290 A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



he came to act in closer connection with prison and criminal 

 law reformers in the House of Commons, his interest in New 

 South Wales was placed on a wider basis. But in earlier years 

 when he and Pitt were close friends it was the religious interests 

 of the Colony alone which he attempted to influence. 



From 1803 to 1812, Lord Hobart, Mr. Wyndham, Lord 

 Castlereagh and Lord Liverpool held successively the seals for 

 War and the Colonies. But in June of the latter year Lord 

 Bathurst came into office and he remained Secretary until 1827. 

 In August, 1812, Henry Goulburn, as Under-Secretary for the 

 Colonies, replaced Robert Peel, who had in that position made 

 his entry into official life. Goulburn remained in this office 

 until the end of 1821. 



At that period the parliamentary chiefs of the department 

 appear to have been in every sense the administrators, and 

 the permanent officials of the Colonial Office held an altogether 

 unimportant position. But even the Secretary of State, as 

 has been seen in earlier chapters, often had insurmountable 

 difficulty in enforcing his policy upon the colonial Governors. 

 Nevertheless the personality and opinions of the Secretary 

 and Under-Secretary were of importance in affecting the de- 

 velopment of the Colony, and it is of interest to know what 

 manner of men they were. 



Lord Bathurst was a kindly Tory of the old school, well 

 fixed in the old ways, and was one of those who retired alto- 

 gether from politics with the passing of the Reform Bill. He 

 was industrious and religious, with a strong inclination towards 

 the Clapham sect, and he had plenty of plain common-sense. 

 During a long Parliamentary career he made one speech only, 

 and that a short one, which rose above the merest mediocrity. 1 

 He was a high-minded public-spirited aristocrat, who had prob- 

 ably gone into politics as a kind of family duty, was a tolerably 

 competent official, had a close regard for routine and a total 

 lack of imagination. 



It is very difficult to describe Goulburn. He was even at 

 this time a very close friend of Peel's, and his relations with all 

 his colleagues, so far as they can be judged from the semi- 



*On the treatment of Bonaparte 1817. Hansard, vol. xxxv., pp. 1146-1160, 

 March, 1817. 



