accumulated facts as a basis for thought, but having them, could think and act to purpose, with a mind clear alike of dreams, prejudices, and fears. Externally, he was in many ways a typical Irishman ; in- ternally, he was in his merits and his shortcomings exceptionally, and to us at least, surprisingly, an Englishman.
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