These materials his family, at my suggestion, committed to my friend Mr.
Theodore Walrond, whose sound judgment, comprehensive views, and official
experience are known to many besides myself, and who seemed not less
fitted to act as interpreter to the public at large of such a life and
character, because, not having been personally acquainted with Lord Elgin,
or connected with any of the public transactions recorded in the following
pages, he was able to speak with the sobriety of calm appreciation, rather
than the warmth of personal attachment. In this spirit he kindly
undertook, in the intervals of constant public occupations, to select from
the vast mass of materials placed at his disposal such extracts as most
vividly brought out the main features of Lord Elgin's career, adding such
illustrations as could be gleaned from private or published documents or
from the remembrance of friends. If the work has unavoidably been delayed
beyond the expected term, yet it is hoped that the interest in those great
colonial dependencies for which Lord Elgin laboured, has not diminished
with the lapse of years. It is believed also that there is no time when it
will not be good for his countrymen to have brought before them those
statesmanlike gifts which accomplished the successful accommodation of a
more varied series of novel and entangled situations than has, perhaps,
fallen to the lot of any other public man within our own memory.
Especially might be named that rare quality of a strong overruling sense
of the justice due from man to man, from nation to nation; that
'combination of speculative and practical ability' (so wrote one who had
deep experience of his mind) 'which peculiarly fitted him to solve the
problem how the subject races of a civilised empire are to be governed;'
that firm, courageous, and far-sighted confidence in the triumph of those
liberal and constitutional principles (in the best sense of the word),
which, having secured the greatness of England, were, in his judgment,
also applicable, under other forms, to the difficult circumstances of new