mark him off as an oddity from the herd of English
schoolboys. At the age of sixteen he was back in the land of his
birth. His was a distinguished career. By 1827 he had risen to
membership in the Supreme Council of India. Later he acted as
provisional governor-general, and obtained the Grand Cross of the Bath.
In 1838 he resigned his position and became governor of Jamaica.
Perhaps the most significant incident in his career was his fighting as
a volunteer in the storming of Deeg, on Christmas Day 1804. The
courage which sends a civilian into a desperate hand-to-hand fight, to
which he is not obliged to go, must be above proof. Metcalfe had no
pecuniary interest in his position. He was a wealthy man, who spent
far more than his official salary in the various ways a
governor-general {83} is expected to bestow largesse. His 'jolly
visage' bore the marks of a cruel and incurable disease. He is still
remembered in India as the author of the bill which established the
freedom of the press. The historian Macaulay calls him 'the ablest
civil servant I ever knew in India.' Durham, Sydenham, Bagot,
Metcalfe--Britain had few more distinguished or more able servants of
the state; and they devoted all their powers, without a thought of the
cost to themselves, to solving a vital problem in the maintenance of
the Empire. Their more obvious rewards were obloquy and death.

[Illustration: Sir Charles Metcalfe. After a painting by Bradish]

The misfortune of Metcalfe was that his entire political training had
been gained in governing subject races, Hindus in India and negroes in
Jamaica, races 'so accustomed to be trampled on by the strong that they
always consider humanity as a sign of weakness.' Now old, and fixed in
his mental set, autocratic as an Indian civil servant must be, he came
to deal with a rude, unlicked, white democracy, impatient of control as
Durham discovered, and acutely jealous of its rights. In theory
Metcalfe should have been most sympathetic, for in English politics he
was an advanced Whig, strongly in favour of such {84} popular measures
as abolition of the Corn Laws, vote by ballot, the extension of the
franchise. Besides, he was honestly desirous of playing the
peacemaker. None the less, his administration was marked by a reaction
towards the old Tory state of affairs, and produced a ministerial
crisis which threatened to bring back the reign of Chaos and old Night.

The primal difficulty la