SIR GEOROE GREY.

Wairoa Bell, Volume V, Issue 170, 4 November 1892, Page 6

SIR GEOROE GREY.

A ‘DANGEROUS MAN.’ So said officialdom of Sir George Grey, K.C.8., whose career and character are bound up in the two volumes just published, setting forth his life and times. Ho took risks—a deadly sin in the eyes of Red Tape officialdom, and he withstood his authorities on their own ground. Just the man the Iron Duke would have ordered to the drumhead with short shrift. Blind obedience was that old soldier’s motto—and duty narrowed to the observance of ‘ orders.’ Sir George’s whole career is a romance, with a personality marked by individual g-enius. He was the son of an English colonel, who fell at the head of his column in the storming of Badajoz, and ho was destined from his birth to a soldier’s profession. He went to Australia, and at the age of twonty eight he was Governor of South Australia. In New Zealand the devotion of the Maoris to their ‘ white father ’ is well known. He suspended the operation of an Act forwarded by the Colonial Office, considering it to be a gross breach of our pledges to the natives as defined in the Treaty of Waitangi, His disobedience saved the future of New Zealand, and his daring act was approved at head-quarters. His period of service at the Cape was a stormy one with the Colonial Office, but his work there also left abiding results. He was (lie insubordinate at the Cape who diverted ttie China transports by com mauding the vessels to report themselves at Calcutta, where Lord Elgin, also an ‘insubordinate ’ despatched the troops to Havelock, and so saved India. His third unofficial performance was his attempt at Federal Union, against which policy Downing street set its face. He was recalled, but though tho recall was afterwards cancelled his authority was undermined. After thirty years of bloodshed and blunders we are now catching him up. Sir George is a man of great and varied knowledge, a remarkable linguist and scientist. In his New Zealand home a patriarchal settlement, lie is in touch with all of interest in our world of thought and progress. When he dies. .England will have lost a public servant among the best that she ever had, whose worth she failed to understand, and whose effioial l-eputation was only that he was a ‘dangerous man.’