The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume II Part 38

His a.s.sumption of this office was thus specially appropriate on general grounds; but it was connected in his mind, as he more than once explained, with certain definite and practical objects. He had been impressed, during his chairmanship of the Income Tax Committee, with the inadequacy of the published statistics on finance, and he hoped to signalize his period of office by the promotion of the better organization of Government statistics. He chose this subject, accordingly, for the presidential address which he delivered before the society in December, 1907, [Footnote: Ibid., December, 1907, pp.

553-582.] and which Mr. Arthur Bowley, in his address to the society in furtherance of the same crusade a few months later, described as a "terrible indictment" of the existing system, or want of system. To a large extent this address consisted of ill.u.s.trations of the lack of co-ordination in the collection and issue of these statistics, and the difficulties which confronted the student who desired to make use of them. But he did not confine himself to criticism. Although no definite scheme for dealing with this large and difficult matter could be usefully put forward without a searching official inquiry, Sir Charles was willing to support any proposal which would a.s.sist the object in view, from the inst.i.tution of an advisory or consultative committee of expert statisticians, to that of a central statistical bureau on the Continental model. He induced the council to enlarge the scope of the society's Census Committee, then sitting to advise on measures to improve the census to be taken in 1911, so as to include official statistics generally; and he persuaded the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Publications to hear evidence on the subject. [Footnote: _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, September, 1908, p. 459] He secured the consideration of his suggestions in several official quarters, and his criticisms undoubtedly led to some improvements in detail. It would have been a miracle if Sir Charles Dilke's vigorous campaign had attained a more obvious measure of success, and he himself was well aware of the extreme difficulty of securing attention in this country to a mere question of administrative reform as distinguished from one of political or party interest--a question, moreover, which aroused many departmental susceptibilities. But it would be a mistake to ignore the utility of such efforts as his in stimulating interest in the subject and a.s.sisting those whose labours have resulted in material improvements in recent years.

Never had the society enjoyed the advantage of a President who took so much interest in its proceedings. He regularly attended the meetings of the committees. He was almost invariably in the chair at the society's meetings, and rarely failed to add to the interest of the discussion by some illuminating comment, and he was the life and soul of the dinners of the Statistical Club which followed the meetings.

It is difficult to exaggerate the encouragement which a President of Sir Charles Dilke's distinction can give in these various ways to workers in the unpopular and unattractive paths of statistical science.

APPENDIX II

By Miss Mary Macarthur

The Taff Vale decision struck a vital blow at trade-union organization, and while the case was still finally undecided the leaders of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants called on Sir Charles for advice. Afterwards, when the judgment was upheld, his services were unreservedly at the command of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade-Union Congress.

He a.s.sisted the committee in 1901 at a conference in which Mr. Asquith, Sir Robert Reid, and Mr. Haldane, committed the Liberal party to the initiation of legislation to reverse the Taff Vale decision, and shortly afterwards played a similar part in an interview with Lord James of Hereford and the late Lord Ritchie, who spoke as representing the then Government. The second conference was also satisfactory, since it drew from Lord James the emphatic opinion that workmen on strike were ent.i.tled in their own interest to use moral suasion to prevent their places being taken by others.

The Tory party did not, however, take Lord James's view, and a resolution proposing the restoration of the _status quo_ before the Taff Vale judgment was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of 29.

In May, 1903, a Bill introduced by Mr. D. J. Shackleton to legalize picketing shared the same fate; while an even more ominous event was the appointment by the Government of a Royal Commission on which Labour was unrepresented, and before which the leaders of the trade-union movement refused to appear.

Arguments in favour of compromise were put forward at the Trade-Union Congress of 1903, which followed closely on the rejection of Mr.

Shackleton's Bill, and during the next three years the position of the unions became continuously more precarious. It looked as though trade- unions were beginning, in the phrase of Mr. Bell, to "exist very much on sufferance."

In this crisis Sir Charles was an inexhaustible source of strength. On everyone he could reach and influence he pressed the policy of standing firm, and the continuing reverses of the Tory party at by-elections played into his hands.

The Tories accepted the decision of their const.i.tuents to the extent that Mr. Shackleton's Bill, rejected in 1903, obtained second reading by 39 votes in 1904, and by 122 in 1905. But dislike of the measure had not abated; so many vexatious amendments were embodied in the Bill in Committee as to render it worse than useless; and at last all but the Tory members retired from the Grand Committee in disgust, and the Bill was discharged from the House. But in 1906 came the General Election, by which the Labour party found itself abruptly in the enjoyment of prominence and power.

Faced with responsibility for legislation, the Liberal Government abated something of their pre-election zeal, and introduced a measure which would have given only conditional immunity to the trade-unions; but an indignant Labour party, having secured a majority of 300 for a thoroughgoing measure of their own, were prepared to oppose the Bill of the Government, and this Bill was remodelled on Labour party lines.

The result was seen by everyone, but very few people understood how at every stage the member for the Forest of Dean had intervened, using to the utmost his powerful influence in the one camp to fix the trade- unionists in their demand for complete reversal of the Taff Vale judgment and the prevention of its recurrence, and in the other to bring about an unequivocal acceptance of the demand.

[Footnote: The Trade Disputes Act, 1906, got rid of the Taff Vale decision by Section 4. It also legalized peaceful picketing (Section 2), and made certain acts done in furtherance of a trade dispute not actionable on the ground merely that they interfered with business (Section 4). Its sections dealt with the following subjects:

Section 1 amended the law of conspiracy.

Section 2 made peaceful picketing legal.

Section 3: "An act done by a person in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute shall not be actionable on the ground only that it is an interference with the trade, business, or employment, of some other person, or with the right of some other person to dispose of his capital or his labour as he wills."

Section 4: "An action against a trade-union, whether of workmen or masters, or against any members or officials thereof, on behalf of themselves and all other members of the trade-union, in respect of any tortious act alleged to have been committed by or on behalf of the trade-union, shall not be entertained by any court."]

Nor after this major issue was settled triumphantly did his anxiety and watchfulness abate. He scrutinized the provisions of the Bill with jealous care. He desired to exclude every ambiguous word. "Too easily satisfied," he scribbled to me after Labour members had neglected to press an amendment he considered of importance, and as the Bill slowly moved forward several such criticisms came into my hands.

His own work in Committee on the Bill is indicated by his summary of the risks confronting those who took part in trade disputes:

1. The liability to be hit in respect of molestation.

2. Under the word "reasonable."

3. Under the Law of Nuisance.

The first danger he diminished in an amendment accepted by the Government. The second he tried to lessen by moving the omission of the words "peaceably and in a reasonable manner." Unsuccessfully, for his Labour colleagues inclined to think him extreme, and intimated their consent to retain "peaceably."

On the third question he was supported by almost half the Committee, and only failed to carry his amendment against the Government through a dictum of the then Attorney-General, that the Law of Nuisance could not be invoked to stop picketing. This law has, however, since been invoked against the pickets of the Hotel, Club, and Restaurant Workers' Union, and under it several members of the union have been fined, and one or two committed to gaol. The instance is a final proof, if one were needed, of Sir Charles's prescience. The fame of Sir Charles Dilke in the realm of industrial legislation will mount high, but to trade- unionists nothing will endear his memory more than the knowledge that, if and in so far as they have now a charter invulnerable alike to the prejudice and the caprice of those who administer the law, it is largely due to the clear vision of Sir Charles Dilke, and to the skill and invincible courage with which he followed his aims.

CHAPTER LIII

WORK FOR NATIVE RACES

1870-1911

I.

Perhaps no one of Sir Charles Dilke's eager activities won for him more public and private affection and regard than the part which he took both in and out of Parliament as a defender of the weaker races against European oppression.

At the very outset of his career, John Stuart Mill's admiring sympathy for the youthful author of _Greater Britain_ was specially called forth by chapters which made a natural appeal to the son of the historian of British India. More than twenty years later, Sir Charles, revising his work in the full maturity of his power and knowledge, emphasized again the first precept of his policy, which enjoined not only justice, but courtesy:

"Above all it is essential to the continuation of our rule under the changed conditions that the individual Englishman in India should behave towards the people as the best behave at present."

Into the question whether India would be better or worse off under some other system he never entered; British control was accepted by him as a fact; but, so accepting it, he insisted that justice should be done to the Crown's Asiatic subjects.

"Men who speak better English than most Englishmen; who conduct able newspapers in our tongue; who form the majority on town councils which admirably supervise the affairs of great cities; who, as Native Judges, have reached the highest judicial posts; who occupy seats in the Provincial, the Presidency, and the Viceregal Councils, or as powerful Ministers excellently rule vast Native States, can no longer be treated as hopelessly inferior to ourselves in governmental power. These men look upon the Queen's proclamations as their charters, and point out that, while there is no legal reason against their filling some proportion, at all events, of the highest executive posts, there are as a fact virtually no natives high up in the covenanted Civil Service."

Control of the military power, control of the Budget, must remain with the governing race. But "provided war and finance are in those single hands, autocratic or despotic if you will, which must exist for India as a whole, in the absence of any other authority, the less we interfere in the details of administration, to my mind, the better both for India and for ourselves." [Footnote: _East and West_, November, 1901.]

Local self-government would give to the leading natives more opportunity for a career, and to the governed a rule more closely in touch with their sympathies and traditions. But there could be no general formula.

"Roughly speaking," he said, "my views are hostile to the treating of India as a single State, and favourable to a legislative recognition of the diversity of conditions which undoubtedly exist in India." He contemplated administration in some parts of India by hereditary chiefs and princes, in some cities by elective representatives of the munic.i.p.alities, in other portions of the country by a mixed system. But, by whatever method, he was for recognizing the fact that in India we were at many points controlling a developed though a different civilization; that trained men were to be had in numbers; and that the educated natives' claim for an increased and increasing part in the task of government must be recognized.

There is a letter from him to Mr. Morley in 1897, when he thought that freedom for the Indian Press was threatened by "blind reaction" after the Poona murder: "The state of things in Poona has grown out of the Committee, under the man who was stabbed but is not dead, employing British privates (instead of employing native troops, as did General Gatacre at Bombay) to search the houses for plague patients." The whole position appeared to him "more dangerous than it has been at any time since the recall of Lytton in 1880."

A policy of repression would set back the progress of liberalizing Indian government. No one insisted more strongly on the maintenance of sufficient force to defend the Indian Empire; but he believed that there was a second "greatest duty" in learning "how to live with the development of that new India which we ourselves have created."

Speaking on July 13th, 1909, when the murder of Mr. A. M. T. Jackson at Nasik was fresh in all minds, he urged continued "measures of amnesty and appeas.e.m.e.nt," and deprecated the policy of deporting leading members of the National Congress. "If reform was dangerous," he said, "it was less dangerous than leaving things alone." Describing Lord Ripon, whose death had only just taken place, as "the Viceroy who more than any other had touched the imagination of the people of India," he added: "If our rule, excellent in intention, but rather wooden, is to be made acceptable, imagination must play its part."

This lifelong advocacy of generous principles was not unrecognized. In the last autumn of his life he was pressed in flattering terms to attend the twenty-fifth National Congress; and for some time he entertained the idea, which was specially urged on him by his friend and honorary agent for the Forest of Dean, Sir William Wedderburn, who was presiding over the Congress that year.

The project was finally set aside in view of the momentous autumn session of 1910; but he did not feel equal to the journey. When the end came, India mourned for him.

II.

Sir Charles Dilke's concern with the vast network of problems arising throughout Africa and the Pacific Islands from the contact of white men with natives was infinitely detailed; yet more and more it tended to reduce itself to one broad issue. In this relation the coloured man is everywhere the white man's labourer; Dilke's object was to insure that he should not be his slave. Against actual slavery he was always a crusader, and for long years he contended against the recognition of it implied by the practice of restoring runaway slaves in Zanzibar. Under a Liberal Government, he carried his point at last. A letter written on August 17th, 1907, fitly sums up this matter:

"Dear Sir Charles Dilke,