He acted as Vice-President of the Defence Fund. The
following is a letter written to Mr. Hamilton Hume, giving his views
on the subject in full:
"Ripple Court, Ringwould, Dover,
"_August 23_, 1866.
"SIR,
"The clamour raised against Governor Eyre appears to me to be
disgraceful to the good sense of England; and if it rested on any
depth of conviction, and were not rather (as I always flatter myself
it is) a thing of rumour and hearsay, of repetition and reverberation,
mostly from the teeth outward, I should consider it of evil omen to
the country and to its highest interests in these times. For my own
share, all the light that has yet reached me on Mr. Eyre and his
history in the world goes steadily to establish the conclusion that he
is a just, humane, and valiant man, faithful to his trusts everywhere,
and with no ordinary faculty of executing them; that his late services
in Jamaica were of great, perhaps of incalculable value, as certainly
they were of perilous and appalling difficulty--something like the
case of 'fire,' suddenly reported, 'in the ship's powder room,' in
mid-ocean where the moments mean the ages, and life and death hang
on your use or misuse of the moments; and, in short, that penalty and
clamour are not the thing this Governor merits from any of us, but
honour and thanks, and wise imitation (I will farther say), should
similar emergencies arise, on the great scale or on the small, in
whatever we are governing!
"The English nation never loved anarchy, nor was wont to spend its
sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and
half-brutish type; but always loved order, and the prompt suppression
of seditions, and reserved its tears for something worthier than
promoters of such delirious and fatal enterprises who had got their
wages for their sad industry.
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