Here, then, is suggested another aspect of his mind's history. He notes:
'As I rejected at this period of my life the Divinity of Christ, I sought, under Renan's guidance, more fully than I need have done, the origin of Christ's teaching and of that of Paul, in the doctrines previously taught by the Essenes and the Sadducees.'
Elsewhere a manuscript note describes his varying attitude towards
Christianity:
'In the course of 1863 I ceased my attendance upon Holy Communion, and fell into a sceptical frame of mind which lasted for several years, was modified in 1874, and came to an end in 1875. I had been a very strong believer, and in the loss of my belief in the supernatural, as it is called—i.e., in the Divinity of our Blessed Lord—I kept an unbounded admiration for His words, as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount, and belief in duty towards others. From 1885 to 1888 the Holy Sacrament was a profound blessing to me, but in 1905 I ceased again to find any help in forms.'
To what he called in 1865 the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching— to-day it would be called Christian Socialism—he was always constant. It was the guiding principle of that inner idealism which underlay his whole life and which strengthened with his maturity. The world was for him 'a Christian' world. But acceptance not so much of the dogma as of the mystical faith of Christians would seem to have varied with him from time to time, and to have varied also in its formal expression. His mind was too positive, too much occupied in the detail of life, to have time either for brooding meditation or for the metaphysics of religious inquiry; and, at least in 1866, Christianity interested him mainly as one of the most potent shaping forces of human society. The desire to follow out and investigate at first hand certain of its modern manifestations helped to direct the impulse for travel which was already prompting him.
The Long Vacation of 1865 had found him tramping, first with Warr in Guernsey, afterwards alone 'through Brittany and Normandy and partly into the provinces south of the Loire,' eloquent on the charms of travelling without luggage, sketching also, and increasing his carefully gathered knowledge of French architecture.
He had explored France very thoroughly before he found the part of it which was to become almost a second homeland in his affections; and he had the Frenchman's appreciation of what was most characteristically France. "I think the better of the French," he wrote at this time, "for their admiration of the scenery of the Loire, the Indre, and the Vienne. Few English people are capable of appreciating the scenery of Anjou…. I never saw anything more lovely than the scenery of the Vilaine south of Guichen and Bourg des Comptes."
But this was only an excursion. The whole bent of his desire lay towards serious travel, in which he should pass from the training- ground of the University to that wider school where knowledge was to be gained, applied, and perfected. In the early part of 1866 he was talking only of a journey in America, and it was a journey with a literary purpose. In his History of Radicalism he had given much space to the Revivals in Prussia led by Ebel, and also to the rise in America of the school of the Perfectionists in 1834. He proposed to take with him the sketch of this book, and work into it the results of inquiry made on the spot as regards the communistic experiments which had been tried in the United States.
But travel for its own sake tempted him, and even before he set out, 'I fancy,' he writes, 'my intention was already to go round the world: but if I had asked my father's leave to do so, I should have been refused.'
At all events, when once fairly launched, the interest of travelling absorbed his mind; and accordingly the book on Radicalism was finally put aside, though not before some work had been done on it at Quebec and Ottawa. Nor was it altogether abandoned; for, he says, in treating of 'Radicalism in modern history':
'I discussed it under various heads, of which the first was Great Britain, the second the British Colonies, the third the United States, showing, as this table was made before I left England, the predominance which Colonial questions were already assuming in my mind.' Also: 'In the last part of the sketch of the work I dealt with the political Radicalism of the future. I wrote strongly in favour of the removal of the disabilities of sex. I took the Irish Catholic view of the Irish question, and I commenced the discussion of some of those questions which made the freshness and the success of Greater Britain—for example, "Effects upon Radicalism of Increased Facility of Communication," and "Development of the Principle of Love of Country into that of Love of Man."'
'Such,' he writes, at the end of that passage which describes the purposes and the labours of his last academic terms—'such were the dispositions in which I commenced my journey round the world.'
CHAPTER VI
"GREATER BRITAIN"
In June, 1866, Charles Dilke, not yet twenty-three, started on the travels which are recorded in the first and most popular of his books, Greater Britain. Its original draft was in reality the numbered series of long descriptive letters which he sent home to Sloane Street.
His first prolonged absence, coupled with the unspent shock of his grandfather's death, had bred in him a homesickness, which under the influence of a Virginian summer he tried to dissipate by an outburst of verse; but the medium was unsuited to his pen, and he soon returned to the 'dispositions' with which he started on his journey.
'Leaving England as I did with my mind in this kind of ferment, my visit to Boston became deeply interesting to me, as I met there a group of men undoubtedly, on the whole, the most distinguished then collected at any city in the world. At one party of nine people, at Cambridge, I met Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Lowell ("Hosea Biglow"), Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and Dr. Hedge the great preacher. It is hard to say by which of them I was the most charmed. Emerson, Longfellow, Asa Gray, and Wendell Holmes seemed to me equal in the perfection of their courtesy, the grace of their manner, and the interest of their conversation, while Hedge and Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and which had a powerful effect upon my work of the time; to be traced indeed through the whole of the American portion of Greater Britain.'
There is no need here to attempt any sketch of a journey which is described in a book which is still read after half a century. Charles Dilke began with the South, where the earth had scarcely closed over the graves of the great war, where the rebel spirit still smouldered fiercely, and where reorganization was only beginning to establish itself. He went on to New York, to New England, and to Canada; then, crossing the line of the Great Lakes, followed that other highway of the northern continent, the Mississippi, to St. Louis. Here he met with Mr. Hepworth Dixon, then editor of the Athenaeum, and the character of his journey changed: he travelled in company, and he travelled for the first time under privations and in real danger. Together they crossed the plains from the eastern head of the Pacific Railway at a period of Indian war, and parted at Salt Lake City.
This is a marking-point in the experience. Before Charles Dilke set out to cross a land still debatable, where travel still was what travel had been for the pioneers, he wrote home two letters. Both are dated August 26th, 1866, from Leavenworth in Kansas, now a sober town of twenty thousand inhabitants, then carrying recent memories of the days "when the Southern 'Border Ruffians' were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of Abolitionists stuck on poles," and even after the war basing its repute for health on the story that, when it became necessary to "inaugurate" the new graveyard, "they had to shoot a man on purpose."
The first of these letters is to his father:
"MY DEAR FATHER,
"I have been for some days considering whether I would write to you upon my present theme before or after my journey across the plains, but I have come to the conclusion that it is in every way better that I should do it now. Before leaving you, I had prepared, with the knowledge only of Casswell" (one of his Trinity Hall set), "elaborate plans for my long-thought-of visit to Australia.
"After landing in the States, I came to think that, in spite of the evident advantages to be gleaned by taking the two tours in one, you might be seriously averse to my more lengthy absence. When, however, I came to sketch out plans for the great work which I have long intended some day to write, and of which I completed the first map during my stay at Ottawa, I found that I must go to Australia before getting very far through with the book, and that I could not be even so much as certain of my basement and groundwork until after such a visit.
"Were I to postpone my trip to Australia, I might find it impossible ever to go there, remembering that it is not a tour which can be made from England, at any time, much more quickly than I shall have made it now; and whenever I did make it, you would have to expect an absence more prolonged than that for which this letter will prepare you. Of course that absence is fully as grievous to me as to you, and nothing but necessity would drive me to it. Of course my going will depend upon my health, and upon the letters I shall receive at San Francisco. I have ample funds to take me as far as Sydney, and to enable me to live there a long time, were anything to prevent your letters reaching there as soon as I do. I enclose a letter to Knight for Tasmanian introductions; you can no doubt get me Australian from Sir Daniel Cooper and others. I propose to visit Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Geelong, Adelaide, Hobart Town, Wellington, and Auckland, but the order in which I take them, of course, depends on local circumstances. Will you send me some money to Sydney, with such introductions as you can get? If they don't turn up, I shall start a Shaker colony, or a newspaper, or row people ashore from the emigrant ships."
When the travellers halted to rest for some time at Denver, after six days' journey across the plains, Charles Dilke, with a brain excited by the keen atmosphere of the prairie, "sketched out many projects of a literary kind."
'In addition to my book on Radicalism, there was a plan for a book of "Political Geography" based on the doctrine that geographical centres ultimately become political centres—ideas which are also to be traced in Greater Britain under the name of Omphalism; and a scheme for a book to be called "The Anglo-Saxon Race or The English World," which is noted as dating from June, 1862, and being a head under which should be treated the infusion of foreign elements into the Saxon world—such as, for example, Chinese immigration. A fifth work was to be on "International Law," in two parts—"As it is," and "As it might be." Another was to be on the offer to an unembodied soul of the alternatives of non-existence, or of birth accompanied by free-will, followed by life in sin or life in Godliness.'
But all the time literature figured in his mind only as an accompaniment to political life. There was more than jest in the young man's answer to Governor Gilpin of Colorado, when that dignitary suggested permanent stay in Denver, with promise of all sorts of honours and rewards in his infant state. Charles Dilke writes home:
"I told him that unless he would carry a constitutional amendment allowing a foreign-born subject to be President of the United States, he would not receive my services. This he said he would 'see about.'"
What underlay the jesting is set out in this letter to his brother Ashton, sent by the same mail that carried to his father news of the projected journey to Australia:
"MY DEAR ASHTON,
"I write in English [Footnote: The brothers usually corresponded with each other in French; see Chap. II., p. 15.] because I write of serious matters, best to be talked over in our serious mother-tongue. I shall also write very simply, saying exactly what I want you to hear, and that in the plainest manner.
"I have been thinking of late that in talking to you I may have failed to make you comprehend why 'I wanted to make you do things that would pay,' and that if I failed to lead you to look at these things as I do, I must have debased your mind and done you as much harm as any man can do his dearest friend. I will, then, in this memorandum explain my views about you and your future, leaving it to you, my dear brother, to apply or reject them as your judgment prompts, without letting your love for me bias you in favour of my argument.
"I believe that the bent of your mind is not unlike that of mine. My aim in life is to be of the greatest use I can to the world at large, not because that is my duty, but because that is the course which will make my life happiest—i.e., my motives are selfish in the wide and unusual sense of that word. I believe that, on account of my temperament and education, I can be most useful as a statesman and as a writer. I have, therefore, educated myself with a view to getting such power as to make me able at all events to teach men my views, whether or not they follow them. I believe that you and I together would be more than twice as strong as each of us alone; I, therefore, if you are not disinclined, wish to see you acting with me and ever standing by my side in all love and happiness. To do this you must make a name, and you must begin by making a name at Cambridge. If you can go up to college 'a certain future first-class man'—then you can give up classics if you like, and read other and more immediately useful things—be President of the Union, and so on; but you cannot do that from a god-like height unless you are 'a certain first.' So with music, if you play at all, you must play like a whole band of seraphs (as, indeed, you seem in a fair way to do). Of course, it is very easy to say—Music is an art which, if cultivated merely because it will 'pay,' ceases to be either art or music. True! Quite true!! But only true if you insert merely—merely because it will 'pay.' I think (I may be wrong) that it is possible to cultivate it so as to 'pay,' and yet love and reverence it (and yourself in it) as the highest form of art.
"Now I come to riding. I do most earnestly suggest that if you can bring yourself to learn to ride so as to be able to ride an ordinary horse along a road with perfect safety, you should do so. I am clear that you cannot go into the diplomatic service without it. In travel you must ride. If you can bring yourself to it at all, it must be at once.
"Now for my absence. Part of my plan is the writing of serious and grave works, neither of which can be written until I have seen Australia as well as America. I find it, then, a necessity to go there; and I go there now, firstly because I have it within reach, and secondly, because absence from all, and above all from you, dearest, would be worse at any future time than now.
"Keep, however, constantly before you the ultimate doing good or being useful—which is (for I firmly hold the Jesuit doctrine, if it be rightly understood) to justify the means.
"I need hardly say that this talk is for you, and not even for father, nor for Casswell.
"Your devoted friend and brother,
"CHARLES."
"What a prig he was!" is scrawled across the page, as Charles Dilke's judgment on himself, when later the letter fell into his hands.
But, happily, in all the ordinary intercourse of life, ease and geniality were native to him; he got on readily with all manner of men; and nothing could have been better for him than the plunge into a society where all was in the rough. He shed his priggishness once and for all somewhere on the "Great Divide." What makes the permanent charm of Greater Britain is its sense of enjoyment, its delighted acceptance of new and unconventional ways. In crossing the plains, he first made the experience of actual physical privations, and for the first time saw and fell in love with "the bright eyes of danger."
Through all the seriousness and solid concentration of Greater Britain there runs a vein of high spirits. Facts are there, but with them is a ferment of ideas and of feeling. Part of that feeling is just a contagious delight in the joyous business of living. But the strong current which lifted him so buoyantly was an emotion which no shyness or stiffness hampered in the expression—in its essence an exultant patriotism of race. Democracy meant to him in this stage of his development, not any abstract theory of government, but the triumph of English ideas.
California, then in the full rush of mining, was the touchstone of Democracy; where, out of the chaos of blackguardism, through lynchings and vigilance committees, judge and jury were at work evolving decent security and settled government.
"The wonder is" (he wrote) "not that, in such a State as California was till lately, the machinery of government should work unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and City….
"California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America—at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States— that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice —that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world." [Footnote: Greater Britain (popular edition), p. 193.]
The same thought is summed up in the chapter where he sets down his recollected impressions on board the ship that carried him southwards along the shores of America from the Golden Gate towards Panama:
"A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on the shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first 'smells the molasses' at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that her image grows up in the mind.
"The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race— the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence."[Footnote: Ibid., p. 216.]
That is the governing idea of the book—an idea in which were merged those other projects which passed before him when he halted at Denver; and it is set forth with most fulness and vigour in the opening chapters, which deal with a "Greater Britain" that is outside the British Empire—with the Britain that no longer dwells under the British flag.
He left the Pacific shores in tremendous spirits, and on the voyage to New Zealand was a provider of entertainment for his fellow- passengers, writing an opéra bouffe, Oparo, or the Enchanting Isle, in which he himself spoke the prologue as Neptune, 'two hundred miles west- sou'-west of Pitcairn Island.' His head might be full of politics and of the ethics which touch on politics; but he was in the humour to turn his mind to jesting and to find material for comedy as well as for grave discourse in the advent of white men to cannibal islands.
The rest of the book is a sequel or corollary. English institutions are studied in New Zealand and in Australia, among autonomous communities of Britons. Later on they are studied in Ceylon and India, where they have their application to white men, living not as part of a democracy, but as the arbiters of their fate to Orientals.
Dilke's own exposition of this governing conception was set out in the preface to the book:
"In 1866 and 1867 I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples, had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always, one.
"The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide—a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands—is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps eventually to overspread.
"In America the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found plantations of her own—that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.
"Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled 'Great,' America, Australia, India, must form a 'Greater Britain.'"
He wrote of this passage in his Memoir:
'The preface of Greater Britain, in which the title is justified and explained, is the best piece of work of my life. It states the doctrine on which our rule should be based—remembered in Canada— forgotten in South Africa—the true as against the bastard Imperialism. As will be seen from it, I included in my "Greater Britain" our Magna Graecia of the United States. As late as 1880, twelve years after the publication of my book, not only was the title "Greater Britain" often used for the English world—as I used it—but, speaking at the Lotus Club of New York, Mr. Whitelaw Reid used it specially of the United States. Tom Hughes, he declared, "led a pioneer English colony to this Greater Britain, to seek here a fuller expansion." It is contracting an idea which, as its author, I think lofty and even noble, to use "Greater Britain" only of the British Empire, as is now done.'
The touch of enthusiasm in this book lifted his writing to its highest plane. He himself was specially proud of the praise which P. G. Hamerton bestowed on the landscape passages: [Footnote: See Appendix, pp. 72, 73.] and they have the quality, which his grandfather schooled him in, of being really descriptive. But his characteristic excellence is found far more in such a passage as that which follows his sketch of the time when "the thinking men of Boston and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more … morally seceded from their country's councils," because in those councils the slave-holders still had the upper hand. Here are a few of its ringing sentences:
"In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the University teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8,000 school-teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3,000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one." [Footnote: Greater Britain (popular edition), p. 41.]
The book was written at high pressure—in twelve months of desk work, beginning in June, 1867, when the traveller returned from his year's wandering—and it was not written under favourable conditions. He had contracted malaria in Ceylon, which gradually destroyed his appetite, and so induced a state of weakness leading to delirium at night. The end was an attack of typhoid fever, which came on while the book was still in the press; and his father, thinking it important to hurry the publication, took on himself to correct the proofs while his son was ill. The result was a crop of blunders; but nothing interfered with the unforeseen success of the book, which was published in the last months of 1868. Large portions of the work were translated into Russian, its circulation in America was enormous (under a pirate flag), and in England it rapidly ran through three editions, and was praised in the newspapers almost without exception.
In the reviews which appeared there stood out a general acceptance of the book as fair and friendly to all. In spite of its audacious patriotism, it was no way limited in sympathy. This fairness of mind received the homage of Thiers in a great defence of his Protectionist budget. "Un membre du parlement d'Angleterre, qui est certainement un des hommes les plus éclairés de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'écrire un livre des plus remarquables," he said, and pressed the argument that Charles Dilke's defence of Protection from the American and Australian point of view gained authority by the very fact that its author was libre-échangiste d'Europe. Dilke always called himself, more accurately, "a geographical Free Trader." He accepted, that is to say, the doctrine for Great Britain unreservedly, only because of Great Britain's geographical conditions. This was very different from the orthodox English Liberal's view of Free Trade as a universal maxim to be accepted under penalty of political excommunication.
On a matter of even wider import for Imperial statesmanship his sympathies were at once and clearly declared. From this his first entry into the arena of public debate he was the champion of the dark-skinned peoples— all the more, perhaps, because he recognized clearly that the Anglo-Saxons were "the only extirpating race." In lands where white men could rear their children it seemed to him inevitable that the Anglo-Saxon race should replace the coloured peoples as, to take his own illustration, the English fly was superseding all other flies in New Zealand. Yet at least while the American-Indians or the Maoris remained, he was determined to secure justice for them; and he incurred angry criticism for outspoken condemnation of English dealing with the natives in Tasmania. But a great part of his book is devoted to discussion of questions which must be of constant recurrence, affecting the relations of Englishmen to natives in lands where the English are only a governing handful. These matters received special comment in a letter from John Stuart Mill at Avignon on February 9th, 1869. Mill, although a stranger to Dilke, was moved to write his commendation in the most ungrudging terms:
"It is long" (he said) "since any book connected with practical politics has been published on which I build such high hopes of the future usefulness and distinction of the writer, showing, as it does, that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and enlightened views of them.
"There are so few opinions expressed in any part of your book with which I do not, so far as my knowledge extends, fully and heartily coincide, that I feel impelled to take the liberty of noting the small number of points of any consequence on which I differ from you. These relate chiefly to India; though on that subject also I agree with you to a much greater extent than I differ. Not only do I most cordially sympathize with all you say about the insolence of the English even in India to the native population, which has now become not only a disgrace, but, as you have so usefully shown, a danger to our dominion there; but I have been much struck by the sagacity which, in so short a stay as yours must have been, has enabled you to detect facts which are as yet obvious to very few: as, for instance, the immense increase of all the evils and dangers you have pointed out by the substitution of the Queen's army for a local force of which both men and officers had at least a comparatively permanent tie to the country; and again, that the superior authority in England, having the records of all the presidencies before it, and corresponding regularly with them all, is the only authority which really knows India; the local governments and offices only knowing, at most, their own part of it, and having generally strong prejudices in favour of the peculiarities of the system of government there adopted, and against those of the other party." [Footnote: James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, was the historian of India, and for a long time one amongst its official rulers at the India House.]
Then followed an exhaustive and very friendly criticism, in which the most interesting points are his challenge of Dilke's proposal to make the Secretary of State for India a permanent office, not changing with party upheavals, and, lastly, this:
"If there is any criticism of a somewhat broader character that I could make, I think it would be this—that (in speaking of the physical and moral characteristics of the populations descended from the English) you sometimes express yourself almost as if there were no sources of national character but race and climate, as if whatever does not come from race must come from climate, and whatever does not come from climate must come from race. But as you show in many parts of your book a strong sense of the good and bad influences of education, legislation, and social circumstances, the only inference I draw is that you do not, perhaps, go so far as I do myself in believing these last causes to be of prodigiously greater efficacy than either race or climate, or the two combined."
The writing of this letter marked the beginning of a friendship which lasted till Mill's death. If the book had done nothing but secure Dilke this friend, it would have been well rewarded. But rewards were not lacking. The fortunate author was crowned with a great popular success invaluable for a young man about to enter political life. Yet more important even than the prestige acquired was the sum of experience gained.
APPENDIX
EXTRACT FROM "LANDSCAPE," BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
A traveller who did not set out with the intention of word-painting, but to see how men of English race fared wherever they had settled, said that 'travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's value, to despise no feature of the landscape.' If Sir Charles Dilke wrote that rather from the political than the artistic point of view, it is not the less accurate in any case, for the landscape, however uninteresting it may seem, or even ugly, is never without its great influence on human happiness and destiny. The interest in human affairs which Sir Charles Dilke has in common with most men of any conspicuous ability, does not prevent him from seeing landscape-nature as well as if his travels had no other object. His description of the Great Plains of Colorado is an excellent example of that valuable kind of description which is not merely an artful arrangement of sonorous words, but perfectly conveys the character of the landscape, and makes you feel as if you had been there.
"Now great roaring uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains…. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveller wishing here to end his days.
"To those who love the sea, there is here a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it from the top of the next hillock….
"The colour of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever." [Footnote: Greater Britain, p. 80 (popular edition).]
If the reader will take the trouble to analyze this description, he will perceive that, although powerful, it is extremely simple and sober. The traveller does not call in the aid of poetical comparisons (the only comparison indulged in is the obvious one of the Atlantic), and the effect of the description on the mind is due to the extreme care with which the writer has put together in a short space the special and peculiar characteristics of the scenery, not forgetting to tell us everything that we of ourselves would naturally fail to imagine. He corrects, one after another, all our erroneous notions, and substitutes a true idea for our false ones. The describer has been thoroughly alive; he has travelled with his eyes open; so that every epithet tells. The reader feels under a real obligation; he has not been put off with mere phrases, but is enriched with a novel and interesting landscape experience.
In a good prose description, such as these by Kingsley and Sir Charles Dilke, the author has nothing to do but to convey, as nearly as he can, a true impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions, without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; and yet at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. It is not easy to fulfil these conditions all at once, and therefore we meet with many books of travel in which attempted descriptions frequently occur, which fail, nevertheless, to convey a clear idea of the country. A weak writer wastes precious space in sentimental phrases or in vain adjectives that would be equally applicable to many other places, and forgets to note what is peculiarly and especially characteristic of the one place that he is attempting to describe.
CHAPTER VII
ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT
I.
While engaged in the writing of Greater Britain, Charles Dilke entered upon the main business of his life by coming forward as a candidate for the House of Commons. Immediate action was necessary; for the position of parties indicated the near approach of a General Election.
The constituency to which he addressed his candidature in the autumn of 1867 was the borough of Chelsea, a new Parliamentary division created by the Reform Act of that year. It was of vast extent, embracing Chelsea, Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensal Town, and Kensington. In Chelsea Charles Dilke had his home, and, as representing the Parliamentary borough, he would speak "backed by the vote and voice of 30,000 electors." "I would willingly wait any time," he said in his opening address on November 25th, in the Vestry Hall at Chelsea, "rather than enter the House of Commons a member for some small trumpery constituency." The electors should hear his opinions, "not upon any one subject or upon any two subjects or any three, but as nearly as might be upon all."
His speech began with the electoral machinery of democracy—questions of franchise and redistribution.
Purity of election he laid down as a necessary condition of reform, and to that end two points must be assured: the removal of election petitions from the House of Commons to a legal tribunal, [Footnote: A Bill with that object was at the time passing through Parliament.] and, secondly, the security of the ballot. Upon the first matter he came perhaps to doubt the new system after he had seen it tried; upon the second he was able to tell his audience from first-hand knowledge that in Australia opposition to the ballot was unknown, and that in Virginia a conquered minority looked to it as their best defence against oppression.
From the machinery of Government he passed to its application. Ireland was then the burning question, and Dilke's attitude upon Ireland may be indicated in a sentence. After the Church should have been disestablished, the land system reformed, [Footnote: His views on the Irish Land Question had been stated in Greater Britain (popular edition), p. 209: "Customs and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be recognized and made the basis of legislation without bringing about the disruption of the Empire. The first Irish question that we shall have to set ourselves to face is that of land. Permanent tenure is as natural to the Irish as free-holding to the English people. All that is needed of our statesmen is that they recognize in legislation that which they cannot but admit in private talk—namely, that there may be essential differences between race and race."] and a wide measure of Parliamentary reform given to Ireland; after they should have passed Fawcett's Bill "for throwing open Trinity College, Dublin, and destroying the last trace of that sectarian spirit which has hitherto been allowed to rule in Ireland" —they might hope "not perhaps for instant quiet in the country, but at least for the gradual growth of a feeling that we have done our duty, and that we may well call upon the Irish to do theirs."
There went with that a moderate censure upon the lawlessness of Fenianism. But the Irish question did not occupy so much space in his discourse as in those of most speakers at that moment, and this for a reason which he gave later in his life: 'About Ireland I was never given to saying much, because, except for a short time in 1885, when moderate Home Rule could have been carried, I never thoroughly saw my own way.' But as early as 1869 he deplored the lack of local deliberative bodies which elsewhere did much of the State's work, and in 1871 he advocated their creation as a means of relieving Parliament. This, rather than any special sympathy with Nationalism as such, was always the governing consideration with him on the Irish question. 'I showed in this way,' he notes, 'a working of the opinion which in 1874 caused me to vote, alone of English members unpledged by their constituents, in support of Mr. Butt when he brought forward his Home Rule Bill.' [Footnote: Eight in all voted; all except Dilke represented Northern constituencies, with a large Irish vote among miners or operatives.]
He foreshadowed also his attitude towards Labour questions. He proposed, as early as 1867, that the Factory Acts should be extended to all employment; the best way of compelling children to attend school was, he thought, to prohibit their employment as premature wage-earners. Another declaration set forth that Trade Unions must be recognized, and their funds protected just as much as those "of any association formed for purposes not illegal." By no means were all Liberals in 1867 ready to distinguish between Trade Unions and criminal conspiracies.
Taxation came next. His desire to "sweep away many millions of Customs and Excise," and to establish a system so far as possible of direct taxation, is notable because it was put forward at the very moment when he was explaining in Greater Britain to the precisians of Free Trade that young countries, like America and the Colonies, had reasonable grounds for maintaining a rigid Protective system.
Questions put at this first meeting with the electors elicited a declaration for triennial Parliaments; if these failed, then for annual; for payment of members, with preference for the plan of payment by the constituency, advocated by "Mr. Mill, the great leader of political thinkers." As to manhood suffrage, the candidate held "that the burden of proof lies on those who would exclude any man from the suffrage; but I also hold that there is sufficient proof for the temporary exclusion of certain classes at the present time."
This, with some other points in the exposition of his political creed, needs to be read in the light of a passage in the Memoir:
'I tried to be moderate in order to please my father, and not to lose the general Liberal vote; my speeches are more timid than were my opinions.'
Yet for all his efforts after moderation he was too extreme for his father, who probably was shocked to hear that the Game Laws "needed an amendment, which should extend perhaps to their total abolition." Sir Wentworth Dilke remonstrated. His son replied in December, 1867:
"I am a Radical, I know; still I have for your sake done everything I can to speak moderately. I have spoken against Fenianism in spite of my immense sympathy for it. For my own part, though I should immensely like to be in Parliament, still I should feel terribly hampered there if I went in as anything except a Radical…. Radicalism is too much a thing of nature with me to throw it off by any effort of mine. If you think it a waste of money for me to contest Chelsea, I will cheerfully throw the thing up and turn to any pursuit you please."
Many other matters which were to occupy Charles Dilke later are mentioned in this first and detailed exposition of his political faith. He dealt with army reform: would abolish "purchase of commissions and flogging"; he condemned "an army in which we systematically deny a man those advantages that in entering an employment he naturally looked to receive," and the double responsibility of the Horse Guards and the War Office as "a system which is in its very essence costly and inefficient." On Foreign Affairs he said: "I am very wishful indeed for peace, but a peace more dignified than that which has of late prevailed." [Footnote: Speech in Chelsea, November 25th, 1867.]
He spoke at Chelsea, Kensington, Hammersmith, Fulham, Brompton, Notting Hill, and Walham Green, earning from the electors the name of Mr. Indefatigable Dilke. The borough deserved that a man who sought to represent it should state his case thoroughly, and there was an uncommon degree of truth in a not uncommon compliment when he called it "the most intelligent constituency in England." South Kensington was the home of many judges and other important lawyers, many great merchants and men of business; Brompton was still a literary quarter; Holland Park and Notting Hill the home of the artists who figured largely on Dilke's committee—the names of Leighton, Maclise, Faed, and other Academicians are among the list. The honorary committee was made up almost entirely of resident Members of Parliament.
In Kensal Town was a very strong artisan element, and at one time a working-man candidate was before the electors, George Odger, who was 'the best representative of the Trade Unions, and a man of whom the highest opinion was entertained by Mr. Mill.' He not only withdrew, but became also an active supporter.
Of the Tory candidates, perhaps the more important was Mr. Freake, a big contractor who had built Cromwell Road, in which he lived, and who was not on the best of terms with his workmen. Some of this unpopularity reflected itself on the allied candidature of Dr. W. H. Russell, whose expenses Mr. Freake was said to be paying. But the contest led to a lasting friendship between Charles Dilke and the famous war correspondent. The other Liberal candidate was Sir Henry Hoare, a Radical baronet, twenty years older than Dilke, who had for a short time sat as member for Windsor. So long as he represented Chelsea he voted with the extreme Radicals, and his name may be found in many division lists in the minority along with that of his colleague. But later in life he changed his politics, joined the Carlton Club, and was a member of it for many years. Charles Dilke always spoke of him in terms of cordial friendship even after their political association had long been ended.
Their candidature was not a joint one, as Dilke put himself forward independently; but when the election actually came the Liberal candidates joined forces, and two picture-cards represent the contest as between rival teams of cocks. In one the Odger cock is seen retreating; Freake is on his back, gasping; Russell and Hoare still contend, while under the banner "Dilke and Hoare for ever," Dilke crows victorious. In the second card Odger has no place, and Russell is as dead as Freake.
This graphic forecast was justified by the result. Polling took place on Wednesday, November 18th, 1868, and, according to a local paper, "the proceedings were of a most orderly character; indeed, the absence of vehicles, favours, etc., made the election dull." The voting was open. The results were published from hour to hour at the booths, and the unpopular candidates were in one or two places driven away by hisses. Even in Cromwell Road Dilke and Hoare led, and Dilke's advantage in his own district of Chelsea proper was conspicuous. The final figures were:
Dilke…….. 7,374
Hoare…….. 7,183
Russell…… 4,177
Freake……. 3,929
The triumph was all the more gratifying because it had been achieved by a volunteer canvass. No member has ever been bound to a constituency by closer ties of personal feeling than those which linked Charles Dilke, first to Chelsea and later to the Forest of Dean. He worked for his constituents, and taught them to work for him.
At this same General Election Sir Wentworth Dilke lost his seat, and Lord Granville sent him a note "to condole with you and to congratulate you. I suspect that the cause of the latter gives you more pleasure than the cause of the former gives you regret. How very well your son seems to have done!"
After the election Charles Dilke sought a rest by one of his flying trips abroad. He stopped a day in Paris to examine the details of the French registration system. Thence he proceeded to Toulon, 'to which I took a fancy, which ultimately led, many years after, to my buying a property there'; the scenery of Provence captured him from the first moment.
Parliament was summoned to meet on December 10th for the election of a Speaker, and for the swearing-in of members. By the beginning of December the member for Chelsea was on the eve of return, rejoicing in the news of Mr. Gladstone's defeat in South-West Lancashire and election for Greenwich. "He is much more likely to become a democratic leader now that he sits for a big town."
A note preserved in one of the boxes gives Charles Dilke's first impressions of the party and Government to which he had vowed a somewhat qualified allegiance.
"December 10th, 1868.—House met for election of Speaker. The Liberal party is more even in opinion than ever before. No Adullamites, no Radicals but myself. The Cabinet is somewhat behind the party, which is bad. Too many peers."
The House of Commons of 1868 was superficially very much like any of its predecessors. Dilke notes that it 'contained some survivals of the old days, such as Mr. Edward Ellice, son of "Bear" Ellice [Footnote: This was Mr. Edward Ellice, who had been in the House since 1836, and who continued to represent St. Andrews till 1879. He was sometimes called "the young Bear." See Life of Lord Granville, i. 80, 81, 141, 171, 175, as to the "old Bear."] of the days of Lord Melbourne,' a consistent and typical Liberal. The Liberal party consisted then mainly of men born into that governing class which Lord Melbourne had in mind when he said "that every English gentleman is qualified to hold any post which he has influence enough to secure." This element was accompanied by a fair sprinkling of manufacturers and other business men, for the most part Nonconformists. But no separate Irish party existed to complicate the grouping; indeed, the Irish were much less a corps apart than they had been in O'Connell's time. Labour had not one direct representative, though the importance of the artisan vote had made itself felt; and this was recognized by the choice of Mundella, then returned as a new member for Sheffield, to second the address at the opening of the session.
The personal composition of the assembly had greatly altered. More than a third of its members were new to Parliament. W. Vernon Harcourt, Henry James, and Campbell-Bannerman, sat then for the first time, and sat, as did Charles Dilke, below the gangway. In the same quarter was Fawcett, who helped them in creating the new phenomenon of a House of Commons alive in all its parts.
Sir George Trevelyan, who almost alone of living men can compare from experience the House of Commons before the Reform Bill of 1867 and after, holds that it would be difficult to overstate the contrast. The House was no longer an arena for set combat between a few distinguished parliamentarians, whose displays were watched by followers on either side, either diffident of their ability to compete, or held silent by the unwritten rule which imposed strict reserve upon a new member. For the greater number promotion had come through slow and steady service in the lobbies.
Charles Dilke from the first was always in his place—that corner seat below the gangway which became gradually his traditional possession; and from the first he assumed a responsible part in all Parliamentary business. "He was the true forerunner, in his processes, his industry, his constant attendance, and his frequent speaking, of Lord Randolph Churchill." The revolt against 'the old gang' began on the Liberal side, and Charles Dilke was the chief beginner of it. Although the new Reform Act had led to far-reaching change in the quality of the House of Commons, the choice by Mr. Gladstone of the members of the Ministry made it plain that no break with the past was contemplated by the leaders. Lowe, whose anti-democratic utterances on Reform had been denounced by Dilke at the Cambridge Union, was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and only half the Cabinet were commoners. Among these was indeed Bright; but the only other Minister whose name carried a hint of Radicalism was Forster, Vice- President of the Council of Education, and he was not in the Cabinet when it was first formed.
On the other hand, Bright and Forster were to an exceptional degree responsible for the general trend of the Government policy. The dissolution and election had turned with more than usual definiteness on a clear issue—the proposal to conciliate Ireland by disestablishing the privileged Church of the minority; and behind this immediate proposal lay a less clearly defined scheme for giving security of tenure to Irish tenants. Ireland was the first business of Charles Dilke's first Parliament, and it was Bright more than any other man who had stirred English feeling with the sense that England had failed in her duty to the smaller country, and that an attempt to do justice must be made. Yet in both Church reform and land reform the actual brunt of the Parliamentary struggle fell upon Mr. Gladstone. Bright had a marvellous gift for rousing political emotion, but he had not the application necessary to give legislative effect to his aims; and Charles Dilke, though fully sensitive to the beauty of cadence in Bright's language, and enthusiastic for the music of "his unmatched voice," nevertheless inherited something of his grandfather's suspicion of "that old humbug Oratory"—at all events, when the oratorical gift was not allied with executive capacity.
There was no lack of masterful grip and handling of detail in the other great orator of the Liberal party, yet the young Radical's attitude to his leader was one of admiration indeed, but always of limited sympathy. Not only did a long generation lie between them, but Charles Dilke had been bred a Radical, and Gladstone had been bred a Tory. The Government policy after 1868 was dominated by the education controversy, and was dictated by Forster. There was probably no man among his colleagues with whom Dilke more often came into collision. Forster was a strong natural Conservative, though he had been brought up in the traditions of Radicalism, and Mr. Gladstone was suspected of not being willing to abolish Collegiate as well as University tests.
On the Opposition front bench Disraeli's primacy was not less marked than Mr. Gladstone's, and his romantic figure always fascinated Dilke. But his special admiration was for Gathorne Hardy (afterwards Lord Cranbrook), in whom High Toryism found its most eloquent and sincerest spokesman. Later, in 1876, Sir Charles was to complain ironically that the Conservatives "never will be able to employ the services of the man best fitted by nature to be their leader. Mr. Gathorne Hardy will never lead the Conservative party because he is not a Liberal."
In 1869 he saw little of either the Tories or the Whigs, 'but acted with the Radicals.' He had modified his first estimate of the composition of the House. This Radical group largely represented the industrial towns and Nonconformist interests. It included Peter Rylands, member for Warrington; Peter Taylor, member for Leicester; Henry Richard, member for Merthyr Tydvil; George Anderson, member for Glasgow; and Llewellyn Dillwyn, member for Swansea. Some, such as Peter Taylor, were theoretical Republicans, but all were peace-at-any-price men, Bright's votaries, though when Bright joined the Government they were ready to vote against Bright.
The group contained also some men of Charles Dilke's own stamp, with whom Cambridge associations created a bond. 'Harcourt, of whom I saw much, was then a below-the-gangway Radical.' He, though sixteen years Dilke's senior, was also a newcomer, but a newcomer well known already at Westminster by his famous letters to the Times, signed "Historicus," and by his career at the Parliamentary bar. Another was Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who had been Charles Dilke's contemporary and coadjutor at the Union. A great figure in the Radical group came from Trinity Hall— Fawcett, who had first won his seat for Brighton in 1865.
Among Government Liberals, Lord Granville in the House of Lords was an hereditary friend, through his attachment to Dilke's father, but belonged to a much older generation. Grant Duff, a man to whom later on Dilke came to be strongly attached, was Under-Secretary of State for India. From the first, however, a close alliance formed itself between Charles Dilke and a junior member of the Government, who had still been debating at the Union when Dilke came to Trinity Hall. Entering Parliament in 1865, Mr. Trevelyan had distinguished himself by a vigorous campaign against the system of purchase in the Army, and, in 1868, he was put in office as Junior Lord of the Admiralty. Senior to Charles Dilke by five years, he had not known him at Cambridge; but they "speedily became very intimate." So writes Sir George Trevelyan in a letter of 1911:
"I was a very young Minister, worked hard all day by Mr. Childers, a very strict but very friendly taskmaster, and never, according to the Treasury Bench discipline of those heroic times, allowed to be absent from the House of Commons for a single moment. I used to come to the House unlunched, and desperately hungry; and I got my dinner at four o'clock in an empty dining-room. Afternoon after afternoon, Charles Dilke used to come and sit with me; and a greater delight than his company, young to the young, I can hardly describe. But it does not need description to you, for never did anyone's talk alter less as time went on. The last time I saw him was at the swearing-in of Privy Councillors last May (1910), when we talked for half an hour as if we were respectively thirty and five-and-twenty years old."
An enrichment of that talk, as his friend remembers it, lay in Charles Dilke's multifarious knowledge. "This man seems to know all about everything in the world," someone remarked in those days. "Yes," was the answer, "and last week we were talking about the other world: Dilke seemed to know all about that too."
It was characteristic of Charles Dilke to choose for his maiden effort the most highly technical of subjects, and one which lent itself as little as possible to tricks of oratory. He would recall how Mr. George Melly, the member for Stoke-on-Trent, had cautioned him: "Don't talk to them about God Almighty; even Mr. Gladstone can't; they'll only stand it from John Bright." On March 9th, 1869, Mr. William Vernon Harcourt (as he then was) came forward with a motion for the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into registration in Parliamentary boroughs. Upon this Charles Dilke made his first speech, filled with detailed knowledge, and with suggestions drawn from French procedure. Later speakers recognized the special competence shown, and when the Select Committee was appointed, he was named to serve on it—thus taking his place at once in the normal working life of the House.
'I acquired in the early months of this Session a knowledge of the registration and rating systems which lasted for a good many years, and the plan for the restoration of compounding, which was accepted by Mr. Goschen and moved by him in the form of new clauses in his Bill in April, 1869, was of my suggestion. By the joint operation of this plan, and of the Registration Act of 1878, which was my own, an immense increase of the electorate in boroughs was effected.'
No subject could have appeared less attractive than all this dull lore of compound householders and lodger's franchises.
But the spirit of official Liberalism was constantly at war with Radical views.
'My diary continually expressed my regret at what I thought the timidity of Mr. Gladstone's Government.' Thus, when it was beaten by the abstention of Liberals on Fawcett's Election Expenses Bill, which proposed to throw the necessary expenses of returning officers on the local rates, Charles Dilke 'was angry with the Government for not having so much as named the Bill upon their Whip.' Again, when his group had proposed to penalize a corrupt borough, the member for which had been unseated on petition, the entry ran: 'We Radicals beaten by Government and Tories on the Bewdley writ,' the issue of which the Radicals had moved to postpone for twelve months.
In the case of Fawcett's motion to abolish University Tests, of whose injustice Dilke had personal experience: [Footnote: Having taken his Master's degree at Cambridge in this year, Dilke was 'immediately nominated to the Senate as an examiner for the Law Tripos by the Regius Professor of Laws.' But on further inquiry it appeared that an examiner for honours in Law must be a member of the Senate, and that a member of the Senate must declare himself a member of the Church of England. Dilke, strongly objecting to this exclusiveness, had refused to make the required profession. The 'grace,' therefore, was withdrawn, and he was not allowed to examine. Sir Roundell Palmer became Chancellor in 1872, on the retirement of Lord Hatherley. He was again Chancellor from 1880 to 1885.]
'My diary records a division in connection with which Sir Roundell Palmer did us some harm, the fact being that the great lawyer, who was afterwards Lord Selborne, was one of those gentlemen calling themselves Liberals in whom it was difficult to find any agreement with Liberal principles at any time or upon any subject. He was, in fact, a High Church Tory, as I found when I served with him in a Liberal Cabinet.'
On yet another motion of Fawcett's the Radicals found themselves in collision with the head of the Liberal Government. This advocated open competition for the Civil Service, and Dilke supported Fawcett by speech as well as vote. Mr. Gladstone, following Dilke in the debate, suggested that he had spoken without examining his facts, a charge specially calculated to excite this conscientious worker's resentment. 'I recorded a strong opinion as to the crushing of independent members by Mr. Gladstone.'
Charles Dilke was already displaying that blend of opinions which made him always a trial to the party Whips. He notes that, 'taking as I did an independent line, I supported on the Navy Estimates the Conservative ex- chief First Lord of the Admiralty' (Mr. Corry) 'on a motion which deprecated the building of further turret ships till those already built had been tested.'
[Illustration: SIR C. WENTWORTH DILKE, BART.
From the painting by Arthur Hughes.]
These outbreaks of independence led to remonstrance from his father, and remonstrance to this reply:
"I don't mean to let either you or Glyn" (the Chief Whip, afterwards Lord Wolverton) "frighten me into supporting the Government when I think they are wrong, but I vote for them when I am at all doubtful."
This letter was written to Sir Wentworth Dilke, then on a tour through the north of Europe with his son Ashton, by this time a Cambridge undergraduate, and inclined to regard his elder brother as a very timid politician. 'My father and my brother went to Berlin, and saw the Crown Prince, afterwards the Emperor Frederick, and Prince Bismarck, who many years later described to me the impression which they—the Whig and the Republican—had made on him.' From Germany they passed into Russia, where Wentworth Dilke was commissioned to represent England at the Horticultural Congress. In May a sudden telegram called Charles Dilke to St. Petersburg. His father had been attacked with 'that deadly form of Russian influenza, a local degeneration of the tissues, which kills a man in three days, without his being able to tell you that he feels anything except weakness.' Before Charles Dilke could reach the Russian capital, his father had been already 'embalmed and temporarily buried,' with a view to interment in England.
His successor entered upon his position while still several months short of the age of twenty-six. He took steps to give up at once Alice Holt—'a mere shooting place'—and also sold Hawkley in Hampshire, keeping only the London house, 76, Sloane Street, in which he had been born, and which was to be his home till he died there. It was home also for his brother Ashton, now reading classics and rowing in the Trinity Hall boat. The house continued to be managed for the two young men by their grandmother, Mrs. Chatfield, known to Sir Charles and to all his intimates as the "Dragon," 'on account of the sportive old soul calling herself the Dragon of Wantley whenever she attacked me in arms.' With her lived her niece, Miss Folkard, a quiet little old lady. When Charles Dilke married, Mrs. Chatfield and Miss Folkard made way for the bride, and Ashton Dilke's home was then with his grandmother. When death cut short that marriage, the old ladies returned, and lived out the end of their lives in Sloane Street. Mrs. Chatfield was a very popular personage; and many letters from Sir Charles's friends have affectionate or jesting messages to 'Dragon.'
II.
John Stuart Mill returned to England from Avignon in the spring of 1869, and followed up his earlier letter of friendly criticism on Greater Britain by a suggestion of meeting. On Easter Sunday the meeting took place, and the acquaintance 'rapidly ripened into a close friendship.'
Sir Charles was elected in May to the Political Economy Club, of which Mill was a leading member, 'defeating George Shaw Lefevre, Sir Louis Mallet, Lord Houghton, and John Morley, although, or perhaps because, I was somewhat heterodox. Still,' a marginal note adds, 'Mallet and Houghton were pretty heterodox too.'
The heterodoxy challenged that economic orthodoxy of which the Political Economy Club was the special guardian. Forty years later Sir Charles wrote, against the date May, 1869:
'This was the moment of the domination of the Ricardo religion.[Footnote: It will be remembered that the fundamental principle of the "Ricardian theory"—distinguishing it from that o± Adam Smith—is the determination of wages by the law of population. According to Ricardo, it is the influence of high or low wages on the numbers of the population which adjusts the "market rate" to the "natural rate."] It is admirably pointed out in Professor Ashley's address, as President of the Economic Section of the British Association, 1907, that this doctrine had become a complete creed, with a stronger hold over the educated classes of England (and I should add France) by 1821 than any creed has had. The Political Economy Club is shown by Ashley to have been the assembly of the elders of the Church, of which the founder assumed that they possessed a complete code, representing just principles necessary to "diffuse." The Club was to watch for the propagation of any doctrine hostile to sound views. The sect grew rapidly from the small body of Utilitarian founders, and conquered all the statesmen who rejected the other opinions of James Mill. As I tried to show, with the support of a majority of the Club, in April, 1907, the heresy of which I was elected in 1869 as a representative has now (1908) triumphed. The facts announced as "certain" by Ricardo have crumbled, and the doctrine crumbles with them. Professor Ashley declared from the Ricardo chair in 1907 that "the Ricardian orthodoxy is, by general consent, … dead to-day among the English-speaking economists."
'The son of the Club's founder, John Stuart Mill, lived to lead the way out of the doctrine of his father, James Mill, Malthus, and Ricardo, against the opposition of his own disciple Fawcett, into the new land which he just lived to see.
'In the debates, which I regularly attended, Mill, who had become semi-socialist in his views, was usually at odds with his own disciple Fawcett, who had remained individualist. The rows which they had at this Club were carried to the Radical Club after its formation later, and I gradually deserted Fawcett, and, more and more influenced by Mill's later views, finally came to march even in front of Mill in our advance.'
Sir Charles was from the first actually in political life, to which Mill had come after more than half a lifetime spent in study; and experience transformed the philosopher.
"The whole tone of his writings before he entered Parliament," said Sir Charles a quarter of a century afterwards, "had been marked by a vein of practical Conservatism, which entirely disappeared when he found himself in touch with the destructive realities of British politics." [Footnote: "John Stuart Mill, 1869-1873," Cosmopolis, March, 1897.]
Dilke, rightly zealous for the repute of a teacher under whose influence his own political faith developed, was always at pains to confute the popular opinion as to Mill's hardness. Addressing the Economic Society in 1909, he said:
"John Mill's nature was far more spiritual than that of his father.
His self-training was far more permeated by what may be loosely called
Comtist-Christianity than by the utilitarian philosophy."
He cited as an example the conclusion expressed by Mill so far back as 1848 that "cheapness of goods was not desirable when the cause was that labour is ill-remunerated." Here was one of the points where Fawcett 'fiercely differed' from Mill, denying the possibility of any 'exception to the wage principle laid down by Malthus and Ricardo.' Sir Charles was destined not merely to affirm the principle which Mill conceded, but to show by infinitely patient investigation of the facts, first the need for applying the principle, and later—far more difficult—the means by which it could be brought into operation.
The change foreshadowed by this division among leaders of democratic thought was no ordinary one; the whole direction of forces and tendencies was altered; and from 1870 onwards Sir Charles was at the centre of the movement which has established the 'semi-socialism' of Mill's last years as the normal political opinion accepted by both parties to-day. He, more than any other man, translated it from abstract theory into terms of political reality.
III.
Since his undergraduate years Charles Dilke had entertained the project of writing on Russia, and perhaps the journey to his father's death-bed revived the plan.