SIR GEORGE CAMPBELL. T HE death of Sir George Campbell has
caused much repetition of the remark that Anglo-Indians and Colonial magnates never succeed in Parliament, and most of those who make it add that a training to govern in the Colonies or India is a disqualification for Parliamentary work. India makes them too arbitrary, and the Colonies too much of mere managers. That such men fail in the House of Commons, or at least seem to fail, when the comparison is made between their success and their ability, is true, and is greatly to be regretted. As the supreme delibera- tive Council of the Empire, the House imperatively needs the aid of men familiar with its great divisions, and it also needs the aid of men who approach the problems it deals with from a somewhat different standpoint. Sir George Campbell, for instance, probably knew more about tenure, and the effects of different tenures on great popula- tions, than the entire House of Commons ; while Mr. Childers had the keenest perception of the line which a de- mocracy would follow under given circumstances, and could to-morrow, were he able to attend debates, tell us precisely what sort of a " free selector " the County Council will pro- bably make. He must have studied fifty such Bills as Mr. Chaplin's with the personal and vivid interest of a Minister compelled to choose among them. But though the alle- gation is true as matter of fact, we do not believe in the least in the usual explanation. Life in the free Colonies is very good training indeed for life in England, for it is training in the life to which we are approximating, and it produces men of immense skill in the management alike of English and Irish mankind ; while life in India in the Imperial service, the joint service filled by civilians and picked soldiers, is the best of training for administrative work. Englishmen with that faculty suc- ceed very well in the House of Commons : take the late James Wilson, the economist, as an example, or Mr. W. H. Smith. Half our best men in the House have learned their work in business—take, for we prefer to select our illustrations among the dead, the late Mr. W. E. Forster— and governing India is just doing business on an immense scale. Beating a strike and calming an insurrection are bits of work calling for just the same powers, and developing just the same capacities. That Colonials and Anglo-Indians do not succeed, when they fail, is not due to their training—we would back Sir Charles Gavan-Duffy or Sir George Couper, if either were in Parliament, to become powers at once—but to the conditions with which they are weighted, and to the effect, never allowed for in discussion, of pure accident. The Colonials and the Anglo-Indians who enter Parlia- ment are mature men called upon to do the work of school- boys, and naturally they fail or become unpopular. The Members of the House of Commons who succeed do not grow into successful men all at once. They learn debating at their fellows' expense ; they sit watching the temper of the House for years ' • and they " get up " questions with the assiduity of modern novelists or journalists on the look-out for employment. Fox spoke every night for a year ; Peel worked at his documents and Blue-Books like a printer's reader; Lord. Beaconsfield passed years of his life within the walls of the House, before anybody had accepted him at his own valuation. The Anglo-Indian or Colonial dibutant will very rarely do these things. He is usually a mature man ; he has always been a successful one ; his judgment seems to himself fully matured, and on questions he under- stands it is so ; and he plunges into debate, not as a learner, but as a teacher fully experienced. That is all very well when the subject is India or the Colonies, on which he has little to learn except—what he never does learn—the profound ignorance of Members ; but on all other subjects it has the effect either of presumption, or of being a bore, the speech and the thoughts of the audience never perhaps in half-an-hour touching each other at any point. The Colonial or the Anglo- Indian has, in fact, not learned his lesson, and unless he has a natural gift for the House, he cannot learn it. He has not the time, or the pliability of a young man's brain, or the willingness to endure rebuff if only he may learn. He is an inexperienced man with the feelings of an experienced one—a much commoner source of blunder than the world imagines—and he creates an impression of foolishness which is felt even by those who experience it to be wholly false, but of which they never quite succeed in ridding their minds. Then, remembering the difference between the speaker's record in India or Africa or Aus- tralia, and his performance in their presence, the Members try to account for the failure, and, if ill-natured, say that very poor abilities seem great in India, or that debating in Australia is a very different thing from debating at home. Neither remark is true, but its repetition causes it to be accepted as true, and the next candidate has to contend with a heavy weight of what is really class-prejudice. He is an Indian or Colonial, and therefore ought to fail.
We must allow, too, much more than has hitherto been the case for what we call pure accident. It is a very long time—two generations, we think, one generation certainly—since the fighting services have sent any one to the House of Commons who, remaining soldier or sailor, acquired any prominent position ; and this is nearly as true of the Colonies and India. The number of Members who come thence is not great, and few of them have happened to be acceptable men. If Lord Sher- brooke is to be called. an Australian, he is one, and Mr. Childers, in a perhaps lesser degree, is another; but the majority have been, by pure accident, men fitter for other work. Sir Richard Temple, though he is not exactly a failure, gains no power in the House, partly perhaps because of endless caricatures, but chiefly because his great quality, a magnificent energy to which even the impossible is no obstacle, cannot be recognised in debating. He would govern Egypt successfully, with the Valley in insurrection and the Soudan disgorging its tribes, with far less effort than he would pilot a contentious Bill through the House of Commons. His administrative skill, too, is thrown away, for though it would be just as effective in English Cabinet office, men reach the Cabinet in this country through success in debating. Sir George Campbell, again, had every possible disqualification for the House of Commons. He was an admirable adminis- trator, very just and a little hard, with plenty of resource in difficulty, and a fund of energy and industry which seemed inexhaustible. His superiors in India never doubted that he was the man to promote ; and though he was not popular among his subordinates, there was great con- fidence in his fairness and his capacity to find a way out of any complication. He had, too, almost un- paralleled knowledge, which his industry enabled him to accumulate and his cloudless memory to use, very often, it must be admitted, without perfect discretion. His pamphlet on the Irish agrarian war was far the ablest contribution to that discussion, and, we believe, pro- foundly influenced Mr. Gladstone in proposing his ultimate settlement. But every man has foibles, and Sir George Campbell's foibles as a Governor were that he wanted to do all the work himself ; that he had no sym- pathy for anybody's ideas, though he had plenty for their sufferings ; and that all subjects once before him assumed equal proportions, the result, we believe, of a power of momentary concentration which was the handmaid of his marvellous industry. Those foibles debarred him entirely from success in the House of Commons. He never made a speech without some- thing in it, often something original ; but he took up everything, and so became a bore. He did not care in the least even to understand other men's points of view, and therefore created an irritation which extended. in the most curious way to the Press, which sometimes scolded and sometimes derided him ; and all subjects were, the moment he touched them, of equal importance, which de- stroyed the respect of the House for his capacity altogether. When to over-frequent speech, and inopportune speech, and speech about nothing as if it were important, we add that every speech was made in a voice which sounded as if a corn-crake were preaching a funeral sermon over a burnt-up 'crop, we easily understand why Sir George Campbell failed. to acquire influence in the House of Commons. It was not because he was an Indian, and had governed great provinces successfully, that he failed ; but because he was Sir George Campbell, a sincere Radical of unusual mental powers, but none of the qualities which charm a most difficult Assembly. Indeed, he was not an Indian in the ordinary sense, for after he had begun to succeed as a civilian, he was allowed to take advantage of an Act made for days when steamers were not, and remain in England for five years without quitting his Indian appointment, or losing his right to pension. He knew England and its ways as well as any man in it, but if he had lived here all his life, though he might have risen to the top in any service, he never could have made a popular Member of Parliament. Some day or other, a man with the necessary qualities will come home and be elected, and then, when he enters the Cabinet, the comment in all journals will be that, after all, India or the Colonies, as the case may be, afford a wonderfully varied and effective mode of training for politics. The Colonial millionaires tend already to gravitate towards Parliament ; and though India creates none—she never sent home an Englishman, except Clive, with a million of money, and his fortune was mostly a life-interest—she exports many competent men in every decade, rich enough to live the life of the House of Commons, and contribute without pay knowledge which may, if history should ever again grow lively either in Asia or Europe, be felt to be invaluable.
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