[14] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, describing an interview with Murdoch, 1 September, 1842. [15] See Bagot's admirable analysis of French conditions in his public and confidential despatches, 26 September, 1842. [16] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 12 June, 1842. [17] Bagot to Stanley: 26 September, 1842--confidential. [18] Peel to Stanley, 28 August, 1842. [19] Bagot to Stanley, 26 September, 1842--confidential. [20] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 July, 1842. [21] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842. [22] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842. [23] Bagot Correspondence: letters to Sherwood 16 September, and to Ogden 19 September. Dismissal is far too blunt a term in which to describe the transaction. [24] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842. [25] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, 3 November and 3 December, 1842. [26] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842. [27] Hincks, _Reminiscences of his Public Life_, p. 89. [28] Kaye, _Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe_, p. 416. {158} CHAPTER V. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE. A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot's successor was one of those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which, for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the {159} residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the governor-general's displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company authorities against him. He was something more than what Macaulay called him--"the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India"; his faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty