Shortly After This Calamity, Yule Removed To London, And On The Retirement
Of His Old Friend, Sir William Baker, From The India Council Early That
Autumn, Lord Salisbury At Once Selected Him For The Vacant Seat.
Nothing
would ever have made him a party-man, but he always followed Lord
Salisbury with conviction, and worked under him with steady confidence.
In 1877 Yule married, as his second wife, the daughter of an old
friend,[67] a very amiable woman twenty years his junior, who made him
very happy until her untimely death in 1881. From the time of his joining
the India Council, his duties at the India Office of course occupied a
great part of his time, but he also continued to do an immense amount of
miscellaneous literary work, as may be seen by reference to the subjoined
bibliography, (itself probably incomplete). In Council he invariably
"showed his strong determination to endeavour to deal with questions on
their own merits and not only by custom and precedent."[68] Amongst
subjects in which he took a strong line of his own in the discussions of
the Council, may be specially instanced his action in the matter of the
cotton duties (in which he defended native Indian manufactures as against
hostile Manchester interests); the Vernacular Press Act, the necessity for
which he fully recognised; and the retention of Kandahar, for which he
recorded his vote in a strong minute. In all these three cases, which are
typical of many others, his opinion was overruled, but having been
carefully and deliberately formed, it remained unaffected by defeat.
In all matters connected with Central Asian affairs, Yule's opinion always
carried great weight; some of his most competent colleagues indeed
preferred his authority in this field to that of even Sir Henry Rawlinson,
possibly for the reason given by Sir M. Grant Duff, who has
epigrammatically described the latter as good in Council but dangerous in
counsel.[69]
Yule's courageous independence and habit of looking at all public
questions by the simple light of what appeared to him right, yet without
fads or doctrinairism, earned for him the respect of the successive
Secretaries of State under whom he served, and the warm regard and
confidence of his other colleagues. The value attached to his services in
Council was sufficiently shown by the fact that when the period of ten
years (for which members are usually appointed), was about to expire, Lord
Hartington (now Duke of Devonshire), caused Yule's appointment to be
renewed for life, under a special Act of Parliament passed for this
purpose in 1885.
His work as a member of the Army Sanitary Committee, brought him into
communication with Miss Florence Nightingale, a privilege which he greatly
valued and enjoyed, though he used to say: "She is worse than a Royal
Commission to answer, and, in the most gracious charming manner possible,
immediately finds out all I don't know!" Indeed his devotion to the
"Lady-in-Chief" was scarcely less complete than Kinglake's.
In 1880, Yule was appointed to the Board of Visitors of the Government
Indian Engineering College at Cooper's Hill, a post which added to his
sphere of interests without materially increasing his work. In 1882, he
was much gratified by being named an Honorary Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland, more especially as it was to fill one of the two
vacancies created by the deaths of Thomas Carlyle and Dean Stanley.
Yule had been President of the Hakluyt Society from 1877, and in 1885 was
elected President also of the Royal Asiatic Society. He would probably
also have been President of the Royal Geographical Society, but for an
untoward incident. Mention has already been made of his constant
determination to judge all questions by the simple touchstone of what he
believed to be right, irrespective of personal considerations. It was in
pursuance of these principles that, at the cost of great pain to himself
and some misrepresentation, he in 1878 sundered his long connection with
the Royal Geographical Society, by resigning his seat on their Council,
solely in consequence of their adoption of what he considered a wrong
policy. This severance occurred just when it was intended to propose him
as President. Some years later, at the personal request of the late Lord
Aberdare, a President in all respects worthy of the best traditions of
that great Society, Yule consented to rejoin the Council, which he
re-entered as a Vice-President.
In 1883, the University of Edinburgh celebrated its Tercentenary, when
Yule was selected as one of the recipients of the honorary degree of LL.D.
His letters from Edinburgh, on this occasion, give a very pleasant and
amusing account of the festivity and of the celebrities he met. Nor did he
omit to chronicle the envious glances cast, as he alleged, by some British
men of science on the splendours of foreign Academic attire, on the yellow
robes of the Sorbonne, and the Palms of the Institute of France! Pasteur
was, he wrote, the one most enthusiastically acclaimed of all who received
degrees.
I think it was about the same time that M. Renan was in England, and
called upon Sir Henry Maine, Yule, and others at the India Office. On
meeting just after, the colleagues compared notes as to their
distinguished but unwieldy visitor. "It seems that le style n'est pas
l'homme meme in this instance," quoth "Ancient Law" to "Marco Polo."
And here it may be remarked that Yule so completely identified himself
with his favourite traveller that he frequently signed contributions to
the public press as MARCUS PAULUS VENETUS or M.P.V. His more intimate
friends also gave him the same sobriquet, and once, when calling on his
old friend, Dr. John Brown (the beloved chronicler of Rab and his
Friends), he was introduced by Dr. John to some lion-hunting American
visitors as "our Marco Polo." The visitors evidently took the statement in
a literal sense, and scrutinised Yule closely.[70]
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