LORD GLENELG.

 ONE by one the politicians of the last generation are disappearing from the scene. Last year witnessed the departure of the veteran, Lord Palmerston, rich with the honours of more than half a century of active statesmanship, by this mail we learn that almost the last of his old colleagues in official life who, though less known to the present generation, was hardly less honoured than his old contemporary in that which preceded it. Charles, Lord Glenelg, has, at an age protracted beyond the usual span of human life, been at length gathered to his fathers. In the rapid whirl of time, the noble lord has, in the calm serenity of his old age, ceased to exist but as an honoured relic of the past ; but as in the course of his official career as a Minister of State he has a place in Australian history, a brief notice of his public life may not be uninteresting to Australian readers.

Lord Glenelg, or, to adopt the older and more familiar designation, Charles Grant, was born at Kidderpore, in Bengal, in the year 1779. His father, Mr Charles Grant, was no less distinguished in social life than his son, the subject of the present memoir, was in political life, and he occupies a conspicuous niche in that Walhalla of worthies recorded by Sir James Stephen in his well known Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography as the "Clapham Sect." It is a remarkable fact in connection with the lives of the father and the son, that each held in his day the virtual government of India; the father in the last century, as Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, the son in the present century, under a better system of government, as a Minister of the Crown. The son inherited the father's philanthropic spirit, and when the power fell into his hands in after life took advantage of the occasion to carry out the benevolent views of his parent for the amelioration of the condition of the coloured population of British India.

Lord Glenelg came to England in early life. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where, in the year 1801, he took some of the highest academical honours then attainable. He was subsequently called to the Bar, but never practised, having, in the year of his call, 1807, been elected a member of the House of Commons, and he thenceforward sacrificed forensic for political honours. In 1813 Lord Liverpool, whom history records as having had a tenure of office that some of our colonial prime ministers might envy, appointed him a Lord of his Treasury, and this position he held until 1819, when the same perennial Prime Minister made him Chief Secretary for Ireland. In 1823, he was appointed to the office of Vice President of the Board of Trade, which he held until 1827, when, on the accession of Mr. Canning to office, he accepted the office of President, with a seat in the Cabinet. Upon the disruption of Mr Canning's Ministry by the lamented death of that memorable man, Mr Grant ceased to hold office until 1836 when, after the interregnum of the Duke of Wellington's Administration which did not believe in reform and popular progress, and had to be convinced of its mistake, he took office under Earl Grey as President of the Board of Control. This office he held until 1831, when Lord Grey's Ministry succumbed to inevitable destiny, and Mr Grant in the following year, under the Administration of Lord Melbourne, accepted the post of Secretary of State for the Colonies. This office he held until 1839, when he may be said finally to have retired from political life. Up to the time of his becoming a member of Lord Melbourne's Ministry, the subject of our notice had been a member of the House of Commons, but in that year he accepted the peerage which he has so well and so eminently adorned.

The useful portion of Lord Glenelg's political life began in 1830, when he was enabled, like his colleague and contemporary, Lord Palmerston, to give free vent to his political prepossessions in favour of freedom and progress. His Lordship was never a Tory, any more than was Lord Palmerston, though, like the latter, he held office so long under a Tory Administration. But party politics, in the last years of the reign of George the Forth especially, were really the worn-out prejudices which Captain Gronow in his amusing reminiscences of social life of the period has recently disinterred. Toryism was, in those days, respectability; and the chill of respectability cooled the ardour of politicians who were well to do in the world, and who, like the Mr Grant of that day, merely bided their time. In 1833 Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board of Control, and freed from the trammels of official subordination, carried through Parliament a measure which not only freed the British consumer from the infliction of a capacious monopoly, but, better still, extended for the first time to the natives of British India the blessings of freedom and civilisation. In his subsequent career of Secretary of State for the Colonies, it was reserved for his lordship as to the West Indian colonies, by his clearsightedness in adopting a bold and simple remedy, to relieve them from the commercial embarrassment of a depreciated currency, and, as to the colony in which we are most interested, by the benignant and benevolent exercise of his authority, which in those times of colonial government was paramount, to relieve it from the curse of convictism, and to make it, what it is now, a British community.

After his retirement from official life Lord Glenelg took no active part in party politics. His sympathies were always in favour of progress, but he preferred to the turbulence of political the amenities of social life as he enjoyed them— quiet social intercourse, and unbounded intellectual gratification. His intellectual attainments were of a very high order, and among his poetical contributions to our devotional literature may be mentioned two hymns, well known to and in use by many denominations of Christians, " When gathering clouds around I view ;" and, " Saviour, when in dust to thee," with the refrain " Hear our solemn Litany. "

Lord Glenelg was never married, and his title, therefore, becomes extinct. Of his family, his brother, Sir Robert Grant, was, during a great portion of Lord Glenelg's career, also a member of the House of Commons and was in 1832 elected member for the Radical borough of Finsbury, after the passing of the Reform Bill, notwithstanding that he had been a member of Parliament at the time that Lord Castlereagh's well known "Six Acts" were passed. Sir Robert was afterward, for some years, Governor of Madras. Of Lord Glenelg's sisters, one, we believe, married Mr March Phillips, well known to lawyers as the author of a valuable treatise on the law of evidence and another was married to Mr Patrick Grant, who was for some time a member of the Legislative Council of this colony.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Friday 27 July 1866, page 2