English legislator, author and diplomatist, born in Oxford on the 24th of December 1847; graduated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1876. For three years previous to attending Balliol he traveled in New Zealand and Australia, and published a work on those countries which was pronounced by the London Times to be a standard work. He was private secretary to the governor of Victoria in 1877; spent 1880–81 in the West Indies, studying their economic situation, and returned there in 1882 as government agent; in 1885 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Zululand; in the winter of 1886–87 Mr. Baden-Powell was in Canada and the United States to draw up a report on the fisheries question, and a year later was made special commissioner to Malta to help Sir George Bowen to arrange the details of its constitution. Among his numerous published writings are Protection and Bad Times, with special reference to the new British empire (1879); State Aid and State Interference (1882); The Truth About Home Rule (1888); besides numerous articles in the Quarterly, Nineteenth Century, Contemporary and Fraser’s dealing with Australian constitutions, imperial defense, import duties, fiscal policy, various details of West Indian, South African and colonial policy, industries in the United States, and other topics of national and international interest. In 1887 he was knighted in commendation of five valuable books on the West Indies.
