I do not remember ever to have read more pompons nonsense than was
talked a few days ago in Parliament on the subject of pensions for
retired colonial governors.
On all ordinary occasions the strongest case a man can have with the
British public is to be an ill-used man--that is to say, if you be a man
of mark, or note, or station. To be ill-used, as one poor, friendless,
and ignoble, is no more than the complement of your condition. It is in
the fitness of things that pauperism, which we English have declared
to be illegal, should neither be fondled nor caressed. To be ill-used
profitably there must be something pictorial in your case; it must have
its reliefs of light as well as shade. There must be little touches,
a bright “has been,” sunny spots of a happy past Without the force
of these contrasts, there is no possibility of establishing the grand
grievance which is embodied in ill-usage.
Now, Mr B. C. who brought on this motion was a sorry artist, and the
whole sum and substance of his case was, that as we secured the services
of eminent and able men, we ought to pay them “properly.” Why, in that
one word “properly” lay the whole question. What constitutes proper
payment? Every career in life carries with it some circumstance either
of advantage or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a
material benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit.
The educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is
not recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable
pittance. It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the
reverence that attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in
the parish beside him with that income, and mark the difference of their
stations! The same of the soldier. Why or how does seven-and-sixpence
diurnally represent one the equal of the best in any society of the
land? Simply by a conventional treaty, by which we admit that a man,
at the loss of so much hard cash, may enjoy a station which bears no
imaginable proportion to his means.
On the other hand, there are large communities who, addressing
themselves to acquire wealth and riches, care very little for the
adventitious advantages of social state. As it is told of Theodore Hook,
at a Lord Mayor’s feast, that he laid down his knife and fork at the
fifth course, and declared “he would take the rest out in money;” so
there are scores of people who “go in” for the actual and the real. They
have no sympathy with those who “take out” their social status partly
in condition partly in cash, as is the case with the curate and the
captain.
Almost every man, at his outset in life, makes some computation of how
much his career can pay him in money, how much in the advantages of rank
and station. The bailiff on the estate makes very often a far better
income than the village doctor; but do you believe that Æsculapius would
change places with him for all that? Is not the unbought deference
to his opinion, the respect to his acquirements, the obedience to his
counsel, something in the contract he makes with the world? Does he
not recognise, every day of his life, that he is not measured by the
dimensions of the small house he resides in, or the humble qualities
of the hack he rides, but that he has an acceptance in society totally
removed from every question of his fortune?
In the great lottery we call life, the prizes differ in many things
besides degree. If the man of high ambition determine to strain every
nerve to attain a station of eminence and power, it may be that his
intellectual equal, fonder of ease, more disposed to tranquillity, will
settle down with a career that at the very best will only remove him a
step above poverty; and shall we dare to say that either is wrong? My
brother the Lord Chancellor is a great man, no doubt. The mace is a
splendid club, and the woolsack a most luxurious sofa; but as I walk
my village rounds of a summer’s morning, inhaling perfume of earth
and plant, following with my eye the ever-mounting lark, have I not
a lighter heart, a freer step, a less wearied head? Have I not risen
refreshed from sleep? not nightmared by the cutting sarcasms of some
noble earl on my fresh-gilt coronet, some slighting allusion to my
“newness in that place”? Depend upon it, the grand law of compensation
which we recognise throughout universal nature extends to the artificial
conditions of daily life, and regulates the action and adjusts the
inequalities of our social state.
What is a viceroy or a colonial governor? A man of eminence and ability,
doubtless, but who is satisfied to estrange himself from home and
country, and occupy himself with cares and interests totally new and
strange to him, for some five or fifteen thousand pounds a-year, plus
a great variety of other things, which to certain minds unquestionably
represent high value--the--station, the power, the prestige of a great
position, with all its surroundings of deference and homage. Large as
his salary is, it is the least distinctive feature of his high office.
In every attribute of rank the man is a king. In his presence the wisest
and the most gifted do no more than insinuate the words of their wisdom,
and beauty retires curtsying, after a few commonplaces from his lips.
Why, through all the employments of life, who ever attains to the like
of this? His presence is an honour, his notice is fame. To be his guest
is a distinction for a day; to be his host is to be illustrious for a
lifetime. Are these things nothing? Ask the noble earl as he sits in his
howdah; ask my lord marquis as he rides forth with a glittering staff.
Did any one, even Mr B. C. himself, ever imagine that Mr Macready
ought to be pensioned after he had played Cardinal Wolsey? Was it
ever proposed, even in Parliament, that Mr Kean should have a retiring
allowance when he had taken off his robes as Henry IV.? These eminent
men were, however, just as real, just as actual, during their brief hour
on the stage, as His Excellency the Viceroy or the “Lord High.” They
were there under a precisely similar compact. They had to represent a
state which had no permanence, and a power that had no stability. They
were to utter words which would be ridiculous from their lips to-morrow,
and to assume a port and bearing that must be abandoned when they
retired to change their clothes.
It is one of my very oldest memories as a boy that I dined in company
with Charles Kemble. There was a good deal of talking, and a fair share
of wine-drinking. In the course of the former came the question of the
French Revolution of ‘30, and the conduct of the French King on that
occasion. Kemble took no part in the discussion; he listened, or seemed
to listen, filled his glass and emptied it, but never spoke. At last,
when each speaker appeared to have said his say, and the subject
approached exhaustion, the great actor, with the solemnity of a judge in
a charge, and with a grand resonance of voice, said: “I’ll tell you how
it is, sirs; Charles X. has forfeited a--a--a right good engagement!”
And that was exactly the measure that he and all his tribe took, and are
now taking, of kings and rulers--and let us profit by it. The colonial
king has his “engagement;” it is defined exactly like the actor’s. He is
to play certain parts, and for so many nights; he is to strut his hour
in the very finest of properties, and is sure, which the actor is not
always, of a certain amount of applause. No living creature believes
seriously in him, far less he himself, except, perhaps, in some
impassioned moment or other like that in which I once knew Othello so
far carried away that he flung Iago into the orchestra.
Pension Carlisle, pension Storks, if you will; but be just as well as
generous, and take care that you provide for Paul Bedford and Buckstone.
In Archbishop Whately’s ‘Historic Doubts,’ we find that the existence
of the first emperor can be disproven by the very train of argument
employed to deny the apostles. Let me suggest the converse of this mode
of reasoning, and ask, Is there a word you can say for the Viceroy
you cannot equally say for the actor? Have you an argument for him who
governs St Helena that will not equally apply to him who struts his hour
at the Haymarket?
I perceive that the writer of a letter to the ‘Times’ advocates the
claims of the ex-Governors, on the plausible plea that it is exactly the
very men who best represent the dignity of the station--best reflect the
splendour of the Sovereign--who come back poor and penniless from the
high office: while the penurious Governor, who has given dissatisfaction
everywhere, made the colony half rebellious by his narrow economies,
and degraded his station by contemptible savings, comes back wealthy and
affluent--self-pensioned, in fact, and independent.
To meet this end, the writer suggests that the Crown, as advised
thereon, should have a discretionary power of rewarding the well-doer
and refusing the claim of the unmeriting, which would distinctly
separate the case of the worthy servant of the Sovereign from that of
him who only employed his office to enrich himself.
There is a certain shallow--it is a very shallow--plausibility about
this that attracts at first sight; and there would unquestionably be
some force in it, if dinner-giving and hospitalities generally were the
first requisites of a colonial ruler; but I cannot admit this. I cannot
believe that the man who administers India or Canada, or even Jamaica
or Barbadoes, is only an expatriated Lord Mayor. I will not willingly
consent to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has
a good cook and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to
display the merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like
good dinners; I like occasionally--only occasionally though--very good
dinners. I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked
out to dine, “it was flattering, and it was nourishing;” but with all
this I should never think of “elevating my host” to the dignity of high
statesmanship on the mere plea of his hospitality.
We have had some able men in our dependencies who were not in the least
given to social enjoyments, who neither understood them for themselves
nor thought of them for others--Sir Charles Napier, for instance. And
who, let me ask, would have lost the services of such a man to the
State, because he had not the tastes of a Sir William Curtis, nor could
add a “Cubitt” to his stature?
All discretionary powers are, besides, abuses. They are the snares and
pitfalls of official jobbery; and there would be no end of bickering and
complaining on the merits of this and the shortcomings of that man.
Not to say that such a system as this writer recommends would place a
Government in the false position of rewarding extravagance and offering
a premium for profusion, and holding up for an example to our colonial
fellow-subjects the very habits and tastes which are the bane and
destruction of young communities.
Can any one imagine a Cabinet Council sitting to determine whether the
ex-Governor of St Helena had or had not entertained the officers of the
509th Foot on their return from India, or whether he of Heligoland
had really fed his family on molluscs during all the time of his
administration, and sold the shells as magnesia? There could be but one
undeniable test of an ex-Governor’s due claim to a pension, since on the
question of a man’s hospitalities evidence would vary to eternity. There
are those whose buttermilk is better than their neighbours’ bordeaux. I
repeat, there could be but one test as to the claim; and as we read in
a police sheet, as a sufficient ground for arrest, the two words, “Drunk
and Disorderly,” so should any commission on pensions accept as valid
grounds for a pension, “Insolvent and a Bankrupt.”
To talk of these men as ill-used, or their case as a hard one, is simply
nonsense! You might as well say that the man you asked to dinner to-day
has a legitimate ground of complaint against you because you have not
invited him to breakfast to-morrow.