The Press.
London, England, 1854-09-09 00:00:00

856

f it tra tar r.

The Life and Correspondence of Charles Lord
Metcalfe. By John William Kaye. Lon-
don : Bentley.
[Second Notice.]
As will be seen from our previous notice,
Metcalfe had many advantages in his personal
circumstances over his competitors for public
bonours. Foremost amongst them we place
the training which he underwent, from the
start, under the eye of such a statesman as
Lord Wellesley. Hence there naturally re-
sulted a calmness of tone and official dignity
in Metcalfe's public life which, we are com-
pelled to say, we should scarcely have antici
pated from one who in domestic politics was
an ultra-Radical of the most determined kind.
Few men have come under our notice who
united in the same degree practical ability
with a certain sanguine hopefulness of cha-
racter which in other natures would have bor-
dered on the visionary. Listening to him in
his chair, in readinghis letters, one might have
thought him fanciful ; but with the ballast of
responsibility his mind steadied, and floated
securely where others would have foundered.
There must have been personal qualities of a
very high order to produce such a peculiar cha-
racter and to contribute to its successes. Such,
in truth, there were. He acted without im-
petuosity, yet he was never censurable as
dilatory. Difficulties he looked fairly in the
face, neither making too much or too little of
the obstacles in his path. He studied an
Official question circumspectively without the
formalism of a man bred to the desk, and
without the pedantry of a pragmatical and
self-opinionated nature. He was thoroughly
honest in the best fashion, being not only
truthful in all his relations with fellow-man,
but in avoidance of that artful reticence which
is incompatible with high honour. His tem-
per, also, was beautifully serene, and, though
very capable of smarting under unmerited
neglect, he would never vent his anger in
unseemly spleen. Add to all these qualities
his great experience and his systematic train
ing, and we cannot be surprised at his political
success.
In the tesidency at Hyderabad he showed
nearly all his best qualities. Mr. Kaye, as
a biographer, has been obliged to dwell on
certain incidents of that portion of Metcalfe's
career which we could gladly forget. Even so
pure a character as Metcalfe could not leave
an official life in India without being assailed
by the vituperation of India-house debates
and the malignant insinuations of disappointed
partisans. The affairs of William Palmer and
Co., and the transient disagreement with
Lord Hastings, we puss by, and ptoceed
to the act which, more than any other,
gives celebrity to the name of Metcalfe in
Indian affairs. We allude, of course, to what
is called his liberation of the press.
Mr. Kaye should have entered at more de-
tail into the history of the Indian press ; and
it would have been well if he had given his
purely British readers some specimens of
what the Indian press was in the days when
Lord Wellesley placed it under a most pe-
remptory censorship. There are two sides to
the whole question, from first to last ; and,
while we cordially acknowledge the inesti-
mable advantages of a free press, we may
admit that in certain phases of colonial life,
when the principles of the dependency on tho
mother country are unsettled, the administra-
tor must, from the mere necessity of the case,
deal more summarily with anonymous censors
than would be tolerated in England, where
fixed institutions, accumulated property, and
love of order present such vast resources to
authority. Between the Indian press of half
a century ago and the Irish agitators of later
days there was a remarkable similarity. They
were both political nuisances ; but in putting
them down there was the danger of musing that
arbitrary power from which all our constitu-
tional instincts recoil. Yet a wise statesman
could have had no difficulty in dealing with
either of theM. Lord Wellesley Was compelled
to put down the freedom of the Indian press,
just as, his brother, Wellesley Pole, crushed
Catholic Convention. The power of