CRAIG, JAMES GIBSON, Bart., who bore a great part in the political history of Scotland, and a part even more influential than was conspicuous, was born in St John Street, Edinburgh, on the 11th October 1765. He was the second son of William Gibson, Esq., by Mary Cecilia, daughter of James Balfour, Esq. of Pilrig, and grandson of John Gibson, Esq. of Durie, by Helen Carmichael, sister of John, fourth Earl of Hyndford. His ancestor Sir Alexander Gibson of Durie, one of the senators of the College of Justice, under the title of Lord Durie, having married in 1595 Margaret, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Craig of Riccarton (see CRAIG, Sir T.), in 1822 he succeeded under entail to the estate of Riccarton, in Mid-Lothian, with which he took the name of Craig. He entered on business for himself as a law agent in Edinburgh before he was twenty-one; and almost simultaneously began to take a part in the politics of the day. Of his professional career it is not fitting to say more here than that it was eminently successful; and that during the sixty-four years of its continuance he gained professionally the confidence of many of the chief of those with whom otherwise he was at war. As a politician, the qualities of courage, capacity, energy, and disinterestedness, were all necessarily inferred in the side and the share he took. In the political state of Scotland at that time, there was nothing to be gained, but much to be risked, by the profession or even suspicion of Whiggery; and nothing could be accomplished save by great labour and hardihood. In illustration of this, reference may be made to the case mentioned by Sir James himself, in a published letter, written in 1849, of an attempt made by him and others to celebrate, by a dinner, in Edinburgh, the fall of the Bastille in 1789; when only twenty-four persons (several of whom subsequently rose to high eminence in various departments) could be got together, whose names were taken down by the police as they entered, while the sheriff of the county and another official person were subsequently discovered, in an adjoining apartment, noting down as much of the proceedings as could be overheard through the partition. In 1794 the trials and severe sentences of Muir, Gerrald, and other persons engaged in the same object as Sir James, though in a different combination, only confirmed him in his course. Holding steadily on his way, and working energetically, he was by common assent assigned from the first a leadership, which he held until the last; it being his remarkable fortune to be the father and preceptor of the modern Whig party of Scotland, and to outlive almost all his political children and pupils. It was a chief characteristic of his public career, that while ready for every danger, he rather shunned éclat, speaking little, but working indomitably. For forty years, uncheered by success, he lent himself unsparingly in time, strength, and purse, inspiring the timid, sheltering the weak, and (to an extent unsuspected at the time even by those with whom he was in closest alliance) aiding and recompensing the martyred. He had passed sixty-five years of age before the work in which he had been so resolute a labourer fructified in the "Reform" era of 1830-2. During all that critical period, when the country seemed day after day on the brink of revolutionary tumult, Sir James Gibson-Craig was in Scotland the centre-figure of the mass of the population, as he had been for more than forty years previous of the small band maintain-
ing the doctrines which had at last sprung into such fierce popularity. His work now was to restrain the many, instead as heretofore to incite and convince a few; and he was known to spend almost an entire night on the streets of Edinburgh, going about from group to group, enjoining order and patience with as much energy and authority as he had been wont among his small party to urge courage and advance. To his influence, hard won and energetically exercised, is ascribed in a large measure the result of Scotland having got through that crisis without either wavering or outbreak. At this time he received the only honour or reward he could ever be prevailed upon to accept for himself or his family, and was made a baronet of the United Kingdom in 1831. The Reform struggle over, he was content to let much of the work, now become easy and gainful, fall into other hands. But he never lost either his zeal or his influence, and on several occasions during the next twenty years he reappeared in his place as a leader with all his wonted vigour. These occasions arose out of what he thought dangers to the cause of religious liberty, of which, like most of his school, he had a thorough comprehension and strong love. Some of those related to questions merely local in their incidents, though not in their principle—such as an attempt to exclude an eminent citizen of Edinburgh from the chief magistracy on the ground of his being a dissenter; but one requires mention as more important and memorable. In the latter part of what is known as the "non-intrusion controversy," which resulted in the disruption of the Established Church of Scotland, Sir James thought it his duty to take part against the Non-intrusion party, not apparently on the ground of the original question, but on the ground that there was encroachment and danger in the claim of the church courts to a power of interpreting the statutes co-ordinately with the courts of law. Sir James was mainly instrumental in getting up a great public meeting in Edinburgh on this subject, the aim of which is indicated by a sentence in the speech of the chairman (Lord Dunfermline, a contemporary and life-long political ally of Sir James):—"The question is, whether the state is to control the church in what it is fit and proper the church should be by law controlled in; or whether the church is to control the state by asserting her supremacy in all matters which she thinks fit to declare come under her jurisdiction." The course then taken by Sir James was counter to that adopted by the law-officers and other leading members of the Scottish Whig party, and indeed may be said to mark a distinction between the old and the new sections of that party. The older Whigs having, as in the case of the Roman Catholics, stood up against the intrusion of the state into things religious, were equally jealous of the intrusion of the church upon the state.
Passing on to the more strictly personal or private qualities of Sir James Gibson-Craig, it would be a great mistake to assume, from the boldness and sternness of his political career, that he was of obtrusive temperament or habit. On the contrary, he was essentially modest—manly, it is true, and with a somewhat fierce impatience of everything like meanness and dissimulation; but, while firmly adhering to his own position, never forgetful of what was due to others, thus doing much to conciliate those opponents, especially of the higher class, with whom he happened to come into personal contact. In the whole circle of domestic relations he was in a remarkable degree gentle and faithful; he met his duties in public, but sought his delights at home. "Seeing Sir James Craig," says Lord Cockburn (Life of Jeffrey), "in his fields and among his villagers, or by his fireside, was one of the sights that show how, in right natures, the kind affections can survive public contentions." His personal habits, as might be inferred, were active, and, to the utmost extent consistent with the diversified nature of his labours, methodical. Till upwards of eighty, he was an early riser, going through a con-
Craig. siderable amount of business before breakfast; and he was all his life attached to athletic sports and rural pursuits. He died March 6, 1850, in the eighty-fifth year of his age, with his mind still active and undimmed. His last public act was attendance at a meeting regarding a monument to his personal and political friend Lord Jeffrey, at which he caught the cold that initiated his fatal illness. Opinions, of course, do and will differ as to the policy and measures of which Sir James Gibson-Craig was a champion, but not as to his having done much public work from pure motives; and his services are not the less worthy of record that his part was not that of orator or parliamentary leader, and that he was content to do what he thought his duty, careless alike of display, dissuasion, and reward. (A. R.)