The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume II Part 27

A number of fine old prints after Raphael were there, and also a photograph of the head of Fortune in Burne-Jones's 'Wheel.' Sir Charles had commissioned Burne-Jones to paint a head of Fortune, and the correspondence on the subject was sufficiently complete to suggest that the commission had been executed, though as a fact it was never carried out. Sir Charles, who knew something of the difficulty of tracing and attributing pictures, used to declare laughingly that the correspondence might go far to mislead some critic of the future into search after a non-existent original. Anyway, the beautiful head with its closed eyes hung there always, presiding over the varying fortunes of the last tenants of the house.

The far dining-room opened with French windows on a paved terrace, which led by steps to a little garden and to the stables beyond. This terrace was the scene of the morning fencing, when the clashing of foils and Sir Charles's shouts of laughter resounded to the neighbouring gardens. Lord Harcourt recalls the parties in the eighties, as one of the characteristic features of life at 76, Sloane Street. Lord Desborough, then Mr. W. Grenfell, a first-rate fencer, came frequently, and he chronicles the 'deadly riposte' of Sir Julian Pauncefote, a regular attendant when he was in town. Mr. R. C. Lehmann, best known as oarsman and boxer, but a fencer as well, came whenever he could. A great St.

Bernard, lying waiting for him in the entrance hall, announced his master's presence.

Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, of the French Emba.s.sy, was one of the most regular attendants. When M. d'Estournelles left London it was to go to Tunis; and further reference in one of Sir Charles's letters betrays the pride with which he learnt that this frequenter of his school had done it credit by 'pinking his man' in a duel. M. Joseph Reinach came to fence whenever he was in London; so did Italian masters--for example, the Marchese Fabrizio Panluoci de' Calboli, 'who wants to set up here.'

The _maitre d'armes_ was senior master at the London Fencing Club, and many young fencers joined these parties to gain experience. Sir Charles was one of the first Englishmen to use the epee; he fenced always when in Paris, as in London, and any famous French fencer who visited this country received as a matter of course an invitation to the morning meetings at No. 76. [Footnote: Sir Charles fenced whenever he was abroad, if he could get an opponent. There is a note of 1881: 'August 29th-September 3rd, fenced with de Clairval at La Bourboule.' As late as 1907 he was fencing at Hyeres with a master who came over from Toulon on certain days in the week. Also at the end of 1881 he 'started a local fencing club in my own street, and trained some good fencers there, and used to get away to fence there whenever I could find time in the evening hours.' He took part in a compet.i.tion at this club, and 'won the prize for rapier fencing, being beaten, of course, for foil fencing.']

Sir Theodore Cook, now editor of the _Field_, an antagonist of a later date, and captain of the first international fencing team of 1903, speaks of the considerable reputation of Sir Charles as a fencer, 'taking the same place in a quiet way as that Lord Howard de Walden takes towards the public now' (1913).

It was the 'unconventional style and the boyish enjoyment of his pastime'--to use Lord Desborough's words--which were characteristic of Sir Charles. His mischievous attempts to distract his adversary's attention, his sudden drops to the ground and bewildering recoveries, his delight at the success of his feints, and contagious merriment, must have gained the sympathy of even the most formal fencer. Many stories of these bouts are told. One is that, having driven an antagonist from the terrace into the Garden Room, into which he was followed by his favourite cat, Sir Charles caught up and threw the protesting animal at his opponent, and dealt his final blow at a foe embarra.s.sed by the double onslaught. Those, however, who know his respect for the dignity of cats will always regard the story as apocryphal.

He delighted in having near him the pictures of his friends, and there were many on the next landing, in the vestibule and the Blue Room to which it led. Mr. Chamberlain, keen-eyed and alert, looked out from Frank Holl's canvas. Fawcett, [Footnote: Now in the National Portrait Gallery, as also Holl's 'Chamberlain,' by Sir Charles's bequest.]

painted by Ford Madox Brown in 1871, recalled an earlier friendship, as did the portrait of John Stuart Mill, who, never having sat to any painter, just before his death allowed Watts to paint this for Sir Charles. The picture came home on the day Mill died, and is the original. It was left by will to the Westminster Town Hall. The picture in the National Portrait Gallery is a replica, painted by Sir Charles's leave. By Watts was also a beautiful portrait of Sir Charles himself, the pendant to another which has gone. He and his first wife were painted for each other, but the portrait of her seemed to him so inadequately to render the 'real charm' of the dead woman that he destroyed it. The ill.u.s.trations of this book contain some reproductions of pictures mentioned here.

Reminiscent of earlier family friendships were the Keats relics here and in Sir Charles's own study. Many of these had been bought by old Mr.

Dilke from Keats's love, f.a.n.n.y Brawne, to save them from the indignity of an auction.

In the Blue Room also hung some extraordinarily fine pictures by Blake, who was the friend of Sir Charles's grandfather--among them 'The Crucifixion,' 'The Blasphemer,' and 'The Devil,' [Footnote: 'I gave four of my Blakes to the South Kensington Museum in 1884.'] The best loved both by the grandfather and by Sir Charles was the beautiful 'Queen Catherine's Dream.' A precious copy of _The Songs of Innocence_, hand-painted by Blake and his wife, completed the collection. There were several reliefs by Dalou in the house, the finest let in over the mantelpiece of the Blue Room, a copy of Flaxman's Mercury and Pandora.

They were executed for Sir Charles when the sculptor was in London in great distress after the Commune, before the amnesty which retrieved his fortunes.

Here also were reminiscences of Provence. One side of the wall was largely covered by a picture of Frejus by Wislin, painted in the days when St. Raphael and Valescure did not exist, and when the old town rose clear from the low ground as Rome rises from the Campagna, the beautiful Roquebrune, a spur of Sir Charles's beloved Mountains of the Moors, behind it. Sevres china, vases, bronzes, filled the window ledges, presents to the first Baronet from the Emperor of Austria, Napoleon III., the Crown Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor Frederick), and other royal persons and Governments, with whom his Exhibition work brought him into touch.

At the time when Horace Walpole's collection at Strawberry Hill was sold, Sir Charles's grandfather had stayed at Twickenham, and had brought away many purchases, which peopled the Red and Green Drawing-rooms on the next landing. There was a little group of miniatures in which the 'Beautiful Gunnings' and a charming 'Miss Temple' figured; in another group, miniatures of Addison, of Mme. Le Brun, of Moliere, came from Lady Morgan, whose pen of bog-oak and gold, a gift to her from the Irish people, hung in Sir Charles's own study.

The best of the miniatures were those by Peter Oliver, and portrayed Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth, Princess Royal of England, afterwards married to Lord Craven; while the finest of all was 'a son of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1632.' It was one of 'several others' which Walpole 'purchased at a great price,' a purchase which was thus chronicled 'by Mason (Junius) in a letter to Walpole: 'I congratulate you on the new miniatures, though I know one day they will become Court property and dangle under the crimson-coloured shop-gla.s.ses of our gracious Queen Charlotte.' The set were all brought together for the first time since 1842 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition.

In these two drawing-rooms, among the medley of enamelled and inlaid tables, royal gifts and collectors' purchases, pictures by Cranach, Mabuse, Van Goyen, Mignard, and many more, some special objects stood out. These were a beautiful Madonna by Memling, on a circular panel, from Lord Northwick's collection; the Strawberry Hill marble version of the famous Bargello relief by Donatello, of the head of the infant St.

John the Baptist; and a portrait ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, which, owing to the fleurs-de-lis on the chair, pa.s.sed by the name of 'the d.u.c.h.ess,' a portly lady of some dignity, with beautiful white hands and tapering fingers. Lady Dilke's researches, however, placed the lady as Anne Dujardin, an innkeeper of Lyons. The painter, young Karl Dujardin, unable to pay his reckoning, had settled it by marrying his hostess and taking her to Amsterdam, and the fleurs-de-lis on the chair explained that the lady was of French extraction. A Flemish head of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had come from the Gwydyr Collection.

She was much exhibited, but her main interest was due to Sir Charles's intense admiration for the governing capacity and the overshadowed life of the woman. He made two pilgrimages to the church at Brou, near Bourg-en-Bresse, where her sculptured face, closely resembling that of the portrait, looks out from tomb and windows, as she lies side by side with Philibert le Beau, the husband of her love and of her youth, in the magnificent shrine she built for him.

Tapestry hangings divided the rooms from each other, and in many cases only heavy curtains divided them from the stairs.

Above these rooms, Sir Charles's little study, occupied all day by his secretary or himself, was lined with books of reference and piles of despatch-boxes, while every spare foot on the wall held relics of the past. There was the Herkomer portrait of his second wife, there also a copy of a favourite picture, Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredano; the portrait of Keats, the only one Severn did from the life--now on loan at the National Portrait Gallery--old political cartoons of Chelsea days, portraits and prints of John Wilkes, and a head of Mazzini. Felix Moscheles (the nephew of Mendelssohn and baby of the Cradle Song) painted Mazzini. Concerning its subject the Memoir notes: 'In the course of 1872 I lost a good friend in Mazzini, whose enthusiasms, Italian and religious, I at that time scarcely shared, but whose conversation and close friendship I deeply valued.... The modernness of the Universal Cigarette Smoking Craze may be judged by the fact that Mazzini was the first man I ever knew who was constantly smoking cigarettes.'

The rest was a medley impossible to catalogue: portraits of Charles Lamb, who had been the grandfather's friend; a scarce proclamation by the Pretender; medals and other 'Caryll' relics; rapiers, pistols which had travelled with Sir Charles through America; a section of the Trinity Hall boat which was head of the river in 1862 and 1864; seven cups, trophies of rowing, walking, fencing, and shooting matches, with shots dug up on his Toulon estate which were mementoes of the British blockades of the town. Apart from works of reference, a special case was given to autographed books from Hood, Rogers the poet, Gambetta, Laveleye, Louis Blanc, Castelar, Cardinal Manning, Queen Victoria, and many more. In this collection figured all Sir Charles's college prizes, carefully preserved; the family Bible of Lord Leicester, uncle to Sir Philip Sidney, with Dilke family entries; and a little volume in which his second wife had written for him some of the most beautiful pa.s.sages from 'Queens' Gardens' in _Sesame and Lilies_; it was bound in white vellum and 'blessed by Ruskin.' Here, too, were many Keats letters and books afterwards left by will to Hampstead.

A h.o.a.rd of treasures filled a little book-room above--his mother's sketches, drawings of his first wife driving her ponies in Sloane Street, photographs and trinkets of hers, old family caricatures, and also some original sketches by Leech. In the room next to it, occupied by his grandmother till her death in 1882, was a John Collier of the first Lady Dilke.

When the grandmother's sitting-room was used later by Sir Charles's second wife, its main features were a small reference library of French art and a collection of books on Labour. Before the fireplace, on the writing-table as it was in 1885, were bowls of French porcelain filled once a week with fresh flowers from the Toulon garden--paper white narcissus and purple anemones or big violets of Provencal growth.

Sir Charles's bedroom above was the old nursery, connected with his mother's room, in which he was born, and out of which opened a little room where as a child he slept. His memories of that room were the terrors of a nervous boy, lying alone in the dark, creeping downstairs to sit--a tiny white-robed figure--as near as possible to the drawing-room door, to get comfort from the hum of talk or thunder of the four-handed piano pieces of the period.

His own room for many years was full of drawings by his second wife--her studies under Mulready, her drawings for her _Renaissance_, and other pen-and-ink sketches by her hand, as well as two miniatures of her by Pollet. Some of Frank Dicey's Thames water-colours, one showing Sir Charles's river house at Dockett Eddy, and sketches from his own pen or brush made in his Russian, American, and world-wide wanderings, were here also. In a tiny glazed bookcase by the fire were some 'favourite books,' a volume or two of Kipling, two volumes of Anatole France, next to a cookery book of 1600, Renan's _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_, and a volume of Aubanel. The place of honour was given to a deeply scored copy of Jeremy Taylor's _Golden Grove_.

Beside his great-uncle's Peninsular medal and clasps hung one of Roty's medals, a present from the artist. There were several of Roty's beautiful medallions in the house, the finest one of Sir Charles himself, explained by the legend on the back as 'done for his wife.' She had it made, and it was always with her.

There were a good many of W. E. F. Britten's pictures, painted for Sir Charles; the finest was that of 'St. Francis preaching to the Birds,' a thing of delicate colour and taste, which fitted with his love of the Umbrian Holy Land and went later to the country cottage at Pyrford.

There was more force in a large crayon drawing of the Earl of Southampton in the Tower: 'his cat had just arrived down the chimney, probably saving his master's reason by relief of the intolerable tension of lonely confinement.'

The painted cats, or Miss Chaplin's modelled p.u.s.s.ies, of which there were many, were seldom without some magnificent living representative at 76, Sloane Street. Zulu, an enormous dark long-haired cat, was very popular; but the last of the 'Head Cats,' Calino, was so engaging that, at his death about 1908, Sir Charles decided that he should never be replaced. The sway of these cats was despotic, but there were occasions on which their own territory was too limited for them, and messages would come from far down the street demanding the removal of the reigning favourite from some article of furniture where it had ensconced itself with such majesty that a show of violence was out of the question. Among his precious books was a cat story--privately printed and bound--which his second wife had gradually evolved among the wonderful essays in story-telling with which, when he was jaded, she diverted him. This held so large a share in his affection that it nearly displaced his little French copy of the _Contes de Perrault_, containing the adventures of the Marquis of Carabas and Puss in Boots. At the winter cottage at Pyrford, among the pines, was a cattery, where Persian tailless cats, some ginger and some white, were bred. A list of names was kept ready for them, and Babettes, Papillons, Pierrots and Pierrettes, Mistigrises and Beelzebubs, were distributed to friends and acquaintances. Among the treasured pathetic sc.r.a.ps kept in his father's desk, his executors found a pencil drawing by his wife, the closed window of a silent house, into which the perfectly sketched figure of a little kitten was trying to enter.

In the gracious setting of this house the pervading atmosphere was that of work. The three generations of Dilkes whom it had sheltered had each found the sphere for which he was best fitted, and pursued it tirelessly. The grandfather, beloved old scholar and critic; the father, indefatigable organizer of international exhibitions, horticulturist, newspaper proprietor, member of Parliament--both pa.s.sed on the traditions of strenuous labour to the great Parliamentarian who was now the occupant of the house. He had absorbed those traditions and far outvied his predecessors, working day and night, bringing down from his bedroom almost illegible memoranda to be deciphered by his secretary in the morning.

From 1880 to 1885 his accession to public office had intensified the work. Messengers with official boxes waited in the hall; callers on political or electoral business, to be interviewed by him or his secretaries, filled the Blue and Red Rooms. After the morning's fencing he pa.s.sed rapidly from letters to interviews till the Office or the House of Commons claimed him, and his faithful coachman, Charles Grant, who when he died in 1901 had served his master for thirty years, waited for him at the door. Yet with all this the house continued, as in his father's day, to be noted for its hospitality, and the lists of guests in the tattered diaries bear witness to the enormous and varied circle of Sir Charles's friends. Here met foreign diplomatists and artists, English statesmen, and men of letters. Even Cardinal Manning broke his rule against dining out, as 'yours is a Cabinet dinner,' to come to 76, Sloane Street; but as he met M. de Franqueville, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, and the friend whom the Cardinal designated to be his biographer, the future author of _France_, J. E. C. Bodley, there must have been talk of other subjects than 'Housing of the Poor.' Indeed, absence of 'shop' seems to have been one of the charms of these dinners, and Mr. G. W. Osborn, the Chairman of the Chelsea Liberal a.s.sociation, records that, even when the local leaders met there, some outside element was always introduced which made the talk general.

On another occasion Sir Charles notes: 'July 9th, 1884. On this day Cardinal Manning dined with me, and gave me, in return for a Spanish crucifix with which I had presented him, a miniature of "our patron, St.

Charles,"' which now, he adds, '(1891 and 1903) hangs in my bedroom.

Manning and H. von Bismarck met at my table--I think for the first time.'

His first invitation to Mr. Gladstone, of October 26th, 1882, was to meet the Duc de Broglie: 'the leader of the Conservative party in France is at this moment a sufficiently interesting figure for me to think you may like to come to meet him, if you are not engaged.'

Such social life, like the morning's rapid turn with the foils or the Sunday afternoon on the river, helped to save him from breakdown under a strain of work persistently intense. Another quality which saved him was his power of turning at once and completely from one occupation to another.

A friend thus describes him as he appeared in 1885: 'There was in him a quality of boyishness I have never seen in any other man, coupled with deep gravity and seriousness, and the transition from one mood to the other came with lightning rapidity. Appeal to him on some question of high politics, even at a moment of the most joyous relaxation, and his face gravened, his bearing changed; he pulled himself together with a trick of manner habitual to the end, and the 'boy' became the statesman before it seemed the last echoes of his laughter had died away. We all prophesied for him accession to the highest offices of the State; for though so far the offices which he had held had been of but minor rank, yet he had magnified these offices till they became of the first importance, and his knowledge and authority were as great as were his charm and his power of gathering round him supporters and friends. He spoke with the authority of one who knows his value to the nation which he serves.'

So with Sir Charles's second marriage the house entered on its last phase, and the dark days which followed were lightened for its two occupants by mutual confidence and the support of an abiding love.

CHAPTER XLVIII

FOREIGN POLICY

After a brief stay at Royat, whither doctor's orders had sent Lady Dilke, Sir Charles returned with her, in September, 1886, to the little riverside cottage at Dockett. Thence, as autumn drew on, they moved to the other cottage that had been built among the pines on the sandy ridge near Woking.

No longer having a seat in the House of Commons, Sir Charles again resumed the pen, by which he had first gained distinction.

In the English home politics of 1887, the Irish Question predominated as it had never done before: Home Rule was being thrashed out on every platform. This was a matter on which Sir Charles, to use his own words, 'never clearly saw his way'; it was one that he naturally avoided, for it had separated him from his most intimate political a.s.sociate, and he turned to the field of foreign affairs which had continuously occupied him during his tenure of office, and which, save during the episode of the franchise negotiations, had been his central concern.

For a moment he had the notion of entering into the business of newspaper management. His object was not to secure literary reputation, but to direct and influence public opinion. Early in 1887 he wrote to his friend Mr. Thursfield of the _Times_:

'What I want is work on foreign affairs, or rather external affairs, or foreign and colonial. I would prefer not to write, but to suggest and supervise foreign news, and to work up the subjects of the leaders which others would write. If I wrote, I think I should write less well than other people, because I always write as I speak, and not as people are taught to write.'

Nothing came of this idea; but it was a proposal remarkable in its self-depreciation, because it was made when work from his pen was already having a conspicuous success. Beginning in January, 1887, a series of six articles dealing with the existing position of the six Great Powers appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_, anonymously, but the author was at once identified. They sent the _Review_ into repeated editions. They appeared translated into French in the _Nouvelle Revue_, and were discussed all over Europe. Later in the summer they were published in book form, and called in English _The Present Position of European Politics_ and in French _L'Europe en 1887_.

In the author's own words, the articles dealt with 'facts and tendencies'; and though he would have been the last to hold himself a prophet, saying that in the nature of things 'two years meant for ever in politics,' much that he wrote is still of interest, and the suggestion of Mr. Erskine Childers' hero that we should 'Read Dilke' is not yet out of date. [Footnote: _Riddle of the Sands_, by Erskine Childers, popular edition, p. 127. First published March, 1903.]

The keynote of the book is contained in the opening words, 'The present position of the European world is one in which sheer force holds a larger place than it has held in modern times since the fall of Napoleon.' This reign of force the author traced back to 1878, the date of the Treaty of Berlin, but it was originally due, as he pointed out, to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, which had left a permanent source of irritation in the European States system. Nevertheless, he recognized that for the time the continuance of Prince Bismarck's policy, based as it was on the maintenance of the Treaty, meant peace, because Prince Bismarck believed peace to be necessary for the maintenance in undiminished strength of the German Empire, wedged in between France and Russia, the former always hostile, the latter an uncertain quant.i.ty. An alliance with Austria-Hungary was necessary to this policy: an alliance dictated by the fact that no other was likely to be permanent. Italy, it was true, had recently joined the alliance; but Italy, like Russia, was an uncertain factor, and Sir Charles Dilke believed that, if a critical moment were to come, the desire to get the Trentino would be stronger than the ties of any alliance. The policy of Prince Bismarck was accordingly to prevent a Russo-French alliance, and to help Russia to push into the Far East; to help her also in the Balkans, but not beyond the point at which Austria might remonstrate; and to prevent Austria from seeking anything calculated to precipitate a war between herself and Russia, such as an attempt to add to the position which she had obtained in the Balkan Peninsula under the Treaty of Berlin. This policy also involved keeping Turkey quiet and preventing a league of the Balkan States, lest such a league should irritate Russia and Austria and produce a European conflagration.

General Fadejew, in a celebrated pamphlet [Footnote: General Fadejew, _uber Russland's Kriegsmacht und Kriegspolitik_, Leipzig, 1870, translated from the Russian.] which fluttered all the Chancelleries of Europe in the early seventies, had said that the road from Russia to Constantinople lay through Vienna; and Vienna, Sir Charles agreed with the Russian general, was the centre to be watched, for it was there that the key of European policy was to be found. 'Austria interests me,' he wrote, when preparing his book, to Sir William White, the Amba.s.sador at Constantinople. 'I can't leave London, but I'm thinking of sending a man to Vienna to tell me certain things. If so, to whom should he go?' And he watched the strange development of events in Bulgaria. Early in January he notes an interview with 'Dr. Stoiloff, the ablest man except the brutal Stambuloff, and the leader of the Conservative party' in Bulgaria, where the perpetual intrigues of Russian agents, official and unofficial, had recently culminated, in August, 1886, in the kidnapping of the reigning chief of the State, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and had thereby created an Austrian party: events which were to have many long-drawn-out consequences, as the following century to its own cost was to find out. Bulgaria from this time began to move in an orbit of her own, distinct from, and often unfriendly to, the other Balkan States.

In 1887 it was still a current belief--especially on the part of many of Sir Charles's own political friends--that Germany was eagerly watching for an opportunity to seize the German provinces of Austria, and that Austria was eagerly watching for an opportunity 'to go to Salonica,' as the current phrase had it. The two propositions were almost mutually destructive, but, without insisting on this rather obvious consideration, Sir Charles was well aware that (even apart from reasons of international policy) Germany could not desire the disruption of Austria, because the German provinces of Upper and Lower Austria and Styria did not lie next to North Germany, but were cut off from it by countries in which the most enterprising of all Slavonic peoples--the Czechs of Bohemia--'hated the Germans with a deadly hatred,' and already, even in 1887, had got the upper hand. Count Bismarck himself had resisted--and successfully--the desire of the military party to annex Bohemia in 1866 after Sadowa. The permanent exclusion of Austria and the House of Hapsburg from Germany was also no sudden or ephemeral policy. In the middle of the seventeenth century, as the author of the _Holy Roman Empire_ had reminded his readers, it had been proposed by the famous publicist Philippe Chemnitz, who wrote under the name of 'Hippolytus a Lapide,' as the surest means of securing a permanent unity of some kind in Germany. [Footnote: See Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, chap. xx., p. 386; Louis Leger, _Histoire de l'Autriche-Hongrie_, chap.

xv., p. 258.] It had been adopted by the leaders in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848-49, and Count Bismarck was the inheritor of these traditions when he finally expelled the House of Hapsburg in 1866, and thus translated ancient theories into modern facts. It was therefore highly improbable, to say the least, that only a few years after the Treaty of Berlin he should be engaged in an attempt to nullify his own work. [Footnote: On January 14th, 1849, the Frankfurt Parliament voted the exclusion of Austria from Germany.]

Austria, Sir Charles Dilke pointed out, some day by mere compet.i.tion with Russia, if that Power made further advances, might perhaps be forced forward unwillingly to Salonica; but by thus seizing Macedonia--a far larger proposition than that of the annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, and in many respects a different one--it was clear she would 'increase her military weakness, would deeply offend the Servians, the Greeks, and the Bulgarians, and by increasing the number of her Slavonic subjects would only hasten her own break-up.' Here, in fact, lay the real danger to the 'Eastern Empire.' Prince Bismarck, as a matter of fact, was of all men in Europe the man who most desired to keep Austria alive. 'It is a necessity to him that she should continue to exist. Once destroy Austria, and Germany is left to fight it out with France and Russia without a.s.sistance, for in this case Italy would not move,' notwithstanding the recently renewed Triple Alliance. That a military party existed in Austria which might desire to go to Salonica, and would also rejoice in a war with Italy, Sir Charles was well aware; but he saw no reason to believe that it would succeed in forcing these adventures on the Ballplatz, or on the statesmen of Hungary, who above all things dreaded an increase of the Slavonic elements in the Empire.

The Austria-Hungary of 1887 was the Austria-Hungary of the long rule of Count Taafe at Vienna, of M. Koloman Tisza at Buda-Pesth, and of Count Kalnoky at the Ballplatz; and it was not unreasonable at that time to consider it possible that, 'after the division of the respective spheres of influence of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, in Macedonia, Austria might gradually increase her influence in the Balkan States; and if she would take the bold step of making up an arrangement for evacuating part of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, so as to show she had no intention of going southwards to Salonica, she might bring together in a general understanding with herself the small States and the Turks.' This, however, Sir Charles admitted, was probably impracticable, 'as Austro- Hungarian pride would effectually prevent the abandonment of any portion of Bosnia.' But so late as 1909 Dilke told Lord Fitzmaurice, when, at the time of her final annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary had retired from the Sandjak of Novi Bazar, that he thought the British Foreign Office 'had made too great a fuss' over the annexation, which had been certain to come, sooner or later. [Footnote: Lord Fitzmaurice was then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and represented the Foreign Office in the House of Lords. See further as to Sir Charles Dilke's' views on the events of 1908, Chapter LVIII.]