At first, Lord Mayo worked at night, carrying on the labours of the day long after his guests and household were asleep. But India soon taught him that her climate put limits even on a strongly-built constitution like his own, and he had to give up the practice. It may be imagined that much accurate prevision was required to lay out the paper side of Lord Mayo's work described above, so that it might be as little as possible interfered with by the more public functions of the Viceregal office. His interviews with each of his Secretaries, and the meetings of his Executive and Legislative Councils, were fixed for specified hours on certain days, and from the printed scheme on his table no departure was permitted. But a large mass of ceremonial and personal business could not be thus laid out beforehand.
One day it was a foreign embassy, or a great feudatory who had come a thousand miles with his retinue to pay his respects; another day it was the return visit of the Viceroy; a third day it was the laying of some foundation-stone; a fourth, the inspection of a local institution or hospital; a fifth, a rapid run upon a railway to see some new works, or examine a bridge across a deltaic estuary hitherto deemed uncontrollable by engineering skill; a sixth, the letting in of the water at the head-lock of a canal; a seventh, a great speech as Chancellor of the Calcutta University, or some words of encouragement at the distribution of prizes at a college or school. No hard-and-fast scheme could provide for this multifarious aspect of his duties. But he looked (and looked with just confidence) to his Private Secretary to reduce the interference thus caused to his regular work to the minimum. Whenever the ceremonial permitted, he avoided an interruption of his day's work by giving up the hour for the evening's gallop to it.
In the following narrative of the great measures initiated or carried out during Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty there are several omissions which Lord Mayo would have deemed most unjust. They refer not to what he himself did, but to the assistance which he derived from others. But with few exceptions his coadjutors are still alive, and some of them still hold high office. This book is not written in praise or dispraise of living men. Yet, at almost every page, I have felt that I am doing the central figure of it a wrong by isolating him from his surroundings. He was essentially a man who went through life girt about with friends, and a memoir which fails to develop that side of his character leaves half his story untold. This, however, is one of the conditions under which a contemporary biography ought to be written; and no one can feel the air of ungraciousness which it may impart to my work, especially to the Indian sections of it, more keenly than the writer himself.
While, however, Lord Mayo in the following narrative stands out more prominently from among those who shared his labours than he himself would have deemed right, his method of working renders the injustice less than it might have been in the case of some other Viceroys. He had a remarkable faculty for listening to everything that could be said on a subject, and then shaping from many divergent counsels a course which was distinctively his own. No one could tempt him into the error of being led to state his own conclusions first and then to ask his adviser's opinion about them. He had the art of making every one feel that he followed with a personal interest their exposition of a case; but at the same time that his interest was that of a judge, not of a partisan.
In India the Provincial Administrations and Heads of Departments represent the initiative, the Secretariats the critical element in the Government. A Head of a Department is almost ex officio a man who has something to propose. And his plans of improvement, however admirable in themselves, and however economical they may purport to be at the outset, mean in the end increase of expenditure. The function of the Secretariat is to pull such schemes to pieces, to expose their weak points, and to put on the drag upon every proposal that sooner or later will cost money. A strong Viceroy acts as arbiter between the two sets of forces thus constantly in motion.
Those who had to do business with Lord Mayo were constantly struck by his happy combination of the qualities required for this delicate part of his office. He was adored by the more ardent administrators for the interest with which he listened to their plans. Every one felt sure of a fair hearing. But those who misinterpreted his courteous sympathy into official approval found, by a very brief experience of his method of working, that they were mistaken. For between this initial stage and ultimate action lay an ordeal of inquiry and criticism, a process of weighing which he sometimes renewed afresh in his own mind, even after his responsible advisers had been convinced of the expediency of the proposed measure. He insisted that each question should be thoroughly fought out by his subordinates, sending it, if necessary, back and back, till every disputed point was absolutely disposed of, before he allowed himself to express his own views; nor did he commit himself to a line of action until the chances had been exhausted of his having to alter it, in consequence of new evidence coming to light. He had the art of bringing to a focus whatever was sound in the advice of conflicting Councillors, and all parties felt that their strongest arguments had entered into, and were fairly represented by, the conclusion at which he arrived. But they also felt that that conclusion was his own, and that he would adhere to it. This openness to suggestion and to plans of administrative improvement, followed by a carefully protracted period of criticism and scrutiny, and backed by stedfastness in the practical action which consummated it, formed the secret of Lord Mayo's success as an Indian Viceroy.
The strong individuality which marked his measures produced a corresponding sense of personal responsibility in his own mind. Amid the difficulties and trials, to be presently narrated, this feeling sometimes pressed upon him with a weight under which even his robust nature heaved. 'It is a hard task,' he wrote to a friend during the first dark months of his grapple with deficit; 'but I am determined to go through with it, though I fear bitter opposition where I least expected it. I have put my hand to the work, and I am not going to turn back; and I will kill, before I die, some of the abuses of Indian Administration.'