The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 10

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.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sics 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 a.s.sociation, 1907, that this doctrine had become a complete creed, with a stronger hold over the educated cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sembly of the elders of the Church, of which the founder a.s.sumed 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.

While on the way to St. Petersburg in May, 1869, he chanced to share a railway carriage with a distinguished member of the Russian Diplomatic Service, Baron Jomini, son of the famous writer on strategy, and 'almost,'

says Sir Charles, 'the cleverest man I ever met with, and to me always an excellent friend.' Jomini was useful even on that journey, when difficulties arose over an irregular pa.s.sport; and in later years he rendered Sir Charles various services with officialdom--as, for example, when the Russian Customs officers, not unnaturally, objected to the English traveller's bringing in for his personal use 'books prohibited in Russia, the most extraordinary collection that was probably ever got together in that country unless in the office of the censorship of police.'

From the first Baron Jomini was at hand to introduce Sir Charles to society in Russia, but in other directions the traveller was not less well equipped. He learnt Russian; and before setting out on his second visit to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1869 he had made a special journey to Geneva, with an introduction from Louis Blanc to Herzen, leader of the moderate Russian revolutionists. He knew Mazzini well, and through him had visited Baden to make a lasting acquaintance with Tourgenief. Tourgenief was then 'living with the Viardots, the sister and brother-in-law of Malibran.' Long years after Dilke spoke of him as one of the finest of talkers.

At St. Petersburg he met many of the advanced revolutionaries to whom Herzen had commended him, and he was also received by more orthodox Liberalism. The Political Economy Club gave a dinner in his honour, at which he made a speech in French on the Irish Land Question; and the Geographical Society held a reception in recognition of the author of _Greater Britain_, with Baron von der Osten Sacken in the chair, son of a comrade and colleague of the elder Jomini in days of Napoleonic war.

[Footnote: Nicolas Dmitrivitch von der Osten Sacken, Chamberlain of the Imperial Court, afterwards Russian Amba.s.sador at Berlin; born 1834, died 1912.] Osten Sacken's father was the Governor of Paris in 1815 after the entry of the Allies.

After a visit to Taganrog, at the eastern end of the Sea of Azof, he came back to St. Petersburg, and occupied by chance the next rooms to the great singer Mario--"an embarra.s.sing neighbour, as he used to come in about 2 a.m., and give me far too much of the quality of his voice." Here also Sir Charles made friends with Governor Curtin, the American Minister, 'formerly Lincoln's Governor of Pennsylvania during the war, and the best story-teller in the world.' 'I went about a good deal with Baron Jomini and Baron von der Osten Sacken, and saw much of the Emperor's aunt, the Grande d.u.c.h.esse Helene. My chief friends were at this time Princess Galitzin, Prince Orlof Davydof, leader of the high Tory party, and the old Princess Kotchubey, afterwards Grand Mistress of the Robes.'

Later in the year he pushed across into Siberia; and in the Christmas vacation Ashton Dilke came out to join his brother. They met at Kazan, whither Charles had returned from his Siberian wanderings, and went down the Volga together to Astrakan, and thence travelled across the Don Cossack Steppe. Sir Charles returned in the last days of 1869. He notes that Ashton showed at this time the beginnings of consumption--symptoms which led him to give up rowing, and became more grave in the years of his travels in Central Asia.

Russia exercised from the first for Charles Dilke a fascination which it never lost. A picture by Vladimir Makofsky, which he bought about this time, hung in the breakfast-room at Sloane Street; 'it represents a scene from one of Tourgenief's early stories, a summer's night in the government of Toula: boys telling ghost stories while they watch horses grazing on the lammas land.'

A chapter in _Greater Britain_ had set out the opinion which, after travel in the East, he formed of Russia, from talk both with Englishmen and with Orientals. The great power, which he then guessed at from the other side of the Himalayan barrier, seemed to him essentially Asiatic, not European, and not a civilizing power. He quoted with approval the saying of an Egyptian under Ismail's rule: "Why, Russia is an organized barbarism,-- why--the Russians are--why, they are--why, nearly as bad as _we_ are."

This was his view of the Russian Government. The opinion which he formed of the Russian people as a whole was in itself 'contradictory because they are a contradictory people.' He found them 'avid of new ideas.' Yet, 'however fond half-educated Russians may be of professing a knowledge of things they do not understand, I never doubted for one moment the greatness of the future that lies before Russia, nor the essential patriotism and strength of the Russian race; and it was these last considerations that took me so often to their country.'

CHAPTER VIII

THE EDUCATION BILL OF 1870--THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

I.

From his Russian journeys Sir Charles returned to take part in an election in which occurred his first opportunity for helping the cause of direct Labour Representation. In 1869--

'at the extreme end of the year, I returned to London, and worked hard for Odger in the Southwark Election, in which, opposed by a Conservative and a Liberal (Sir Sydney Waterlow), he beat the Liberal, with the result, however, that the Conservative got in. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice subscribed towards Odger's expenses, and Fawcett also worked for him. The incident contributed a good deal towards that separate organization of the Radicals which was attempted early in the following year.'

Already another organization of far-reaching influence had been planned, and it led to a great alliance.

'In the course of 1869 I became Chairman of the London Branch of the newly formed Education League, and my friendship with Joseph Chamberlain began, he being Chairman of the Committee of the League and its real head.'

Dilke was seven years the junior of Chamberlain, who in 1869 was thirty- three. But he had seven years' Parliamentary seniority over his friend, who did not become a member of the House of Commons till 1876. Chamberlain was in 1869, and indeed for several years later, a politician and member of the Birmingham Town Council, known throughout the Midland area for the boldness of his Radicalism--which did not stop short of avowing Republican principles--and also for extraordinary ability in developing the munic.i.p.al improvements in which Birmingham under his auspices led the way. He had conceived, and in the Education League partly carried out, the idea of a political a.s.sociation independent of official party control, which should cover the whole country with its branches, and so become a power behind and beyond the Parliamentary leadership. Sir Charles, on his side, brought into the partnership the resources possessed by a young man of considerable reputation both in literature and in public life, who at an early age had established himself in a metropolitan seat.

'The principle of the League was that of general education, and of compulsion and freedom from fees as a consequence. The teaching of religion was left to the Sunday-schools, and upon this head difficulties soon arose.' The ma.s.s of English Liberals inherited the Protestant conviction that "simple Bible teaching" could offend n.o.body, and must be good for everybody, and consequently should be included in the term "education," while the view of more sophisticated politicians was given by Sir William Harcourt (then Mr. Vernon Harcourt). He wrote to Sir Charles in 1870:

"We are fighting with inferior forces, and everything must depend upon husbanding our strength, using it to the best advantage, and not exposing ourselves to needless defeats. We must always seem to win, even though we do not get what we want. That is what up to this point we have accomplished. But we must not allow ourselves to be precipitated upon destruction by men who may be philosophers, but who are no politicians.... We must now retire on the second line of defence. What is that to be? I lay down first that the thing to be resisted is denominationalism. If it can be got rid of altogether-- best; but if not, then to the greatest degree--next best. Now, as a politician (not as a philosopher) I am quite satisfied that neither in the House of Commons nor in the country can we beat denominationalism by secularism. If we attempt to meet the flood by this d.y.k.e it will come over our heads. We must break the force of the wave by a slope, and deal with its diminished weight afterwards as best we may."

'Harcourt then went on to defend that to which I was strongly opposed --namely, Bible reading--on the ground that "we should give our republic not the best possible laws, but the best which they will bear. This is the essence of politics. All the rest is speculation....

We must make up our minds before the meeting on Monday, for in the mult.i.tude of counsellors there is folly."'

A definite principle was at stake. Under this proposal the teaching, though called undenominational, would not in fact be so. Bible reading, subject, no doubt, to a conscience clause, would be enforced on Roman Catholics, Jews, and secularists, and Bible reading, though undenominational as regarded the different divisions of Protestant Christianity, would still be denominational as regards these three: 'I myself took the extreme and logical line of not only opposing Bible reading, but of opposing Mr. Jacob Bright's and Mr. Cowper Temple's amendments for excluding creeds, and for setting up a general undenominational Protestantism of the majority.'