spondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[27] Hincks, _Reminiscences of his Public Life_, p. 89.

[28] Kaye, _Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe_, p. 416.

{158}

CHAPTER V.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE.

A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so
contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot
had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot's successor was one of
those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and
limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on
them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in
Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another
rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled
him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had
earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for
efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little
more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which,
for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the {159}
residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the
governor-general's displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle
for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe
had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen
even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in
India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company
authorities against him. He was something more than what Macaulay
called him--"the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India"; his
faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter
side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a
curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for
administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that
generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty
which ever dominated him, he had passed from retirement in England to
reconcile the warring elements in Jamaica to each other; and his
success there had been as great as in India. In English politics, in
which he had naturally played little part, he identified himself with
the more liberal wing of the Whigs, although his long absence from the
centre of affairs, and the inclination natural to {160} an
administrator, to think of liberal