Dilke (6 page)

For the remaining four years of Mill's life, Dilke was constantly in touch with him. When Mill was at Blackheath there were frequent meetings. When he was at Avignon there was regular correspondence, with Mill pouring out advice to Dilke on the widest possible range of subjects. Women's suffrage, the position of trades unions, land reform, colonial policy, and opposition to the Cowper-Temple approach to denominational teaching in schools were all issues on which Mill wrote to his disciple, and on which Dilke saw almost
completely eye to eye with his master. Even on foreign policy there was substantial agreement, Mill being little more attracted by a peace-at-any-price approach than was Dilke. “If Gladstone had been a great man,” he wrote about the Franco-Prussian conflict on September 30th, 1870, “this war would never have broken out; for he would have nobly 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 a beginning of the international police we are calling for.”
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Dilke, both in his speeches and in his private writings, always used Mill's name with a respect that was little short of reverence. Discussing the payment of members of Parliament at a public meeting, he expressed a preference for the plan of payment by the constituency put forward by “Mr. Mill, the great leader of political thinkers.” Considering his own attitude towards the trades unionist, George Odger,
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he settled the matter by noting that Odger was “a man of whom the highest opinion was entertained by Mr. Mill.” When Mill died, in May, 1873, it was a severe loss to Dilke. Throughout his life he retained his respect for Mill's memory, and was always eager to rush to the defence of the latter's reputation. He took a curious pride in the fact that 76, Sloane Street was the last house at which Mill dined out, and derived a less curious satisfaction from the completion in the last few weeks of the sitter's life of the portrait of Mill by G. F. Watts, which Dilke had commissioned and which at present hangs in the Westminster City Hall.

Some part of the notice which was attracted by
Greater Britain
may have been due to the fact that its publication coincided, within a week or so, with Dilke's election to the House of Commons. In November, 1867, while in the middle of his work on the book, he had been adopted as a Liberal candidate for the two-member parliamentary borough of Chelsea. This was a new constituency, created under the Reform Act of that year, with the enormous electorate, for
those days, of 30,000. Its size enabled Dilke to announce proudly, if a little rhetorically, at his opening meeting, that he “would willingly wait any time rather than enter the House of Commons a member for some small trumpery constituency.” The Chelsea division contained Dilke's family house in Sloane Street and the whole of the present metropolitan borough, but it contained a great deal else as well. It covered the prosperous residential districts of South Kensington and Notting Hill, as well as the more working-class areas of Fulham, Hammersmith and Kensal Green.

Despite his temporary ill-health and the competing claims of his work on
Greater Britain
, Dilke was a vigorous campaigner. He spoke all over his constituency, and he never skimped his speeches. He believed that the electorate should hear his views “not upon any one subject or upon any two subjects or any three, but as nearly as might be upon all.” The platform upon which he stood might be described as one of moderate radicalism. He was in favour of the ballot and of removing election petitions from the House of Commons to the Courts of Law. He wanted triennial parliaments and the payment of members. He believed that the onus of proof must be on those who wished to exclude anyone from the suffrage, but he also put forward the balancing view that he saw sufficient proof at that time for the temporary exclusion of certain classes. On Ireland, he advocated church disestablishment, land reform, and a wide measure of parliamentary reform. Then, when “we have done our duty . . . we may well call upon the Irish to do theirs.” He disassociated himself from the violence of the Fenian approach. Army reform, including the abolition of flogging, of the purchase of commissions, and of the office of an independent commander-in-chief, was also prominent in his programme.

Dilke later indicated that his true position at this time was well to the left of his platform. “I tried to be moderate, in order to please my father, and not to lose the general Liberal vote,” he wrote; “and my speeches were more timid than were my opinions.”
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Despite these efforts Sir Wentworth Dilke was disturbed, and wrote a letter of remonstration within a
month of the commencement of his son's candidature. The reply which he received was uncompromising.

“For my own part,” Charles Dilke's letter ran, “though I should immensely like to be in Parliament, still I should feel terribly hampered there if I went in as anything except a Radical. Now I have spoken against Fenianism in spite of my immense sympathy for it. Radicalism is too much a thing of nature with me to throw it off by any effort of mine. If you think it a waste of money for me to contest Chelsea, I will cheerfully throw the thing up and turn to any pursuit you please.”
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The offer to abandon his candidature was not perhaps to be taken too seriously (it is certainly difficult to imagine Charles Dilke cheerfully turning to any other career nominated by his parent), but it served its purpose. Little more complaint was heard from Wentworth Dilke, who paid the election expenses of his radical son with a good deal more cheerfulness than his son would have obeyed his instructions.

The dissolution came in the autumn of 1868, and polling in Chelsea was on November 18th. The other Liberal candidate was Sir Henry Hoare, who had already been in the House of Commons for a short time as member for Windsor, and whose views at that stage of his life were almost as radical as those of Dilke. There were two Conservatives in the field, C. F. Freake, a Kensington contractor, who had built the Cromwell Road, and W. H. Russell, who had achieved fame as the correspondent of
The Times
in the Crimea. The result was a decisive victory for the Liberals, and a personal triumph for Dilke, who polled nearly 200 votes more than the much older and politically more experienced Hoare. The figures were:

Dilke      . .   . .   7,374

Hoare     . .   . .   7,183

Russell    . .   . .   4,177

Freake    . .   . .   3,929

Dilke's moderation had apparently been more successful
in conciliating the general Liberal vote than in reassuring his father. Indeed it could be claimed that his own feigned moderation was more successful in winning votes than was his father's genuine moderation, for at the same election Wentworth Dilke lost his seat at Wallingford. Despite his son's opinions and the often strained relations between them, Wentworth Dilke was probably well enough satisfied with the exchange. He knew his own political limitations, and, as was shown by his work on the proofs of
Greater Britain
, he was eagerly ambitious for his son. Within three months of his election, in July, 1865, he had written to Charles Dilke: “We will talk about the H(ouse) of C(ommons). I fear I cannot make a hit there—you could, after a little maturity comes on you, and that will come whether you like it or not.”
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His attitude in 1868 was probably well summed up by a note which Lord Granville, who knew the family well, wrote to him immediately after the results were known. Granville wrote to Wentworth Dilke “to condole with you and to congratulate you. I suspect,” he added, “that the cause of the latter gives you more pleasure than the cause of the former gives you regret. How very well your son seems to have done!”
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At this election Mill, also, lost the seat at Westminster which he too had held since 1865.

Neither of these defeats did much to mar Charles Dilke's sense of triumph and opportunity—Mill, of course, he had not met at this stage. He was still only twenty-five. He had added a world tour to his Cambridge achievements. He had published a most successful book. He had been elected with gratifyingly large support for a constituency of note. His name was known; his presence was in demand; and his future seemed assured. With all this to contemplate he set off for a brief visit to Paris and Toulon, the latter the centre of an area which he now saw for the first time and with which he was later to be closely associated. By December 10th he was back in London for the meeting of Parliament and the swearing-in of members.

The General Election of 1868 not only brought Charles Dilke into the House of Commons; it also produced the only clear-cut party majority since 1841 and made Gladstone Prime Minister for the first time. The Liberals had 112 seats more than their opponents, and a still greater preponderance in the country. They polled more than one and a half million votes, the Conservatives less than a million. Gladstone's personal triumph was less marked than that of his party. He was defeated in South-west Lancashire, his seat in the previous Parliament, but he had also been nominated for Greenwich, where he was elected, in Dilke's words, “as junior colleague to a gin distiller.” Undeterred by these setbacks, he received the Queen's intimation that he was to form a Government with the statement, “My mission is to pacify Ireland,” and returned briefly to the tree-felling upon which he had been engaged when interrupted. Of the Cabinet which he subsequently formed, Lord Morley tells us, he always spoke as “one of the best instruments for government that ever were constructed.”
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Lord Clarendon, against the opposition of the Queen, was Foreign Secretary, Robert Lowe Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Granville Colonial Secretary, and the Duke of Argyll Indian Secretary. John Bright entered the Cabinet for the first time as President of the Board of Trade, and W. E. Forster, who did not come into the Cabinet itself until two years later, was Vice-President of the Council, in charge of education.

This Government commanded less admiration from Dilke than from its chief. “The Cabinet is somewhat behind the
party, which is bad,” the former wrote on December 10th, adding laconically, “Too many peers.”
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Even the party, however, was not greatly to Dilke's liking. He noted with approval that it had shed most of its “Adullamites,” but thought it equally bereft of radicals. At first, indeed, either through arrogance or pessimism, he believed himself to be the only member to whom this label could be applied. It soon became clear that he was wrong in this view, and he worked during the parliament in shifting alliance and varying degrees of closeness with Harcourt, Fawcett, G. O. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, as well as with a group of nonconformist provincial radicals which included Peter Rylands from Warrington, Llewellyn Dillwyn from Swansea, Henry Richard from Merthyr Tydfil, George Anderson from Glasgow, George Dixon from Birmingham and Peter Taylor from Leicester. The members of this group saw eye to eye with Dilke on most home policy questions, but in foreign affairs they were “peace-at-any-price” men of the Bright school, and as such had little in common with him. Furthermore, they were socially and personally much less close to Dilke than were the Cambridge radicals, Harcourt, Trevelyan and Fitzmaurice, and, a little more doubtfully, Fawcett.

Trevelyan, who was at this time Civil Lord of the Admiralty, recorded long afterwards his recollections of his early friendship with Dilke.

“I was a very young Minister,” he wrote in 1911, “worked hard all day by Mr. Childers, a very strict but very friendly taskmaster, and never, according to the Treasury Bench discipline of those heroic times, allowed to be absent from the House for a single moment. I used to come to the House unlunched and desperately hungry; and I got my dinner at four o'clock in an empty dining-room. Afternoon after afternoon, Charles Dilke used to come and sit with me; and a greater delight than his company, young to the young, I can hardly describe. But it does not need description . . . for never did anyone's talk alter less as time went on.”
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Harcourt, who was then new to the House of Commons and not in the Government, although possessing a considerable outside reputation, was Dilke's closest associate at the time. Brilliant in phrase, tempestuous in character, patrician in manner,
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and radical in view, his make-up was nicely calculated to appeal strongly to the young member for Chelsea.

Dilke, in his early days in the House, had little social contact either with the Tories or with the Whigs on his own side. This was despite the view, which he expressed half seriously a few years later, that “in politics one always personally prefers one's opponents to one's friends.”
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But he was fascinated by Disraeli (who attracted him far more than did Gladstone), and he had the highest respect for Gathorne Hardy, whom he considered the most genuinely eloquent Englishman to whom he ever listened, and whose services he thought were not fully used by the Conservative party.

From his first days in the House, Dilke was a most regular attender in the Chamber; and this regularity quickly became a habit which never left him throughout his parliamentary career. In an age when members were far more willing to listen to the speeches of others than is the case to-day, he was noted for his almost unfailing attention to all aspects of the business of the House. He sat below the gangway, on the front bench on the Government side, and he soon acquired a proprietary right to the corner seat—a position separated from the official Government front bench above the gangway by the shortest physical distance but by a rather wider political gap. From this seat he first addressed the House on March 9th, 1869. The subject he chose was a typically complicated one. Harcourt had moved to appoint a Select Committee to enquire into the system of registration of electors in parliamentary boroughs, and Dilke spoke in support of this motion, drawing in great detail on his French and Australian observations. As a maiden speech it was a ponderous effort, and could not possibly have been considered an oratorical triumph.
But it showed the House that he had a capacity for mastering a subject, and he soon attained more fame through the heterodoxy of his opinions than even the most flamboyant rhetoric would have brought him.