CONCLUSION.
“He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood; who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good doth avert the dolours of death; but, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is ‘Nunc dimittis,’ when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations.”—Bacon.
Sir Rowland Hill, at the time of his retirement, “remained,” in the words of the Treasury Minute, “full as ever of ability, energy, and resources, and of disposition to expend them for the public good.” He was broken down in health—broken down, not so much by the great work that he had done, as by the hindrances that, time after time, had been wantonly and cruelly piled up against him in the discharge of his duty. “Men will one day think of the force they squander in every generation, and the fatal damage they encounter by this neglect.”[248] “He stands,” wrote Mr. Gladstone a few months before he left the Post Office, “pre-eminent and alone among all the members of the Civil Service as a benefactor to the nation.” He had not been two years in the service of his country when the Chancellor of the Exchequer of that day, “a man not of many words, or, in manner, of overflowing heart,”[249] told him that, were the Secretaryship to the Post Office vacant, he was the man whom he should recommend to fill it. In a most trying and severe apprenticeship he had proved his thorough fitness for the post, and had convinced Mr. Baring that there was, at all events, one inventor who could be a man of business.[250] But before long his force was squandered by Sir Robert Peel. For the next four years his work lay outside the Post Office. With the return of the Whigs to power, he was once more brought back to the great work of his life. Unhappily the squandering of force did not come to an end. Seven years more had to pass before he was made sole Secretary, and placed in a position of real and undoubted power. For these seven years he had been, to use his own words, “a general almost without an army.” For the next six years his work went on smoothly and rapidly under a happy succession of able and high-minded Postmasters-General. But a change came all too soon. In the Post Office certainly he should have had no master over him at any time. There even the ablest of our statesmen might well have sat at his feet. “He is King of Postal Reform,” wrote a Postmaster-General of a later date, “and I felt myself a very small subject in waiting upon him.” But under the able chiefs under whom he served from 1854 to 1860 he worked with full contentment. This happy period came to an end, as has been seen, with the appointment of Lord Stanley of Alderley. His force was once more, and for the last time, squandered.
How strangely and how sadly was this man thwarted in the high aim of his life. He longed for power, but it was for the power to carry through his great scheme. For the mere shows—the trappings—of authority he cared but little. Such outward things dwelt not in his desires. “My plan” was often on his lips, and ever in his thoughts. His strong mind was made up that it should succeed. He looked upon it with all the fondness and the pride with which a father looks upon his only boy. Take it from him, and his life was done. There was in him a rare combination of enthusiasm and practical power—such a combination as the world has not often seen, and may not again see for many a long day. He had “the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself”;[251] but together with this confidence was found a cautiousness that, for the most part, is only seen in those who are far too timid for any great undertaking. He clearly saw every difficulty that lay in his path, and yet he went on with unshaken firmness. To the simple pleasures of life he was by no means indifferent; but he had in his early years attained a thorough self-mastery. In everything but in work he was the most temperate of men. He never repined over the past, or, when once he had taken a step, fretted at the result. His health was greatly shattered by his excessive toils and his long struggles. For the last years of his life he never left his house, and never even left the floor on which his sleeping-room was. But in the midst of this confinement, in all the weakness of old age and sickness, he wrote, “I accept the evil with the good, and frankly regard the latter as by far the weightier of the two. Could I repeat my course, I should sacrifice as much as before, and regard myself as richly repaid by the result.”
With these high qualities was united perfect integrity. He was the most upright and the most truthful of men. He hated By-ends and all his companions. He was often careless of any gain to himself, but the good of the state never for one moment did he disregard. He watched over the public money with a carefulness which few men show even in watching over their own private hoards. He was never even so much as tempted for a single moment to purchase popularity by swerving by a hair’s breadth from the narrow path of duty. More than once a slight sacrifice of public money would have saved him from attack. To public censure he was by no means indifferent. He suffered beneath it even though he knew that it was unjust. Yet he was always ready to brave it in a good cause. One of the men who long served under him bore this high testimony to the character of his old chief:—“Sir Rowland Hill was very generous with his own money, and very close with public money. He would have been more popular had he been generous with the public money and close with his own.” Of his generosity I discovered a striking instance in looking through his private Journal for his last year in office. For one of his subordinates, on whose ability and devotion to himself and zeal in the public service he set a high value, he had not been able to obtain from the Government the recompense which, in his opinion, that gentleman deserved. “I have compensated him to some extent,” he records, “by a gift of £300.” Beneath a manner that was cold beat one of the warmest and even tenderest of hearts. He had, in earlier life, known what it was to bear the proud man’s contumely. The lesson that he had learnt in that hard school was one of forbearance. His rule was stern, yet never without consideration for the feelings of others. No one who was under him ever felt his self-respect wounded by his chief. It is not yet forgotten in the Post Office how, many years ago, one of the higher officers was summoned to the room of the Postmaster-General to give an explanation on some difficult matter. He found his Lordship and the Secretary sitting at the table, but he himself, though he was likely to be kept some time, was not invited to take a chair. Sir Rowland Hill stood up, and remained standing, till his Lordship requested both to be seated.
He had not the fault of most enthusiasts, who look in others for a zeal as ardent as that which animates themselves. He found it somewhat hard, indeed, to understand how any one could be indifferent to the statistics of Penny Postage, and help watching the rise in the number of letters and the postal revenue with as much interest as Englishmen, on a wet day, watch the rise in the weather-glass. But though he did not ask for the same enthusiasm in those who were set under him, he did look for the same carefulness, the same exactness, the same integrity, and the same constant thought for the public good. He forgot that they had not been trained in the same stern school with himself, and he failed to make due allowance for the weakness of man’s nature. By asking too much from men he got from them, perhaps, less than they might otherwise have given. Yet the better natures were not a little raised by the high standard of duty that he ever set before them. He left behind him, in all ranks of the service, a strong sense of public duty, which has managed to outlive even the evil days which came after him.
The history of his declining years I shall but touch on. His work was well-nigh done on the day when he left the Post Office; yet prolonged rest gave him back some small part of his old strength. “Much improved during the winter,” he noted down at the end of his first year in retirement; “rest and cool weather suit me.” In his labours as a member of the Royal Commission on Railways[252] he showed that his mind, however much it had been strained, had yet lost none of its clearness. Not less did it show its power in the years when he was employed in writing “The History of Penny Postage.” He managed, he could long boast, to keep himself “au courant with the progress of science and mechanical invention.” For a while he had strength enough from time to time to attend the meetings of the Political Economy Club. From a short paper that he drew up I extract the following passage:—