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Nothing could have promised better than the appointment of Bagot’s successor; for few among the public servants of Britain had a better administrative record than Sir Charles Metcalfe. He had been born into the tradition of imperial service, and his education had been that of the governing classes in Britain. At a very early age he had undertaken most responsible work in India, and he had passed through all the stages of Indian promotion until he had been chosen to fill temporarily the highest place, after Lord William Bentinck’s retirement. He had proved himself something better than a mere efficient functionary, for, sharing in the reforming work of Bentinck, he had kept an extraordinarily open mind in matters of liberty and fair play. At the cost of great discomfort to himself he had exposed a financial scandal in which his superiors had been inclined to acquiesce; and to him belongs the credit of freeing the Indian press from harassing restrictions. Nor was his administrative liberalism a facile go-as-you-please mood. The man had that highest kind of political imagination whose fruit is self-criticism. He saw with an amazing clearness the dangers confronting British rule in India, and expressed his fears in language adequate to their importance:

Our power does not rest on actual strength, but on impression.... In their feelings, they [the inhabitants of India] partake more or less of the universal disaffection which prevails against us, not from bad government, but from natural and irresistible antipathy.... Our greatest danger is not from a Russian invasion, but from the fading of the impression of our invincibility from the minds of the native inhabitants of India. The disaffection which would willingly root us out exists abundantly: the concurrence of circumstances sufficient to call it into general action may at any time happen.

This is something more than mere shrewd insight: it is evidence that the man had a sympathetic insight into the minds of those whom he governed of an unusual power and depth. Passing from India, he had done work of great importance in removing causes of friction in the government of Jamaica, and Bagot confessed that his was the first name which presented itself to his mind as his successor, if indeed it was not too humble a position to offer to so distinguished a public servant.

In Canada, whatever his political errors, he impressed all with his admirable qualities and his generosity. According to credible evidence, he had unlimited patience in granting and enduring interviews, never attempting ‘to close an interview, except by occasionally wearing out importunity by silence.’ He carried charity and thoughtful generosity to a heroic pitch; and if his years in Indian authority had given him the over-simplicity of great despotic public servants (his critics called him Square-toes), he had also the high civilian’s hatred of mean compromise and trickery. Canada was to be governed by a more intellectual and powerful Colonel Newcome.