Sir Sanford
Freeling, on the other hand, while being no screener of jobbery and
peculation, had not the strength of mind whereof jobbers and
peculators do stand in dread. In evidence of that poor ruler's
infirmity of purpose, we would only cite the double fact that,
whereas in 1883 he was the first to enter a practical protest against
the housing [70] of the diseased and destitute in the then newly
finished, but most leaky, House of Refuge on the St. Clair Lands, by
having the poor saturated inmates carried off in his presence to the
Colonial Hospital, yet His Excellency was the very man who, in the
very next year, 1884, not only sanctioned the shooting down of Indian
immigrants at their festival, but actually directed the use of buck-
shot for that purpose! Evidently, if these two foregoing statements
are true, Mr. Froude must join us in thinking that a man whose mind
could be warped by external influences from the softest commiseration
for the sufferings of his kind, one year, into being the cold-blooded
deviser of the readiest method for slaughtering unarmed holiday-
makers, the very next year, is not the kind of ruler whom he and we
so cordially desiderate.
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