SIR ARTHUR GORDON.
SIR ARTHUR GORDON, lately Governor of Fiji, was received at the Colonial Institute on Tuesday with ex- ceptional honours. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, now Secretary for the Colonies, attended to hear his address upon Fiji, an innovation wholly contrary to etiquette, the Colonial Institute being supposed to be a sort of corporation of critics, and as such hostile to the Colonial Office ; and among the crowd of notabilities who applauded were Lord Granville and Lord Cardwell, both of whom have held Sir Michael's post, while Mr. Gladstone regretted his own absence in a letter which was in itself the strongest of testimonials. There can be no doubt that these honours were well deserved, and that the Colonial Office possesses in Sir Arthur Gordon an instrument of which it may be proud, and of which the India Office would do well to deprive its rival Department. It was Sir Arthur Gordon who, in New Brunswick, in 1863, laid down the first outlines of the plan on which the Dominion of Canada was afterwards federalised by Lord Carnarvon, and Sir Arthur who solved the dangerous conflict that threatened to arise in the Mauritius between the imported labourers and the em- ployers of labour, and so made it possible to leave the island, as has just been temporarily done, without a garrison. These successes induced Lord Carnarvon to pick him out for the first Governorship of Fiji,—a most difficult and, as at first it seemed, a most thankless task, requiring an exceptionally strong man, yet one on which a man of that kind might seem to be wasted. The Islands, though beautiful, fertile, and possessed of an attractive climate, had but just been acquired, through the submission of one of the most horrible races in the world,—the one people left whose chiefs, as Captain Erskine, and the British seaman Jackson, who was so long detained among them, both testify, kept up the practice of cannibalism because they delighted in human flesh. Indeed, their principal chief, though a man of quite excep- tional ability, had passed through a career to which that of the worst Asiatic despot is a reasonable training. Scattered among these savages were a few whites, of whom the best were decent but grasping traders and planters ; while the worst were hardly distinguishable from pirates, or the old man-catching slave-traders of the West African coast, the men who preceded the regular slave-buying captains, and who were worse even than they. The only favourable circumstances in the prospect were the willingness of the people to be governed, and the existence of a considerable Christian population, converted by the Missionaries,—and for a short time even these advantages seemed likely to be worthless. A furious religious war broke out, one incident of which, described at length in the Spectator of August 26th, 1876, still seems to us one of the most strange and dramatic that ever occurred in the history of the world— we mean the simultaneous and spontaneous defiance flung by the men of the Christian army to the ministers of their ancient oracle—and the islands were desolated by a burst of measles, which struck the population with the force which mild epi- demics so frequently seem to acquire when transmitted through a strong race to a weak one, and threatened for some weeks to destroy the Fijians altogether. As it was, we believe a third of the population perished, and the pagan remainder believed the gods were angry at their submission. There was
scarcely any trustworthy force, there was no revenue to speak of, it was almost indispensable to avoid applying to the British Parliament, and of the machinery of civilisation there was scarcely a trace. A Governor might almost as well have been set down in Zululand. In the midst of this unpromising scene, Sir Arthur Gordon began his work, fortunately with large powers, and although both the war and the epidemic broke out after his arrival, within five years he had turned the colony into an orderly and contented little State, in which life and property are quite safe, with sufficient revenue, and a prospect before it of great prosperity. Any- thing that will grow in subtropical regions—cotton, sugar, tobacco, the cocoa-nut, or fruit—will reach perfection in the Fiji Islands, where also coffee flourishes as in Ceylon or Wyna,ad.
Many of Sir A. Gordon's methods were, of course, the common-places of men trained to govern mixed races, the key-note of them all being equal justice and severity to all men,—but he did one original thing. He was described years since to Lord Cardwell, by a New Brunswicker, as "a man who did his own thinking"—one of the reasons, perhaps, why he has occasionally seemed to planters with whom he was in collision so unpleasantly aggressive—and he resolved to use the Native institutions, which, badly as they were worked, were indi- genous to the soil, and therefore needed no explanation to the people. Instead of sweeping all clean, he left the chiefs and their councils to manage the villages, insisting on British principles of government, rather than British methods, and even ventured to apply this idea to the collection of a revenue. Many Governors would have thought revenue hopeless, unless it could be collected from planters using native labour. Sir Arthur imposed a land tax on each village, but left the collec- tion and distribution of the tax to the chief and his council, and agreed to receive the taxes in kind, the produce being sold by tender to the highest bidder. At the same time, though the tax currency, as it were, was taken in kind, the tax account was kept in money, so that if prices rose or a good bargain was made, the villagers received all the benefit. If, for example, a village had £100 to pay, it was not asked for a hundred sovereigns, which it could not have found, but for so much tobacco, sugar, and grain as ought to produce £100, and if the amount contributed when sold produced more than the tax, the differ- ence was refunded. The villagers, whether they approved taxation or not, approved this method, as in certain stages of civilisation they do everywhere :—" In some places each village has grown its own tax-produce along with what it grew for sale or domestic use, in others several villages have combined to grow their tax produce in one large plantation." Taxation thus acted as a stimulus to industry, as Earl Grey said it should do among negroes, and as Lord Dalhousie proved it would do in Pegu. The Fijians are steadily increasing their area of cultiva- tion, they learn to know the prices that rule for their largest articles of produce—a point upon which the traders were not very willing to give them information—the revenue, £60,000 a year, has become ample for the wants of the colony, and said Sir Arthur Gordon,—" Everywhere the increased areas of cultivation, the enlarged towns, the good new houses, the well-kept roads, the cheerful and healthy-looking population, present the strongest possible contrast to the aspect of the country in 1875. This was fully admitted to me not long before I left Fiji by a leading planter, who said that nobody who had eyes in his head could deny that the natives were very much better off than they were three years ago; but he added (and there was much significance in the admission), that this was by no means an advantage to the planter, whose diffi- culties in obtaining labour were thereby materially increased." We need not point out the statesmanlike ingenuity of this scheme, which was hit upon also by the great Mogul Emperors like Akbar. and then spoiled by the sale of the right to collect the tax-produce to farmers-general ; but we want to say a word about the mental self-restraint it involved. There is nothing which tries a good Governor, like Sir Arthur Gordon, placed by circumstances in a position where he can be absolute, like the temptation to found, to make a clean sweep of old arrange- ments, and begin again, on different and more " civilised " principles of administration. Symmetry in organisation is as attractive as any other kind of assthetic temptation, and able men are often as offended with administrative anomalies as the "higher critics" with magenta in a carpet, or feebleness in a hawthorn pattern on a china vase. They like to create, and the creative passion, which is as strong in them as in other artists, is not gratified by building on the old lines. They want to paint, not to "bring out" old pictures. Sir Arthur resisted this temptation, accepted a hint in administration from a pack of cannibals, and owed his success as much to his self-suppression as to his cool judgment, or to his remark- able power of lucid statement. He can write, as those of our readers who recollect the account of the Christian war will remember, as it is given to very few officials to do. It is a pleasure to see such a man so honoured, and we can only hope that Lord Beaconsfield, who has an eye for capacity, though it is sometimes, as in the case of Lord Lytton, attracted by mere glitter, will use Sir Arthur Gordon, with his mature experience, for very much higher work even than that of founding colonies in the Paci- fic. He will want before long, if we are not to have a financial catastrophe in India, a Governor-General who understands finance, and in South Africa a Queen's represen- tative who can conciliate dark fighting-men. Sir Arthur Gordon has displayed a high capacity for either function, and we presume, having passed his manhood away from England, is as little of a partisan as an Englishman living in such an age as this may hope to be. Our supply of Viceroys is not just now so full, that we should waste a possible one upon a single colony, however important, or however greatly in need of good administration.
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