official and private letters amongst the Colonial Office papers, appear to have been of the pleasantest kind. But he seems to have been then, as he was in after life when he had attained high office, one of the most colourless of men. He was of much the same type as Lord Bathurst, but having been born a commoner, found it necessary to be just a little better informed, a shade more efficient, than his titled chief. Though a Tory, he was inclined to more liberal views that Lord Bathurst, though in regard to New South Wales no opportunity was taken for putting them in practice. His colonial policy was vague and rather inconsistent.
"We were not to consider," he said on one occasion, "these Colonies merely as the appurtenances of grandeur, and the gratification of national vanity, but to weigh the right of the people and their individual happiness. … To those who thought that the Colonies were only an encumbrance on the country, it might be that these reasons would have little weight; but with those who like himself considered them one of the great sources of our glory, and one of the great supports of our power, affording resources in war, and increasing our commerce in peace, with those who thought them important under every consideration, it would not be doubted that they had a right to due attention. …"[1] Two years later in a debate on Army Estimates in new colonies, he said:—
"The effect of that principle (on which was founded our colonial policy) was, in compensation for a monopoly of commerce, to maintain the civil and military establishments of the Colonies. Whenever that branch of the subject should be brought forward he trusted he would be able to show that this system of retaining in our own hands the sources of commercial profit was justified by sound policy, and ought not to be rashly abandoned."[2]
These two utterances, the only statements of general colonial policy which he can be found to have made, are scarcely illuminating. The consideration of the "rights" of colonists and their support in war consort but ill with this statement of
