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clearly into the ditch, and doubt whether it will be worth while to try to get out of it. I wanted Stanley to take the President's health, but he declines, saying it will be difficult as if I didn't know that. Lord Derby sends me frantic cautions to say nothing about American politics, and says he is going to send me a letter, to be read at the dinner, containing the list of honours to be awarded.

In October he went further north, to Balmoral. A brief extract about life there may be permitted:

The life here is somewhat desultory, and indisposes one for work, though I have plenty that I ought to do. I am going out grouse-shooting with Colonel Ponsonby by-and-by, not that we shall have much chance of getting at the birds, now they have become so wild, but it will give us a walk and some good scenery. I dined with the Queen last night; there were the Queen, Prince and Princess Christian, Prince Arthur, Princess Louise, Dr Lee, Lady Ely, and myself. We got on very pleasantly, and the Queen was highly gracious. She was surprised to hear I had been here before; and her memory is so wonderful that I was surprised at her having forgotten it. I sat next to the Princess, and liked her very much. I had a little talk with Prince Arthur after dinner, and liked him. He is about the same age as Jack, and a nice spirited boy, wild about shooting, and causing Princess Christian great alarm for the safety of her husband, with whom he is to go out to-day. There has been a shocking accident at Mar Lodge; one of the keepers has shot himself, out deerstalking. He seems to have been striking at a wounded deer with the butt-end of his rifle, the rifle being loaded, and the shock caused it to go off into his chest. It seems incomprehensible that a keeper should do such a thing. The Queen is very much grieved about it. The interest she takes in all her neighbours, and in everything about here, is very great.

We had a great discussion on Walter Scott, Tennyson, &c., last night. The Queen particularly delights in "In Memoriam." . . . She is a great Tennysonian.

The other letters to Lady Iddesleigh and to Mr Disraeli, from Balmoral, are either of a purely private nature, or deal with questions of administration no longer interesting.

It is a very unlucky thing that Sir Stafford did not keep up his diary through the strange events of 1867, and

especially at the moment of Lord Cranborne's secession, with General Peel and Lord Carnarvon, from Lord Derby's Government. His own attitude on the question which divided the Cabinet, the question of Reform, was merely and simply that of his chiefs. He did not want to lower the franchise, any more than they desired it. But he was no more inclined than they to divorce the Conservative party from the current of affairs, and with the party he took that leap into the dark, the dark which was not so Egyptian but that any one might have perceived our present through it, and even somewhat of our future. He let the great current take him to the sea, the sea in which we are tossed about to-day. Documents are wanting, then, as to any private struggle of mind through which he may have passed. It is only plain that he stuck to Mr Disraeli. A letter of February 29, 1867, clearly refers to some momentous conversation with that leader, a letter in which he observes that he is "penitent for the awkward way in which I stumbled over what I meant or wished to say when I left you this morning. Pretty speeches don't come readily, when one really means to say a great deal. .. I can assure you that I look back upon our nine years' friendship with lively feelings of satisfaction and gratitude, and forward with confident hope that we have got many such years before us." And he signs himself, "Your attached and affectionate, S. H. N."1 On March 1 there is just a hint, in a note of one line, about an attempt to prevent the disruption of the Cabinet: "I have spent an hour with our friend: he is much distressed, but, I fear, immovable." On March 2 came a note from Mr Disraeli, offering, in Lord Derby's name, the place of Secretary for India: "Send your answer to him, and at once." The answer, of course, was "Yes," and Sir Stafford entered at once on the great office, which he held so worthily in critical times. As to Reform, he had gone with the stream of history. His habit

1 Though it has nothing to do with the case, I cannot help quoting a letter of Mr Disraeli's, whose butler had assured Sir Stafford that the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not see him. "My dinner, a tapioca pudding, should not have interfered, but my butler is a pompous booby."

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ual and almost proverbial hopefulness enabled him to see a happy future for England and our enfranchised working class, especially as the influence of the Conservative party "has been used almost always on the side of labour and of the working man." 1

CHAPTER IX.

THE INDIAN SECRETARYSHIP.

WHEN Sir Stafford Northcote became Secretary of State for India, he undertook a task of which the labour and difficulty may be faintly appreciated by his biographer. Whoever has been suddenly thrust into the jungle of despatches, letters, minutes, and reports, about matters altogether foreign and mysterious to him, about the countless affairs of our gigantic and heterogeneous oriental dependency, can understand the troubles of the new Indian Secretary of State. When Sir Stafford took office, he had no special knowledge of Eastern matters, and his time was devoured by the claims of home politics, by the labours of the Conservative party in its uncomfortable tenure of precarious office. In the letters of the year, we find Sir Stafford frequently stating that he has scarce any leisure for his vast and complicated task. Yet he tackled his business with his usual clearheadedness, he made himself acquainted almost at once with the ins and outs, the rights and wrongs of many serious and obscure questions, and in this new office, as always, it was his business to keep throwing oil on troubled waters, and smoothing the asperities of men animated by the most contending interests. To the student who comes fresh to these topics, the marvel is that Indian government goes on at all, and that a single English statesman can acquire, in the brief and anxious time of office which party Government allots

Speech at Bristol, November 5, 1867.

to him, the necessary amount of knowledge, and can bestow the necessary amount of attention.

Probably one cannot give a better account of Sir Stafford's position than he gave to Parliament himself when introducing the "Government of India Act Amendment Bill" (April 23, 1868). "We have endeavoured to govern India by means of an executive machinery in India, subject to a controlling machinery in England." At the centre of that controlling machinery in England sat Sir Stafford, as the Indian Secretary of State in Council. The Council consists, or then consisted, of fifteen men, most of whom had served in India. Half are elected, half nominated by the Crown: they hold their offices for life; they advise, and to a certain extent control the Secretary of State. The difficulties of the position are manifest. The world has its own opinion of what old Anglo-Indians are like, and, to use language which would not have been parliamentary twenty years ago, they are apt to be considered fogies. "I believe that, in some quarters," said Sir Stafford, ". .. an impression prevails that the Council are more or less of a useless, and even of an obstructive character, . . . not only an ungenerous but a very untruthful account of the matter. . . . Combined with the amount of work they do as departmental officers, they afford most valuable assistance as advisers to the Secretary of State." That unenvied official has commonly no personal knowledge of India to start with, yet "he is called upon to superintend and control the governors of an enormous empire at the other side of the world, upon thousands of details, embracing every class of business. He is at once charged with military duties, with financial duties, with the duties of home administration, with foreign affairs, with judicial affairs, with the management of great railways, and other public works." Sir Stafford did not add, that he had also, as it were, fight with beasts," in the shape of persons who wanted. tickets for the Sultan's ball, with persons who desired decorations, and were eager that the proverbial "Dowb" should be remembered; that he had to keep the peace between peppery generals and governors, labouring under

"to

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the heat of the weather and the ravages of a dilapidated liver. Such are the duties of an Indian Secretary of State, and if he had not his Council to instruct him, his condition would be all the more ungracious. But Sir Stafford always declined to shun responsibility under the shield of his Council. In a private letter, he remarks that he will not play Adam to their Eve, and say "the Council thou gavest to be with me tempted me." In more dignified language he told the House of Commons. that an Indian Secretary "may shelter himself, by pleading that it is not he but the Council that is responsible. But, in the first place, this is not strictly true." Without anticipating the future by following this discourse any farther here, I quote so much of it that the reader may learn, from Sir Stafford's own words, something of what were the duties and sorrows of the Indian Secretary.

The particular questions with which Sir Stafford had to cope were many and serious. Fortunately for him, Lord Lawrence was then Viceroy; a personal acquaintance, Sir Seymour Fitzgerald, was at Bombay; in Madras was Lord Napier.1 With all of them, despite the clash of provincial and personal interests and the contention of opinion, Sir Stafford maintained most friendly intercourse. The chief points which continually demanded his attention were in the long-run financial, and with finance he was at home. The dreadful famine in Orissa (1865-66), wherein an uncounted multitude of people perished, had shaken our confidence in our own administration, and remains a horror and a shame in the memory. To provide against the recurrence of so terrible a calamity, public works-for example, canals, irrigation, and railroads-were needed. All these schemes demanded money. And whence was the money to come? how was it to be provided? There instantly arose problems about the financial control then exercised over the provinces by the Governor-General. In this matter the ideas of Sir John Lawrence were naturally not very reconcilable with those of the governors of presidencies, nor indeed with those of Sir Stafford Northcote himself.

1 Now Napier and Ettrick.