The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 13

The Queen's Speech inevitably contained reference to Prince Gortschakof's action, and in both Houses there was considerable comment upon this in the debate on the Address. The Prime Minister referred to the opportunity for fuller discussion which would be afforded by Sir Charles's motion, but, when pressed to name a day for the motion, deprecated discussion while the Conference was sitting. Frequent questioning led finally to the intervention of Mr. Disraeli, who raised the whole question of Conference and Treaty in a speech, and was answered by Mr. Gladstone. When after all this Sir Charles still persisted in his motion, the purpose of which was not to discuss either the methods or the results of the Conference, but to deplore the Government's action in having entered on it at all, Mr.

Gladstone declared that Government could spare no time, and would give a day only if it were taken as a direct vote of censure, which they must in honour meet; adding that the day could only be found by the postponement of a Licensing Bill which had much support in the Liberal party. Sir Charles persevered, and made a very able speech, to which no serious answer was given. He entirely destroyed the pretence that the Conference had met without a "foregone conclusion," and stigmatized the indecent haste which could not wait to secure the presence of France even as an a.s.senting party to this acceptance of an act of repudiation. But the House was dominated by dislike for anything which seemed to hint at opening up a new European war at the moment when a settlement of the existing conflict was expected. The Tories, 'would only speak, and would not vote'; while Sir Charles's Radical a.s.sociates, such as Mr. Peter Rylands, welcomed anything done under pretext of avoiding war.

'An attempt was made by Sir Henry Bulwer, the cynical and brilliant brother of Lord Lytton, by Mr. Horsman and Mr. Otway, to use my motion for their own purposes. Otway had resigned his Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs on account of his strong opinion upon the question, and was distressed to find that his resignation had fallen flat.

Horsman was always discontented, and Bulwer wanted to be a peer.

[Footnote: Sir Henry Bulwer was afterwards created Lord Calling; Mr.

Horsman had been a conspicuous Adullamite in the previous Parliament.]

I used to tell Bulwer up to his death that I gave him his peerage, for he received Gladstone's offer of the peerage just in time to prevent him from speaking for my motion. Bulwer, whom I had known as Amba.s.sador at Constantinople, Sir Andrew Buchanan, whom I had known as Amba.s.sador at St. Petersburg, Horsman, and Otway came and dined with me, and we made a great plot, and thought we were going to upset the arrangement with the Russians. But Gladstone succeeded in taking away Goldsmid, who was one of our very few Liberal supporters, made Bulwer a peer, and left me only with Otway, Gregory, afterwards Governor of Ceylon, and Horsman....

'I ought to have divided, even if I had been in a minority of one, for the proposal to withdraw my motion brought a hornet's nest about my ears, and was a parliamentary mistake.'

Michel Chevalier, the celebrated French Economist and Free Trader, wrote thanking Sir Charles. He had spent, he said, thirty years of his life in advocating an Anglo-French understanding, and now he would not know how to look his countrymen in the face were it not for the courageous utterances of a few friendly Englishmen to which he could point as evidences of a good-will that had not forsaken France in her evil day.

II.

'Immediately after my return to England in the middle of the winter of 1870-1871, which had already been the severest ever known in Russia, I again started for the scene of war. I first visited the army of General Faidherbe, which was gallantly fighting in the north, and I was present at one of the engagements near Bapaume, in which the French took prisoners sixty sharpshooters of the Prussian Landwehr-- splendid soldiers, towering above our little Frenchmen, to whom it seemed incredible, whatever the odds, they should have surrendered. I never saw so wretched an army to look at as Faidherbe's. His cavalry were but a squadron. He had one good regiment of foot Cha.s.seurs and two good regiments of marines; and the gunners of his artillery (escaped men from Sedan) were excellent, and the guns were new; but he had for his main body some 20,000 second-skim of the National Guard, the cream from the north having been sent south to the Army of the East under Bourbaki, with whom they were driven into Switzerland.

'Ours were what schoolboys would call second choice. Oh, such men! and without boots, without overcoats, facing arctic weather in wooden shoes and old sacks--facing the Prussians, too, with old muzzle- loading guns; but they fought well, and their leader, a man of genius, made the most of them. I returned two or three times to England--that is, to Dover--to eat and buy things I could carry, for I could hardly get anything at Lille, where, by the way, I heard Gambetta make his great speech. It was the finest oratorical display to which I ever listened, though I have heard Castelar, Bright, Gladstone, the Prime Minister Lord Derby, Gathorne Hardy, and Father Felix (the great Jesuit preacher) often, at their very best.

'Picking up Auberon Herbert, who was on his way to Versailles to wait for the surrender of Paris in order to take in food to his brother Alan, who was serving as a doctor on the ambulance inside, I went to the siege of Longwy. Like all the fortresses of France bombarded in this war, with two exceptions, it surrendered far too easily.

'From Longwy we pa.s.sed on to Montmedy, at which latter place we witnessed the immediate effects of a fearful railway accident, a collision in a tunnel between a trainful of French prisoners and one of recruits for the Prussian Guards. The scene in the darkness and smoke, with the stalwart, long-bearded Landwehr men, who formed the garrison of the town, holding blazing torches of pine and pitch, and the glare from the fires of the upset engines, was one which would have delighted Rembrandt. When a rush of water, a cataract from the roof of the lately blown-up tunnel, suddenly occurred, adding to the horror of the night, the place was pandemonium. Almost the only men unhurt in the front carriages, which were smashed to pieces, were the Mayors of the villages on the line, travelling compulsorily as hostages for the safety of the trains. I made military reflections on the advantage of blowing up tunnels, as against the practice of destroying bridges and so forth.'

Sir Charles was one of the first in Paris after the siege (which was raised by an armistice on January 29th, 1871), taking in with him a large quant.i.ty of condensed milk, of which he made presents to his Paris friends. The purpose of the armistice was to enable regular conditions to be signed between the conqueror and the conquered. The Imperial Government had declared war on Prussia; but the Empire had fallen and the existing Government was only provisional. It had a branch in Paris, another branch in Bordeaux, and between these the investing army barred all intercommunication. The purpose of the armistice was to allow the holding of elections throughout France to return a National a.s.sembly, which in its turn should appoint Ministers fully authorized to treat for peace. The elections did but emphasize the division between Paris and the provinces, for in Paris an Ultra-Radical representative was returned, while in the country a considerable majority of monarchical deputies were elected.

Republican France feared, and not without cause, some attempt to re- establish a dynasty.

When, on February 20th, the new Government, with Thiers at its head, signed preliminaries of peace, a condition was included which stipulated that the Prussian troops should formally enter Paris and remain for three days in possession of all the forts before evacuating the place. The National Guard, refusing to obey orders, entrenched itself in Montmartre; the seat of government was transferred to Versailles, lately the Prussian headquarters; fighting broke out in the streets, and the control of the city was seized in the name of the Commune.

So began the second siege, in which revolutionary Paris stood at bay against those whom they called 'the Prussians of Versailles,' while the real Prussians, still occupying part of the exterior line of forts, looked on, impartial spectators. Sir Charles writes:

'At this time my attention was exclusively turned to foreign affairs, and immediately after my Black Sea speech I started for Paris. I took with me an appointment as a Daily News correspondent--not that I intended to correspond, but only because it would explain my presence.

Having been unable to leave London during the first days of the rising of March 18th, which developed into the Commune of Paris, I left it with my brother on April 2nd, and reached Creil at night, and St.

Denis in the morning. From Creil I wrote to my grandmother: "We shall reach Paris in the morning. It is no use writing, and we shall not be able to write to you." We drove into Paris, and at once went to the Hotel de Ville, where we found the famous Central Committee sitting.

We obtained from some Garibaldian officers of the Staff a special pa.s.s to leave Paris in order to see Gustave Flourens, for whom I was carrying a private letter from a friend of his in London.... The drums were beating through the streets all day, and great numbers of National Guards were under arms attempting to march upon Versailles, and there was heavy fighting, which we witnessed from a distance.

'We counted 160 battalions of National Guards all carrying the red flag, and saw altogether, as near as we could compute, almost 110,000 men. That all Paris was in the movement at this time was clear, not only from this fact, but also from the following: that on March 26th between 226,000 and 227,000 electors voted, a full vote for Paris considering the great number of persons who, having left Paris before the siege, had not returned. In the munic.i.p.al elections after the Commune, when the Conservatives had come back and made a great attempt to win, the total number of voters was only 186,000. I noticed at the Hotel de Ville that the Parisians had a great many sailors in uniform with them. These were sailors who had remained in Paris after serving there during the siege, and my pa.s.s was handed to me by a splendid specimen of a French tar wearing the name of the _Richelieu_ on his hat. I was one of the few persons not in the insurrection (and these were mostly killed) who saw the pictures in the Hotel de Ville so late--that is, so soon before the fire which destroyed them all--and I recognized old friends which I had known from 1855, when I was there at the great ball. Those who showed us from room to room were chiefly Garibaldian Poles, among them the Dombrowskis, one of whom was killed, and two of whom I afterwards befriended in London in their exile.

'The next morning we left Paris early by the Vaugirard gate, for no one could tell us where Flourens was engaged. We had followed the main line of fighting; his death occurred upon the other line; but so great was the confusion of these days that we knew nothing of it until the 5th. We thought that to make for Clamart would be the surest course to bring us to the forefront of battle, and at 8 a.m. we were in Issy. We then heard heavy firing, and came over the hill between Forts Issy and Vanves, but there was a dense fog which deadened sound, and it was not till we were well down the hillside that we heard the crunch of the machine-guns, when we suddenly found ourselves under a heavy fire from the other side. Seeing the railway embankment in front of us at the bottom of the hill, we ran down and got under shelter near an arch at the corner of a park wall, which may, perhaps, have been the cemetery.

Here we sat in safety while the bullets sang in swarms through the trees over our heads, while the forts cannonaded the heights, and the heights bombarded the forts, and while the federal regiments of the National Guard tried in vain to carry once more the line of hills which they had carried on the previous day, but had of their own accord at night abandoned, having no commissariat. They used, in fact, to go home to dinner. Indeed, many would in the morning take an omnibus to the battlefield, and fight, and take the omnibus back home again to dine and sleep--a system of warfare which played into the hands of the experienced old soldiers--the police of Paris--all ex- non-commissioned officers, and the equally well-trained Customs guards and forest guards, by whom they were opposed. General Vinoy, who was commanding, had, however, heavy work on this day, in which Duval, the General of the Commune, met his death within a quarter of a mile of the spot where we were hiding. With this day ended, indeed, the offensive operations of the Federalists against Versailles, and began the offensive operations of the regulars against Paris. After sitting a long time in our corner we found ourselves starved, and ran up the hill by the park wall, under a heavy fire, to Issy and then walked into Paris. I have a bullet in my room which struck the wall between us just as we reached shelter at the top. One of my curiosities of the time is the official newspaper of April 4th, which was conducted, of course, for the insurrection, but which played so well at being official that it announced as good news the telegrams from Algeria showing that the Arab insurrection was being put down, although the Government which was putting down this insurrection was the very same Government which was engaged in putting down the more formidable insurrection in Paris, to which the journal temporarily belonged.

'On Wednesday, the 5th, my brother went to the fighting at Neuilly bridge, where the troops from Versailles were beginning to develop a serious attack, destined, however, to continue for six weeks without result, for Paris was not entered at this point. I, with a letter from Franqueville [Footnote: Le Comte de Franqueville, well known to a large circle of English friends by his book, _Le Gouvernement et le Parlement Britanniques_ (Paris, 1887).] to the Duc de Broglie, afterwards Prime Minister, in one pocket, and a pa.s.s from the Insurrection in the other, left Paris at 5 a.m. by the Porte Montrouge, and walked by Bourg la Reine to La Croix de Berny, and thence by Chatenay to La Cour Roland, where I met a cavalry patrol of the regular forces, and then came to an infantry camp. Having shown my letter, my English pa.s.sport, and my appointment as a newspaper correspondent, I was allowed to go on to Versailles. There I slept on a table, there being a terrible crowd of Paris fugitives in the town.

In the morning I had my interview with the Duke. He was kind to me, and I saw much of him in London and in Paris in later years. Thiers was right in alluding to his dull father as "The Duc de Broglie; the other, _the_ duke." But both were narrow doctrinaires.

'After looking at M. Thiers' reserves, which at this time consisted of 250 guns parked on the Place d'Armes, with no artillerymen to work them, and a Paris regiment, the 118th, raised during the siege, locked up in the park to prevent their joining the insurrection, I started for St. Germain, where I met Major Anson, M.P., afterwards the leader of "the Colonels" (who resisted abolition of army purchase) in the House of Commons, and lunched, watching the firing of Mont Valerien on Paris. I then drove to St. Denis, the Prussian headquarters. Thence I drove again (the La Chapelle gate of Paris being shut) to Pantin.

After a long parley the Belleville-Villette drawbridge was lowered for me, and I was admitted to Paris, having been almost all round it in the two days.

'Major Anson gave me a bag of gold to pay to his brother's (Lord Lichfield's) cook. This man was in Paris, and on the 7th I called on him at a house close to the Ministry of the Interior, and to the Palace of the Elysee. The cook's rooms were at the top of the house, over the Librairie, still there in 1907. He received the visit of myself and my brother in bed. "Excuse me," he said, "but I have been fighting these three days, and I am tired out." I asked his wife what he was fighting for, and she did not in the least know. No more did he, for the matter of that. He was fighting because his battalion was fighting. "The Prussians of Versailles" had taken the place of the other Prussians; that was all. At this moment 215 battalions of the National Guard supported the insurrection, having joined in pursuance of the resolution that, in the event of the seat of Government being transferred from Paris to any other place, Paris was to const.i.tute itself a separate Republic. This more than anything else was at the bottom of the insurrection, and, as M. Jules Simon has said, "many Republicans who were neither Socialists nor Revolutionists hesitated.

One asked oneself if in fighting on the side of order one was not at the same time fighting for a dynasty." Then, again, serving in the National Guard meant pay and food, especially for the working man, for there was no work to be got in Paris, as business had not been reopened. Moreover, Paris was writhing with rage at the Prussian entry, and Parisian vanity was engaged on the side of the insurrection.

'The insurrection was certainly at this time very far from being a communistic movement, as from a natural confusion of names it was thought to be by foreigners. There was a burning jealousy in Paris of the "Rurals," and a real fear, not ill-founded, that a Royalist conspiracy was on foot. The irritations of the siege, however, played the largest part. The National Guard, who had fought very well at Buzenval on January 19th, profoundly moved by the capitulation, had carried off their guns to their own part of Paris in February, and it may be said that the insurrection dated from that time, and was historically a protest against the peace, for M. Thiers temporized with the insurrection until the old seasoned soldiers were beginning to return to him from their captivity in Germany. The fighting began with the sudden attempt of the Government to remove by force the guns which had been taken to Montmartre, followed as it was by the murder of two Generals by the mob. [Footnote: General Lecomte and Clement Thomas, the Commandant of the National Guard, were shot on March 18th, 1871, under conditions of peculiar brutality.] A number of men threw themselves into the movement from love of fighting for fighting's sake, like the Garibaldian Poles. Some joined it from ambition, but the majority of the men who later on died on the walls or in the streets in the Federalist ranks died, as they believed, for the Republic, and had no idea of the plunder of the rich. Ricciotti Garibaldi was near Dijon "in observation," as he afterwards told me.

He said that he wanted to march upon Versailles with his excellent little army, which would have followed him, and fought well, and would certainly have taken the new capital, although it would have been crushed later on. He telegraphed to Garibaldi, and "Papa" telegraphed to him not to move, Garibaldi being wiser, perhaps, in his son's case than he would have been had it been his own, for he was not remarkable for wisdom. It was a strange moment: the Prussians watching the fighting from those of the forts which were still in their hands, and a careless, idle Paris crowd of boys and women watching it from the walls.

'On the 7th my brother and I were all but killed by a sh.e.l.l from Mont Valerien which suddenly burst, we not having heard it, close to us in a garden at the corner of the Place de l'etoile and Avenue d'Uhrich, as the Avenue de l'Imperatrice had at this time been named, from the General who defended Strasbourg. During the 7th and 8th a senseless bombardment of a peaceable part of Paris waxed warm, and continued for some days uselessly to destroy the houses of the best supporters of the Conservative a.s.sembly without harming the Federalists, who did not even cross the quarter. M. Simon has said that Thiers did not bombard Paris; that he only bombarded the walls of Paris at the two points at which he intended to make a breach.... All I can say is that if this was the intention there must have been someone in command at Mont Valerien who failed to carry it into effect, and who amused himself by knocking the best part of Paris to pieces out of mischief, for no artilleryman could have been so incapable as to fire from hill to hill when intending to fire down into that which, viewed from Mont Valerien, looks like a hole. In 1841, curiously enough, Thiers had been accused, at the time of the erection of the forts of which Mont Valerien was one, of making it possible that Paris should be bombarded in this way, and had indignantly replied, asking the a.s.sembly if they believed that after having _inonde de ses feux la demeure de vos familles_ a Government could expect to be continued in power. But in 1871 he did it, and was continued in power for a time, and that with the triumphant support at the moment of the very persons whose houses he had destroyed. The Commune had a broad back, and that back was made to bear the responsibility of the destruction.'

Sir Charles returned to his duties in London after the Easter recess, but he was back in Paris to see the last moments of the second siege. On May 21st the army had forced its way into the city, though several days of bitter street fighting remained, in which the town was fired, and the Hotel de Ville and Ministry of Finance were destroyed. [Footnote: Sir Charles writes of the celebrated order, "Flambez Finances": 'the order to burn the Ministry of Finance was an undoubted forgery, as a distinguished Frenchman, signing himself "A Communalist," showed in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. The evidence before the court-martial of the porter of the Ministry of Finance, that the fire was caused by sh.e.l.ls, confirms my view, and shows how the events of the moment have been distorted by the pa.s.sions of writers.'] Sir Charles had foreseen the destruction of these uildings, "because they were behind great barricades in the direct line of the necessary attack," and was also proud of the verification which a minor military forecast received. Alan Herbert, Auberon's elder brother, who for many years practised as a doctor in Paris, was awakened on May 21st by a disturbance in the street, and

'"saw several National Guards and dirty-looking fellows taking counsel together whether they should raise a barricade opposite my windows, and they were actually beginning it. However," he wrote to his mother, Lady Carnarvon, "Sir Charles Dilke, when he was in Paris with Auberon, came to see me here, and the question being raised as to a barricade being placed opposite my windows he decided it could not be, as the only proper place for one would be some doors lower down at the meeting of the three streets. This recollection was some consolation to me, and his opinion was quite correct, for an officer arrived, supposed to have been the General Dombrowski, who made them begin lower down."'

It was on May 25th that Sir Charles left London to reach Paris, which was known by the 24th to be in flames.

'Crossing by Calais, I reached St. Denis at night, drove to Le Bourget, got a pa.s.s into Paris from the Germans at dawn, with a warning, however, that it would not bring me out again. By the drizzling rain I pa.s.sed unhindered into Paris, all the gates being open and the drawbridges down, as the Federalists were both within and without the walls. I reached the great barricade in front of the gates of the Docks de la Villette at seven in the morning. My road had been lighted till the daylight grew strong by the flames of the conflagration of the warehouses. This day, Friday the 26th, was that of the third or last ma.s.sacre of hostages--the thirty-seven gendarmes, the fifteen policemen, the eleven priests, and four other people, I believe. It was a very useless crime. When I reached the great barricade at a meeting of roads, one of which I think was called Route d'Allemagne, fighting had just recommenced after a pause during the night. At this point the field artillery were bombarding the barricade from the Rue Lafayette. I stood all day in comparative safety at the door of a baker's shop in the Rue de Flandre, for the baker was interested in what was going on sufficiently to keep his door open and look out and talk with me, though his shutters were up at all the windows. When evening came the Federalists still at this point maintained their strong position, and I, of course, knew nothing of the movements on the south by which the troops had all but hemmed them in. The baker with whom I had made friends offered me hospitality for the night, which I accepted, and I might have stayed longer with him had I pleased; but not knowing how long the fighting might continue, I determined to make my way into the Versailles lines at dawn.

'Fighting in our quarter had been again suspended at night, and in the grey light of early morning (it was fine after a long rain) I left my baker and made my way to the left, the left again, and then down a long street towards the Eastern Railway. A sentry about two hundred yards off presented his piece. I stood still in the middle of the street. He seemed then not to know what to do. I had on the red-cross armlet which I wore throughout the war, and held a white handkerchief in my hand. I suppose I looked respectable enough to be allowed to come nearer, for he let me advance. When near enough I called to him that I wished to speak with the officer of the post. He called out a corporal, to whom I made the same statement. They kept me there for a time which seemed an age, and then brought an officer. I shouted to him that I was an English newspaper correspondent, that I had an authorization as such, an English pa.s.sport, and a Prussian pa.s.s into Paris, and that I was known to the Due de Broglie and to Lord Lyons; also that I could name friends in the centre of Paris to whom I might be sent under guard. He let me pa.s.s, and said: "Allez! Vous avez eu de la chance." I went straight to the Arts et Metiers. The dead were lying thick in the streets, especially at the Porte St. Martin barricade, where they were being placed in tumbrils. The fighting had been very heavy; the troops alone had lost 12,000 killed and wounded after entering Paris. At least as many Federalists were killed fighting, or wounded and finished, besides the great number shot after their surrender. I found Tresca, the father, picking up the pieces of the sh.e.l.ls which were bursting in the courtyard, and putting them all together with wires, to the greater glory of his own particular make.

It was the Federal artillery on the heights which was bombarding Paris with Tresca's sh.e.l.ls. When one burst perfectly into some twenty equal pieces he would say:" Beautiful; that is one of mine." Any that burst into one large piece and two or three little ones he set down to the "genie militaire" of Vincennes.

'After several days I left Paris with Dr. W. H. Russell of the _Times_, my former opponent at Chelsea at the '68 election, whom I had last previously seen at Nancy on the day of Mars la Tour, and returned to London, having for the purpose of leaving Paris a pa.s.s from Marshal MacMahon's Chief of the Staff, which I still preserve.' [Footnote: This Diary Extract of the War of 1870 was published in the _Nineteenth Century_ of January, 1914.]

So ends the story. Later in life, during his championship of army reform in the House of Commons, a Tory Colonel interrupted the civilian critic with some bluntness. "I have been on more battlefields," Sir Charles retorted, "than the honourable and gallant member has ever seen." The white ambulance cap, with its black and green peak, which he preserved as a memento, bore on its lining:

"WoRTH. ORLeANS.

PHALSBOURG. LONGWY.

MARS LA TOUR. BAPAUME.

GRAVELOTTE. PARIS."

Preserved among Sir Charles's papers, and dated September 30th, 1870, there is this letter from John Stuart Mill:

"If Gladstone had been a great man, this war would never have broken out, for he would have n.o.bly taken upon himself the responsibility of declaring that the English Navy should actively aid whichever of the two Powers was attacked by the other. This would have been the beginning of the international justice we are calling for. I do not blame Gladstone for not daring to do it, for it requires a morally, braver man than any of our statesmen to run this kind of risk."

At the outset of hostilities France, and not Germany, appeared to Sir Charles not only ostensibly, but really the attacking Power, and therefore the true menace to the liberties of Europe. The policy of Louis Napoleon was apparently responsible for the Franco-German War, and as he said in _Greater Britain_: "If the English race has a mission in the world, it is surely this, to prevent peace on earth from depending upon the verdict of a single man." With the fall of Napoleon and observation of the Germans as conquerors, Sir Charles became wholly French in his sympathies, and before long his close study of events preceding the war showed him that it had really been of Bismarck's making. This did not lead him to advocate "alliance," for when alliances between various Powers were constantly advocated, he declared his belief that "the time for permanent alliances is past"; [Footnote: Speech at Chelsea to his const.i.tuents, January 24th, 1876.] but his observations in these years made him through life the steady friend of France, the constant upholder of her value to Europe, the advocate of fellowship between her free greatness and that of his own free country. "France," said he, "has in England no stronger friend than I." He lectured and spoke more than once upon the great war and its results, and the pa.s.sage which ends a Recess speech of 1875 was delivered after one of the critical moments when Germany had shown a disposition to renew attack on France. Someone had spoken of Germany "as the most 'moral' among the nations." Sir Charles replied:

'Not only do I think the conduct of Prussia towards Denmark the reverse of "moral," but I confess I have the same opinions of her later conduct towards France.... No doubt the military law presses hardly on the German people, and no doubt the Prussian Court tells them that it is the fault of France; but is it true? Do not believe in the French lamb troubling the waters to the hurt of the Prussian wolf.

Taxes and emigration increase in Germany because, as Count Moltke said in his place in Parliament, "Germany must stand armed to the teeth for fifty years to defend the provinces which it took her but six months to win." But why have taken them? Did not England and Austria at the time warn Prussia what would be the wretched consequences of the act?

German fears of to-day are the direct outcome of the frightful terms which victorious Germany imposed on France. She might have had money, reduction of forces, dismantlement of fortresses, but she would have the dismemberment of France and her money too. She insisted, in defiance of all modern political ideas, in tearing provinces from a great country against their will. France has since that time set an example of moderation of tone, yet Germany cries out that she will fight again, and crush her enemy to the dust. Poor German Liberals, who abandoned all their principles when they consented to tear Alsace and Lorraine from France, and who now find themselves powerless against the war party, who say: "What the sword has won the sword shall keep!"'

He then quoted 'the words of an Alsatian Deputy who spoke before the German Parliament on February 16th, 1874, words which were received with howls and jeers, but which were none the less eloquent and true.' The words dealt with the dismemberment of France, and ended with this pa.s.sage: "Had you spared us you would have won the admiration of the world, and war had become impossible between us and you. As it is, you go on arming, and you force all Europe to arm also. Instead of opening an age of peace, you have inaugurated an era of war; and now you await fresh campaigns, fresh lists of killed and wounded, containing the names of your brothers and your sons." "The view of this Alsatian Deputy is my view," said Sir Charles: "I do not believe that might makes right.... For our own sakes as well as hers, T pray that France may not be crushed. France is not merely _one_ of the nations. The place of France is not greater than the place of England, but it is different. The place of France is one which no other nation can quite hold."

CHAPTER X

THE CIVIL LIST

The disregard of party allegiance which Sir Charles showed in regard to the Education Bill and the Black Sea Conference did not grow less as time went on. When the Ballot Bill of 1870 was in Committee, he moved an amendment to extend the hours of polling from four o'clock to eight, as many working men would be unable to reach the poll by the earlier hour.

There was much talk in debate of the danger which would ensue from carrying on so dangerous an operation as voting after dark, and the Government Whips were actually put on to tell against this proposal; nor was any extension of the hours effected till 1878, and then by Sir Charles Dilke himself, in a Bill applying to London only, which he introduced as a private member of the Opposition under a Tory Government.

The first of the many Bills introduced by him was that to amend the procedure of registration, which in the session of 1871 he got successfully through Committee stage; but it perished in the annual "slaughter of the innocents."