THE PARADOX IN GOVERNOR EYRE.
GOVERNOR E IKE, just now best known to us through certain proceedings of a questionable kind, supposed to indicate something like panic, in Jamaica, deserves better to be known through a very different and much more unique class of proceed- ings, in which he has shown qualities that perhaps not one English- man in a million could match. The more severely we criticize his conduct in the former matter, the more imperative becomes our obligation to exhibit the grander aspect of it, which his achieve- ments nearly a quarter of a century ago as Australian explorer present. He has told his own tale, which has been recently repeated by Mr. Howitt, in his history of Australian discovery, and still more lately re-told by Mr. Henry Kingsley in the October and November numbers of Macmillan's Magazine in a style apparently invented expressly to describe courageous physical exploits with even more than the freshness of most men's original experience. And it is only fair to say that Mr. Henry Kingsley begins his tale by a testimony to Mr. Eyre's previous reputation as protector of the Australian blacks of the Lower Murray,—being the lowest type of black man known to us,—which should fairly raise a very strong presumption in favour of his justice where any issue between the Anglo Saxon and a lower race is placed clearly before him. Mr. Kingsley wrote :— " Of this Mr. Eyre, who made this unparalleled journey, I know but little, save this :—He knew more about the aboriginal tribes, their habits, language, and so on, than any man before or since. He was appointed Black Protector for the Lower Murray, and did his work well. He seems to have been (teste Charles Sturt, from whom there is no appeal), a man eminently kind, generous, and just. No man concealed less than Eyre the vices of the natives, but no man stood more stedfastly in the breach between them and the squatters (the great pastoral aris- tocracy), at a time when to do so was social ostracism. The almost unexampled valour which led him safely through the hideous desert into which we have to follow him, served him well in a fight more wearing and more dangerous to his rules of right and wrong. He pleaded for the black, and tried to stop the war of extermination which was, is, and I suppose will be, carried on by the colonists against the natives in the unsettled districts beyond reach of the public eye. His task was hopeless. It was easier for him to find water in the desert than to find mercy for the savages. Honour to him for attempting it, however."
A man ".eminently kind, generous, and just," standing between the squatting aristocracy of Australia and the wretched savages of those regions, should certainly be able, and apparently willing, to stand, if occasion were, between the negroes of Jamaica and the terrified white population. And if, as we fear, he has failed to do so, his character must present at least some curious paradox.
Courage at all events,—courage of an order that makes ordi- nary courage seem cowardice,—Mr. Eyre certainly does not want. It would be impossible here, and useless if it were possi- ble, to repeat a twice-told story, which, too, in the form into which Mr. Henry Kingsley has thrown it, no one who reads can ever forget. But we may just recall the kinds of courage which that -wonderful narrative illustrates,—the inborn love of braving un- known dangers, the profound contempt for hardship, which of ten fails to accompany the greatest serenity in danger, an unequalled fortitude
under real pain and suffering, without any disposition to be driven - by actual pain, and the expectation of prolonged pain, from his
purpose,—a persistency of will quite independent of the value of the end to be attained, or the suffering to be saved by sacrificing it, when the fiat has once gone forth,—incredible patience with small obstructions, indomitable determination to struggle with great ones,—such were the qualities which took Mr. Eyre in 1840-1 over some 900 miles of actual desert, with water attainable only at intervals of about 120 miles, and no end in view beyond that of demonstrating his own confident and reasonable prediction, that no good could come of the route he followed. The case was this. Mr. Eyre had persuaded the colony of South Australia, just then anxious to find a practicable land route for cattle to Western Australia, to permit hint to explore in a northerly direction instead, as he showed on good grounds that the westerly exploration could come to nothing. The colony, which had raised a sum of money for the western route, permitted him to devote it to the northern, and his attempt failed. He then persuaded himself that he was under a sort of honourable obligation to satisfy the colony that the western route also was impracticable, and this he insisted on doing, at the cost, as he expected, of both his own and a friend's life (and actually at the cost of the friend's), though before be started finally the colony was persuaded that his view was correct, and sent the most urgent in- treaties to him to give up the mad expedition. Go, however, he would,—with one English attendant, Baxter, and three native boys, two of whom murdered his companion about half-way,--over hundreds of miles of sand or cliff, without a tree, or spring of water, or even a native settlement. Repeatedly for six days at a time they 'dragged along the horses with their provisions, or the sheep which they were ultimately to eat, without coming even to sand where a brackish well was possible. Baxter wanted to go back. Even the inadequate end Eyre had proposed to himself—to disprove the possibility of any route in this direction, —was attained. But he had resolved to complete his journey or perish, and complete it he did. When they were five hundred miles away from help on one side, .and four hundred on the other, Baxter was murdered, and why the savage followers who shot Baxter did not shoot Eyre also it is impossible to say. But even then, alone with one native boy, he proceeded, leaving his friend's body unburied on the hard rock where there was neither earth nor sand to bury it, and for two months longer he trudged on, alone but for this savage, always half starved, generally fainting with heat and thirst, latterly almost frozen with cold, to carry out the arbitrary task he had set himself. Clearly Mr. Eyre is one of those men who by merely " putting his foot down " on a given course can make it as sacred to himself, without looking for any results from it, as if the perspective beyond it were always opening out into a more and more brilliant future. There are many men -who, with Columbus's conviction, could go though Columbus's trials. But how many are there who could go nine hundred miles 'on foot over dreary cliffs, through a waterless, treeless, but not insect- less desert (Mr. Eyre was stung to madness day after day), to verify a negative inference which he had proved to his.own and his fellow colonists' satisfaction before he started,—or rather, if we „quiet give the true reason,because he had rashly pledged himself to himself to do this thing ? To such a man means, however horrid, become of no account, when an end, however trivial, is once fixed upon. He lives only to stretch forward to that end.
Is, then, courage, and fortitude, and iron strength of purpose such as this—so immeasurably beyond any standard put before the eyes of ordinary men—compatible, even in imagination, with the sup- position that in Jamaica Mr. Eyre has yielded to a social panic, and adopted very unscrupulous measures for suppressing the in- subordination which had broken out there? We fear it is The .sort of mind which can hunt down almost any end with sure in- evitable step, is rarely the mind to show most discrimination in choosing amongst several the true end to hunt down. Profoundly as we admire, and wonder at, the qualities Mr. Eyre showed in Lis great expedition, we must say we think that, in the actual state of his own previous convictions and that of his fellow colonists, there never was a less justifiable sacrifice and risk in- curred in all the noble records of perilous discovery. If it was really his mere annoyance that he should have persuaded the colonists to divert the funds voted for the useless western exploration to the (as it proved) equally useless northern exploring expedition, which made him resolve that their original intent should not be thwarted,—though they themselves wished it to be abandoned, —then, this shows a mind far too sensitive to the imputation of having disappointed the public hope. As we read Mr. Eyre's character, he let a mere feather's weight of fanciful feeling determine him to risk everything for nothing. The mere fact of thinking that he had persuaded the public to alter their plan and had disappointed them, was sufficient to make him take his own life and his friend's life in his hand, and throw them away on a sandy desert. In the same way no doubt, if he got the idea that the Jamaica whites had trusted him, and trusted him in vain, he would have been spurred on by a similar moral gad-fly to crush all sign of rebellion, at any cost however great, to himself or those who were thwarting his purpose. These men of iron purpose, with inadequate judgment in selecting their purpose, are the most dangerous of rulers. When Mr. Eyre was protector of the blacks on the South Murray River, he was responsible for only one trust,—the protection of the Blacks to the best of his ability. And with one clear and simple trust before him, no doubt he did, as Mr. Henry Kingsley says, battle for it with a noble and unwearied pertinacity. But in Jamaica he was not protector of the Blacks, but Governor of the whole island, and he had therefore a number of different and in some respects conflicting interests amongst which to choose, and so was, we think, pretty sure to make a temporary idol of that duty which for the moment seemed most imperative. The blacks were murdering white men. He thought of nothing but the most drastic measures for repressing that tendency on the part of the negroes, and lost view of that complexity of the ju tidal duty which is of the essence of a governor's functions.
Mr. Eyre seems to us to be one of the peculiar class of men who may be called single-purpose men, —who drive straight away to the one goal before them, even if they have to cut that way through half-a-dozen other equally important ends. We believe that as a rule, the one great advantage which aristocratic governors in India and elsewhere have had over middle-class men of otherwise equal ability, and often greater energy, has been their power of weighing complex social and political ends, and resisting the tendency to drive away at one thing at a time. Lord Can- ning, for instance, saw that, though to repress the Indian rebel- lion was his first duty, there were many other great duties to be associated with it,—the greatest being to repress it without in- justice to the natives, and he got the name of Clemency Canning. Sir John Lawrence, on the other hand, is, if we mistake him not, a little too much of the single-purpose class, who can carry through a great administrative work, but cannot so well govern an empire. But Mr. Eyre is, to all appearance, the very type of this class. His purposes are long straight grooves, out of which he does not get till he gets to the end of them. He does not weigh and balance the various influences he has to ex- ercise, but gives himself up to one tyrannical object at a time. His mind is even unscrupulous after it enters one of these grooves till it gets out of it again. He is possessed by his aim. Negroes, members'of legislative council, all must die, rather than that he shall not succeed in the idea thus haunting him. That is, at least, how we reconcile the wonderful courage, fortitude, and, in a smaller sense, presence of mind that he has shown, with the un- scrupulous arbitrariness, and want of presence of mind in the larger sense, which seem to us to breathe through his great Jamaica despatch.
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