Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/733

 malignant invective, they disallowed the ordinance, and carried an Act of Indemnity the terms of which were insulting to Durham. The latter immediately resigned; but before returning to England he put himself in the wrong by issuing a proclamation in which he not only justified his own conduct in detail, but made public complaint of his grievances against the ministers of the Crown, a step that alienated much sympathy which his unjust treatment by the government would otherwise have called forth, though it was defended by men like Charles Buller and J. S. Mill. The usual official honours given to a returning plenipotentiary were not accorded to Durham on his arrival at Plymouth on the 30th of November 1838, but the populace received him with acclamation. He immediately set about preparing his memorable “Report on the Affairs of British North America,” which was laid before parliament on the 31st of January 1839. This report, one of the greatest state papers in the English language, laid down the principles, then unrecognized, which have guided British colonial policy ever since. It was not written or composed by Charles Buller, as Brougham was the first to suggest, and the credit for the statesmanship it exhibits is Lord Durham’s alone, though he warmly acknowledged the assistance he had derived from Buller, Wakefield and others in preparing the materials on which it was based. With regard to the future government of British North America, Durham had at first inclined towards a federation of all the colonies on that continent, and this aim, afterwards achieved, remained in his eyes an ideal to be striven for; but as a more immediately practical policy he advised the legislative union of Upper and Lower Canada, his avowed aim being to organize a single state in which the British inhabitants would be in a majority. He further urged the creation of an executive council responsible to the colonial legislature; he advised state-aided emigration on the broadest possible scale, and the formation of an intercolonial railway for the development of the whole country. Meantime Durham, who almost alone among the statesmen of his time saw the importance of imperial expansion, interested himself in the emigration schemes of (q.v.); he became chairman of the New Zealand Company, and was thus concerned in the enterprise which forestalled France in asserting sovereignty over the islands of New Zealand in September 1839. His health, however, had long been failing, and he died at Cowes on the 28th of July 1840, just five days after the royal assent had been given to the bill giving effect to his project for uniting Upper and Lower Canada.

Lord Durham filled a larger place in the eyes of his contemporaries than many statesmen who have been better remembered. He was in his lifetime regarded as a great popular leader; and his accession to supreme political power was for some years considered probable by many; his opinions were, however, too extreme to command the confidence of any considerable party in parliament before 1840. That Brougham hated him and Melbourne feared him, is a tribute to his abilities; and in the first Reform Act, of which he was the chief author, and in the famous Report on the principles of colonial policy, he left an indelible mark on English history. His personal defects of character did much to mar the success of a career, which, it must be remembered, terminated at the age of forty-eight. He was impatient, hot-tempered, hypersensitive to criticism, vain and prone to take offence at fancied slights; but he was also generous and unvindictive, and while personally ambitious his care for the public interest was genuine and untiring.

By his first wife Durham had three daughters; by his second, who was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Victoria but resigned on her husband’s return from Canada, he had two sons and three daughters. The eldest son, Charles William, the “Master Lambton” of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s celebrated picture, died in 1831; the second, George Frederick d’Arcy (1828–1879), succeeded his father as 2nd earl of Durham. The latter’s son, John George Lambton (b. 1855), became 3rd earl in 1879.

 DURHAM, a northern county of England, bounded N. by Northumberland, E. by the North Sea, S. by Yorkshire, and W. by Westmorland and Cumberland. Its area is 1014·6 sq. m. It is wholly on the eastern slope, the western angle being occupied by spurs of the Pennine chain, exceeding 2300 ft. in height at some points on the Cumberland border. West of a line from Barnard Castle by Wolsingham to the neighbourhood of Consett the whole of the land, excepting narrow valleys, lies at elevations exceeding 1000 ft. This area represents roughly one quarter of the total. The principal rivers rising in these hills are the Derwent, tributary to the Tyne, forming part of the county boundary with Northumberland, the Wear and the Tees, which forms almost the whole of the boundary with Westmorland and Yorkshire. The dales traversed by these rivers in their upper parts, though sufficiently strongly contrasted with the dark, barren moors surrounding them, yet partake of somewhat the same wild character. Lower down, however, are beautiful and fertile valleys, the main rivers flowing between steep, well-wooded banks; while the lesser streams of the coastal district have carved out denes or ravines on the steep flanks of which vegetation is luxuriant. Castle Eden Dene, 7 m. N.W. of Hartlepool, is famous for its beautiful trees and wild flowers. The coastward slope is fairly steep in the northern half of the county, but it is steady, and the coast itself has no striking scenic features, save where the action of the waves upon the magnesian limestone has separated great masses, leaving towering fragments standing, and fretting the face of the rock with caverns and arches. The cluster of rocks named the Black Halls, 6 m. N.W. of Hartlepool, best exhibits these features. Other natural phenomena include the Linnkirk caves near Stanhope in Weardale in which numerous fossils and bones, with evidence of habitation by man, have been discovered; and the Hell Kettles, S. of Darlington, near the junction of the Tees and the Skerne, four cavities filled with water, reputed to be unfathomable, and measuring from 80 to 120 ft. in diameter. The water is sulphurous.

Except in the moorlands of the west only a few scraps of the county have been left in their natural state; but these portions are of great interest to the student of natural history. The ballast-hills at Shields, Jarrow and Hartlepool, formed by the discharge of material from ships arriving in ballast from foreign countries, are overgrown with aliens, many of which are elsewhere unknown in this country. Nearly fifty different species have been found. Stockton was almost the last retreat in England of the native black rat. Of the former abundance of deer, wild ox and boar every peat bog testifies by its remains; the boar appears to have existed in the reign of Henry VIII., and records of red deer in the county may be traced down to the middle of the 18th century.

Geology.—The uplift of the Pennine hills causes nearly all the stratified rocks of Durham to dip towards the east or south-east. Thus the oldest rocks are to be found in the west, while in passing eastward younger rocks are continually met. In the hilly district of Weardale and Teesdale the Carboniferous Limestone series prevails; this is a succession of thick beds of limestone with intervening sandstones and shales. Some of the calcareous beds are highly fossiliferous; those at Frosterley near Stanhope are full of the remains of corals and the stone is polished as a marble. Much of the higher ground in the west is capped by Millstone Grit, as at Muggleswick and Walsingham commons. The outcrop of this formation broadens eastward until it is covered by the Durham coalfield which occupies the centre of the county from Newcastle and South Shields to Barnard Castle. The Coal Measures are about 2000 ft. thick and contain upwards of 100 seams of coal, including many of great importance—the Brockwell coal, Low Main coal and High Main coal are some of the well-known seams. Fireclays of great value are obtained from beneath many of the coal seams. Apart from the coals, the Coal Measures are made up of beds of sandstone and shale, the former called “post” and the latter “plate” by the local miners. Permian magnesian limestone succeeds the Coal Measures on the east, it reaches from the Tees to South Shields in a broad tract and occupies the coast between that town and Hartlepool. Remarkable concretionary forms are found in the Fulwell Quarries simulating honeycomb and coral structures. The