The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 8

"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 Ca.s.swell.

"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 inst.i.tutions 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es near Salem; and yet, from the time he first 'smells the mola.s.ses' 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 sh.o.r.es 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.es in tremendous spirits, and on the voyage to New Zealand was a provider of entertainment for his fellow- pa.s.sengers, writing an _opera 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sage in his Memoir:

'The preface of _Greater Britain_, in which the t.i.tle 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 t.i.tle "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 n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sages: [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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.blest 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 Aga.s.siz, 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 appet.i.te, 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 eclaires de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'ecrire 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-echangiste 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 subst.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 gra.s.sy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue b.u.t.tes, 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 s.p.a.ce 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 subst.i.tutes 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 s.p.a.ce 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.