the draft law….
‘”Thanks for your news of Bismarck’s map. Their true boundary is the 20th degree of longitude, and it will take them all their time to retain even that, as the Damaras are entirely opposed to them, and the German company which nominally holds that territory will soon have to liquidate for lack of funds. It is one thing to paint a map, and it is quite another to really occupy and govern a new territory. I am still waiting for the news of the signature of the charter, which I hope will not be much longer delayed. I think Kruger will find his hands quite full enough without interfering with me. He is still trying to get them to give him Swaziland in return for non-interference in Matabeleland. The Matabele King (Lobengula) still continues to slaughter his subjects, and makes the minds of our representatives at times very uncomfortable. It is undoubtedly a difficult problem to solve; but the plain fact remains that a savage chief with about 8,000 warriors is not going to keep out the huge wave of white men now moving north, and so I feel it will come all right.
‘”Yours,
‘”C. J. Rhodes.”
‘In March, 1890, I received a letter from Rhodes from the Kimberley Club, in which, after giving some facts with regard to the state of South Africa, he went on: “I see that Home Rule is gaining ground. [Footnote: Rhodes had given Mr. Parnell a subscription of L10,000.] It really means the American Constitution. It is rather a big change, and the doubt is whether the conservative nature of the English people will face it when they understand what Home Rule means. Schnadhorst is here, but is still suffering very acutely from rheumatism.”‘
The reference to ‘Bismarck’s map’ in the second of these communications shows that Sir Charles had reported to Rhodes some of the observations made by the Chancellor in the course of the visit of which an account here follows.
‘In September, 1889, having settled to take my son to Germany to a gymnasium, and having told Herbert Bismarck my intention when he was in London, I was asked by him in his father’s name to stay at Friedrichsruh with the Prince. I started for Germany with my son at the same moment at which my wife started for the Trades Congress at Dundee.’
He wrote to M. Joseph Reinach in August, 1889: ‘I’m going to Friedrichsruh the week after next to stay with Prince Bismarck, who seems very anxious to see me–about colonial matters, I think. I will tell you what he says, for your private information, if he talks of anything else, which is not, however, likely, as he knows my views about that Alsace question which lies at the root of all others. But I had sooner my going there was not mentioned in advance, and I shall not be there until September 7th-9th.’
‘Herbert Bismarck wrote: “I hope you will accept my father’s invitation, because he is anxious to make your personal acquaintance. I am greatly disappointed that I shall be deprived of the pleasure of introducing you myself to my father, owing to my absence, but, then, I am sure that you will find yourself at your ease in Friedrichsruh, whether I am there or not. Hoping to see you before long in England, believe me,
‘”Very truly yours,
‘”H. Bismarck.”
‘The son was still called Count von Bismarck by himself, and popularly Herbert Bismarck, but shortly afterwards his father gave him the family castle of Schoenhausen, and from that time forward he used on his cards the name of Graf Bismarck-Schoenhausen. When I got to Ratzeburg, where I left my son, I found a telegram from Friedrichsruh: “Prince Bismarck looks forward to your visit to-morrow with great pleasure”; and then it went on to tell me about trains.
‘I was met at the station by Prince Bismarck’s official secretary–Rottenburg of the Foreign Office–with an open carriage, although the house was formerly the railway hotel (Frascati) and adjoins the station. I wrote to my wife on Saturday, September 7th: “The great man has been very sweet to me, though he is in pain from his sinews. We had an hour’s walk before lunch together. Then Hatzfeldt, the Ambassador in London, came, and all the afternoon we have been driving, and went to the harvest-home, where the Bismarck grandchildren danced with the peasants on the grass. The daughter, and mother of these children, does the honours, and is the only lady; and at dinner we shall be the Prince, Hatzfeldt, self, Countess von Rantzau, Count von Rantzau, Rottenburg the secretary, a tutor and another secretary, the two last ‘dumb persons.’ The forest is a Pyrford of 25,000 acres, but the house is in the situation of a Dockett, and must be damp in winter till the great January frost sets in, when the Baltic is hard frozen.”‘
Sir Charles notes upon this: ‘Hatzfeldt was the Chancellor’s right-hand man–of action. But Bismarck did not consult him: he said, “Do,” and Hatzfeldt did.’
The letter continues:
‘”When Bismarck’s Reichshund died, a successor was appointed, but the Emperor, who had heard of the death and not of the appointment to fill the vacancy, gave another, and the Prince says: ‘Courtier as I am, I sent away my dog to my head-forester’s and kept the gift one, but as I do not like him I leave him at Berlin.’ Here the favourite reigns, and her name is Rebekkah, and she answers very prettily to the name of Bex. The old gentleman is dear in his polite ways…. The daughter is equally pleasant, and the son-in-law as well. We were loudly cheered at the harvest festival, of course…. You can write to our friend J. R. [Reinach] of the R.F. [_Republique Francaise_] that I found the Chancellor very determined on peace as long as he lives, which he fears will not be long, and afraid of Prussian action after his death.”
‘In another letter the next day, Sunday, September 8th 1889, I wrote: “I expected the extreme simplicity of life. The coachman alone wears livery, and that only a plain blue with ordinary black trousers and ordinary black hat–no cockades and no stripes. There are only two indoor men-servants: a groom of the chambers, and one other not in livery–the one shown in the photograph of Bismarck receiving the Emperor, but there, for this occasion only, dressed in a state livery. [Footnote: Photographs which Bismarck gave Sir Charles, showing the Chancellor with his hound receiving the young Kaiser, and Bismarck alone with his dog, always hung on the wall at Dockett.] The family all drink beer at lunch, and offer the thinnest of thin Mosel. Bismarck has never put on a swallow-tail coat but once, which he says was in 1835, and which is of peculiar shape. A tall hat he does not possess, and he proscribes tall hats and evening dress among his guests. His view is that a Court and an army should be in uniform, but that when people are not on duty at Court or in war, or preparation for war, they should wear a comfortable dress, and each man that form of dress that he finds most agreeable to himself, provided that it be not that which he calls evening dress and tall hats–a sort of ‘sham uniform.’ Countess von Rantzau, however, dresses in a high, short evening gown like other people. The Prince eats nothing at all except young partridges and salt-herring, and the result is that the cookery is feeble, though for game-eaters there is no hardship. The table groans with red-deer venison, ham, grouse, woodcock, and the inevitable partridges– roast, boiled, with white sauce, cold, pickled in vinegar. A French cook would hang himself. There is no sweet at dinner except fruit, stewed German fashion with the game. Trout, which the family themselves replace by raw salt-herring, and game, form the whole dinner. Of wines and beer they drink at dinner a most extraordinary mixture, but as the wine is all the gift of Emperors and merchant princes it is good. The cellar card was handed to the Prince with the fish, and, after consultation with me, and with Hatzfeldt, we started on sweet champagne, not suggested by me, followed by Bordeaux, followed by still Mosel, followed by Johannesberg (which I did suggest), followed by black beer, followed by corn brandy. When I reached the Johannesberg I stopped, and went on with that only, so that I got a second bottle drawn for dessert. When the Chancellor got to his row of great pipes, standing against the wall ready stuffed for him, we went back to black beer. The railway-station is in the garden, and the expresses shake the house.”
‘Other points which struck me in the manners and customs of Friedrichsruh were that the Chancellor invariably took a barrel of beer out driving, and stopped halfway in the afternoon and insisted on his guests consuming it out of a two-handled mug which appeared from under the coachman’s seat. I had some talk with him about the wisdom of his going unprotected for great distances through the woods, and he answered, “But I am not unprotected,” and showed me a pistol which he carried, but, of course, a man with a blunderbuss behind a tree might easily have killed him. He never takes a servant on the box by the side of the coachman, and generally drives entirely alone. He rides alone without a groom, and walks alone with only his dog, or rather the forester’s dog, the daughter of the Reichshund, who walks six or seven miles every morning to go out with him, and six or seven miles every night to come to dinner.
‘The Prince was evidently discontented with the Emperor, but wholly unable to believe that he himself could be done without. He told me that he must work each day and could never take a holiday, but that even a few minutes’ work was sufficient, as all that was necessary was that he should keep an eye on what was going on. All was now so well arranged that the only thing which gave him trouble was the internal condition of Alsace, which as a Reichsland had him alone as a Minister. In the evening he chatted much about the past; told me of his visit to London in 1842, of how a cabman tried to cheat him, and how at last he held out all his money in his hand and said to the man, “Pay yourself”; how then the man took less than that which he had refused, his right fare, and then with every sign of scorn ejaculated, “What I say is, God damn all Frenchmen!” Bismarck speaks admirable English, with hardly any trace of accent, but spoken very slowly. French he speaks more rapidly but less well; and of Russian he has a fair knowledge. He told me how (also in 1842) he had visited Barclay and Perkins’s, and had been offered an enormous tankard of their strongest ale. “Thinking of my country, I drank it slowly to the last drop, and then left them, courteously I hope; I got as far as London Bridge, and there I sat down in a recess, and for hours the bridge went round.” He told me how he had striven to keep the peace through the time of Napoleon III., but finding it useless had prepared for war; and he made no secret of the fact that he had brought the war about. He told me himself, in so many words, that at the last moment he had made war by cutting down a telegram from the King of Prussia, as I have said above; [Footnote: See Chapter XL (Vol. I., p. 157).] “the alteration of the telegram from one of two hundred words to one of twenty words” had “made it into a trumpet blast”–as Moltke and Von Roon, who were with him at dinner when it came, had said–“a trumpet blast which” had “roused all Germany.” As he mellowed with his pipes he told me that, though he was a high Tory, he had come to see the ills of absolutism, which, to work, required the King to be an angel. “Now,” he said, “Kings, even when good, have women round them, who, even if Queens, govern them to their personal ends.” It was very plain that he was on bad terms with the Emperor, and equally clear that he did not believe that the Emperor would dare dismiss him.’
A commentary on the last sentence follows at no long interval, when _Problems of Greater Britain_ appeared and ‘Herbert Bismarck, in thanking me for a copy of my book, said: “My father … sends you his kindest regards. He is just going to disentangle himself from the Prussian administration altogether, and will resign the post as Prime Minister, so that he will only remain Chancellor of the Empire.” This was on February 10th, 1890, and before long Bismarck had been still further “disentangled,” not by his own act,’ but by a blow almost as sudden and dramatic as that which, in 1661, had struck down the owner of Vaux. [Footnote: See the _Memoires de Fouquet_, by A. Cheruel, vol.ii., chap, xxxviii.]
‘In a second letter that young Bismarck wrote, he thanked me for sending him the famous sketch from _Punch_ (Tenniel’s cartoon) of the captain of the ship sending away the pilot. He wrote:
‘”My Dear Dilke,
‘”I thank you very much for your kind note, which warmed my heart, and for the sketch you have cut out of _Punch_. It is indeed a fine one, and my father, to whom I showed it yesterday when your letter reached me, was pleased with its acuteness, as well as with the kind messages you sent him and which he requites. He has left last night for good, and I follow to-night to Friedrichsruh. It was a rather melancholy historical event, when my father stepped out of the house in which he has lived for the benefit of my country for nearly twenty-eight years. When I wrote you last, my father thought only of leaving the offices he held in Prussia, but things went on so rapidly that he did not see his way to remain as Chancellor in Berlin after the Emperor had let him know that His Majesty wished him to resign. I had no choice what course to take after he had been dismissed. My health is so much shaken that I am not able to take upon my shoulders alone the tremendous amount of responsibility for the foreign affairs of Germany which hitherto fell upon my father. When we drove to the station yesterday, our carriage was almost upset by the enthusiastic crowd of many thousand people who thronged the streets and cheered him on his passage in a deafening way; but it was satisfactory for my father to see that there are people left who regret his departure. I shall come back to Berlin after April 1st to clear my house and to pack my things, and then I shall stay with my father till the end of April. In May I hope to come to England, and I look forward to the pleasure of seeing you then.
‘”Believe me,
‘”Ever yours sincerely,
‘”H. Bismarck.”
‘He dined with me on May 15th, 1890, when Arnold Morley, Borthwick, Jeune, Fitzmaurice, Harry Lawson, and others, came to meet him; and from this time forward he came frequently to England.’
Sir Charles, while meeting the younger man thus often, never again had sight or speech of the old Chancellor. ‘In Christmas week [1892] I had a general invitation from Prince Bismarck to stay with him again at Friedrichsruh. But the chance never came.’ Immediately on his return from Germany Sir Charles wrote to his friend Reinach:
‘Pyrford by Maybury,
‘Near Woking,
‘_September_ l3_th_, 1889.
‘My Dear Reinach,
‘Bismarck c’est la paix. As long as he lives, which he thinks will not be long, he expects no movement. He agrees with me that the first movement will come from Russia. He expects the Republic to last in France. Bleichroeder tells him that Ferry is the one man of energy and power.
‘Yours,
‘Chs. W. D.’
Three weeks later, in answer to a question by M. Reinach, this is added:
‘Health as good as he says. But he does _not_ say that. He says he suffers very much. The fact is that he looks very much older than he is, and his hands look like ninety instead of seventy-four.’
What Bismarck thought of his guest may be gathered from a saying quoted in public by Dr. Stephen Bauer. Baron Rottenburg, Bismarck’s first secretary, had told him that, after Sir Charles’s visit to Friedrichsruh, the Chancellor spoke of him as ‘the most interesting of living English statesmen.’ [Footnote: At the banquet given to Sir Charles Dilke in April, 1910.]
In spite of Bismarck’s efforts to bring about another meeting, this visit was the only occasion on which the two men met. It was at a time when the great maker of United Germany was nearing his fall. He was becoming the bitter adversary of the Kaiser and of his policy, a policy which he foresaw might imperil ‘the strength and glory of the German Empire.’ In the often-quoted words of his instructions to diplomatic representatives abroad–‘Do all in your power to keep up good relationship with the English. You need not even use a secret cipher in cabling. We have nothing to conceal from the English, for it would be the greatest possible folly to antagonize England’–is to be found one main point of Bismarck’s diplomacy; and feeling thus, he welcomed a conference with the English statesman of that generation whom he had looked upon as certain to be a force in the approaching years. When at last the meeting took place, Dilke had been overtaken by circumstances which altered his political position in England. But neither Bismarck nor any other statesman on the Continent anticipated that they could possibly have the result of excluding permanently from office one of the very few English statesmen whose names carried weight with foreign Powers on military and international politics.
CHAPTER LI
PERSONAL LIFE–IN OPPOSITION
1895 TO 1904
Few members of the House of Commons can have been sorry to see the last of the Parliament which ended in June, 1895; and Sir Charles had nothing to regret in its disappearance. In respect of foreign affairs, he saw little to choose between the Liberal and Tory Ministers except that, of the two, Lord Salisbury was ‘the less wildly Jingo.’ On questions of Imperial Defence many of his old friends in the Liberal Government were arrayed against him; and with matters standing as they stood between the two Houses, there was no hope of any important Labour legislation. Lord Salisbury had again become Prime Minister, and under the new Conservative Administration everything went more easily. Sir Charles testified in one of his speeches that Mr. Balfour’s leadership, ‘by his unfailing courtesy to all members, made the House of Commons a pleasant place’; and Mr. Balfour’s leadership was well assured of several years’ continuance.
A great Parliamentarian, Sir Charles nevertheless held no brief for Parliament. As a practical statesman, he realized the advantages in a strong hand of such a machine as Bismarck controlled; while his democratic instincts made him favour the Swiss methods, with direct intervention of the people through the Referendum.
‘I trained a whole generation of professional politicians to respect the House of Commons,’ he said, ‘but I was never favourable to the Parliamentary, and I was even hostile to the Party, system.’
Nevertheless, since England was wedded to its traditional system, to work this efficiently was the first duty of an English politician. A note from Sir Reginald Palgrave in 1893 acknowledges gratefully some criticisms of the tenth edition of the classical work which deals with this subject. No one was ever better qualified than Sir Charles to say what could or could not be done by the rules of order, and he would certainly have inculcated upon every politician the necessity of this knowledge as a practical equipment.
‘What Dilke did,’ writes Mr. McKenna, ‘was to impress upon me the importance of a thorough understanding of the procedure and business of the House of Commons, a branch of knowledge in which he was an accomplished master.’
Sir Charles’s whole scheme of existence was arranged with reference to the work of Parliament. Of it he wrote on December 15th, 1905, in reply to Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who had dwelt on the interest of county government:
‘The development of character in politics and the human side of the House of Commons have an extraordinary dramatic interest for me, and an attraction so strong that Harcourt told me that, knowing it, he did not see how I could live out of the House of Commons. I managed to do so, but only by shutting it for a time absolutely out of my mind, as though it did not exist. Having the happiness of being able to interest myself in everything, I suppose I am born to be generally happy. You have known me so long and so closely that few men are more aware of the kind of suffering I have gone through, but the happiness of interest in life has rarely been wanting for long in me, and if it were, I should go out–not of Parliament–but of life.’ [Footnote: Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice was Chairman of the Wiltshire County Council. He had re-entered Parliament as M.P. for North Wilts in 1898.]
Sir Charles never left London while the House was sitting, except for the annual gathering of the Forest miners at the Speech House. On all other working days of the session he was to be found in the House of Commons. He held that the House offered the extremest form of interest or of boredom, according as a man did or did not follow closely all that was going on. For this reason, the smoking-room, where most Parliamentary idling is transacted, saw little of him; cigars, of which he was a great consumer, were for periods of leisure, and he was at the House for business. He might be seen in the passages, going by with coat-tails streaming behind him, most often in the members’ lobby on his way to the first corridor, where was his locker–marvellously stuffed with papers, yet kept in a methodical order that made it a general centre of reference for himself and his colleagues, who consulted him on all subjects; or sometimes in the library, with multifarious correspondence and documents outspread, snipping away with a pair of scissors, after his habit, all in them that was not vitally important. [Footnote: Mr. Hudson tells how in February, 1911, after Sir Charles’s death, he went down to clear his locker in the House of Commons, and found it empty. Mr. Hudson surmised that, foreseeing his need for it was over, Sir Charles had himself prepared it for his successor in its use.] Again, since one form of relaxation which he permitted himself was his afternoon cup–or cups, for they were many–of tea, the tea-room also offered a chance to those who sought him. But whoever wanted Sir Charles went first into the Chamber itself, and in five cases out of six would find him there alert in his corner seat below the gangway, primed and armed with documented information, and ready at any minute to interpose. Every day he went through the whole bewildering mass of papers from which members are presumed to instruct themselves concerning the business of the sittings and to keep a check upon the general proceedings of Government. In his case the presumption was realized. Probably no private member ever equalled him in demands for ‘papers to be laid,’ and certainly none was ever better able to justify his requests for additional information. If these requests were refused, it was never because he wanted what was superfluous, but that which, in his hands, might become inconveniently serviceable.
One habit of his may be traced to his hatred of wasting time. The instant a division was announced he was on his feet, hurrying so as to avoid long minutes of waiting in a crush; and it came to be regarded as part of the natural order that Sir Charles should be first through the lobby.
With all this industry, the record of divisions so carefully chronicled by the hard-working M.P. was not of moment to him. If the business did not seem to him important, he had no objection to absent himself and dine at home. He was weatherwise in the assembly, and knew the conditions which might lead to unforeseen disturbance.
In questions raised by alteration of rules or standing orders, he was never averse from innovation, and even generally an advocate of change. But while the rules were there he insisted rigorously on their observance, in so far as they affected the larger interests of division or debate. Also he fulfilled punctiliously the prescribed courtesies, making it a usage to be down early and to secure his place, although no one ever thought of appropriating it. He rigidly observed the rule, transgressed by others, which prescribes the wearing of a tall hat by members in the House. The hat which was thus endeared to him by traditional usage is therefore inseparable from Parliamentary memory of him. He was generally to be seen handling a sheaf of papers more than Ministerial in dimensions; and he made his hat the receptacle for them; often it would be crammed to bursting before the speech had concluded. Yet there remained with him always the trace of his younger days of grave dandyism; he never abandoned the Parliamentary frock-coat, and sketches of him in the illustrated papers convey the austere correctness of its folds; and the hat from which so much service was exacted appeared each day unsurpassable in gloss.
The intricate mass of historical associations delighted his imagination at Westminster. He took pleasure in all the quaint survivals, from the long-transmitted ceremonial of the Speaker’s entrance, the formal knockings of Black Rod, the cry of ‘Who goes home?’ down to the still continued search before each session for some possible Guy Fawkes. Keenly alive to the past and to the present, he saw with special pleasure any happy grafting of a new usage on to that old stock of memories. Speaking in his constituency after the lying in state of King Edward, which he had attended (standing next to the Prime Minister as the senior Privy Councillor present), he welcomed the precedent which gave a new association to Westminster Hall–that ‘epitome of English history.’ He recalled to his hearers the outstanding incidents and persons whose record had then come into his mind. His habit of tracing out links with the past made him at Westminster the best and most animated of guides.
So it was in Provence, in the Forest of Dean, on the road down from London to Surrey; so it was always in the neighbourhood of his Chelsea home.
There could be no such companion for a ramble through its streets. His memory, astounding in its recollections of his own time, held stories of older records; in his eager, vivid talk the past lived again. As we passed along Cheyne Walk, George Eliot held court in her house once more, while a few doors off Rossetti’s servant pushed aside the little grating to inspect his visitors before admission. Carlyle dwelt again in the house in Cheyne Row, with Whistler for his neighbour. Sir Charles would tell how earlier the Kingsley brothers lived with their father in the old rectory, and one at least of their novels was founded afterwards on the traditions of the place. Then, as layer after layer of history was lifted, Smollett wrote his novels or walked the Chelsea streets with John Wilkes; Sir Richard Steele and ‘his dear Prue’ reinhabited their house, and Dr. Johnson worked at the furnaces in the cellars where Chelsea china was made. [Footnote: ‘Sir Charles Dilke, in hunting about for materials for his lecture on “Old Chelsea” to-morrow, has made some very interesting discoveries. He has found that part of the building once occupied by the famous Chelsea china works, which was thought to have gone for ever, exists as part of a public-house with a modern frontage looking out on the Embankment. The cellars are in an admirable state of preservation. Another interesting point has been the exploration of the old Moravian cemetery, which is now completely enclosed by houses, the ironwork of the gate worn, and, as it were, eaten out by age. Here lie the bones of Count von Zinzendorf, one of the founders of the Moravian sect, and many other famous folk. This, again, has led to some interesting discoveries about Sir Thomas More, all of which will find a place in Wednesday’s lecture’ (Extract from _Leicester Daily Post_, January 11th, 1888, on lecture to be delivered in Town Hall, Chelsea).]
He would give, as a curious illustration of the way in which many years may be covered by a few generations, the fact that he himself had known intimately the daughter of Woodfall, printer of the _Letters of Junius_; while Woodfall’s acquaintance included Smollett as a resident, and Pope as a visitor to Chelsea. He would talk long of Sir Thomas More, [Footnote: He writes: ‘On December 18th, 1886, Cardinal Manning wrote to me: “On Saturday last Sir Thomas More was declared both martyr and saint, to my great joy. We have bought a house and garden, 28, Beaufort Street, which is said to be a piece of Sir Thomas More’s garden. The tradition seems probable. If you can give me any light about it, I shall be very thankful.”‘ Later (January, 1888) Sir Charles writes: ‘In the course of this same month I lectured on Old Chelsea, and made a considerable attempt to clear up some points in the life of Sir Thomas More, for whom I have a great admiration. The result was that Cardinal Manning asked me to visit Father Vaughan at the house which stands on the site of Old Beaufort House, which the Roman Catholics have purchased as a house of expiation for the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More.’] ‘the first of Chelsea worthies,’ whose memory is loved and commemorated by every true inhabitant, and to whose voluntary poorhouse for the parish he pointed, as the direct progenitor of the Chelsea Benevolent Society and the Board of Guardians. But one episode in More’s career specially fascinated him: it was when two great lives touched, and More, journeying to Calais, met that famous lady, Margaret of Austria, the first Governess of the Netherlands, and negotiated the treaty between the Emperor, England, and France, 1527. Great as was his respect for Sir Hans Sloane, after whom the street in which he lived was named, and who gave to Chelsea its beautiful Physic Garden, he never forgave him the destruction of More’s house or the removal of its water gateway.
He would describe the tidal shore, as it lies in the picture which he bequeathed to the Chelsea Free Library, and which hangs on its staircase, when below the old church the bank sloped to the water’s edge; or he would pass back to the earlier time when the boats of the nobles lay there in such numbers that Charles II. described the river as ‘Hyde Park upon the Thames.’ Once more Bess of Hardwick lived at Shrewsbury House, Princess Elizabeth sheltered under the Queen’s Elm; at the old Swan in Swan Walk, Doggett founded the coat and badge to be rowed for by the watermen’s apprentices ‘when the tide shall be full.’ These things may be found in many a guide-book and in the lectures which he delivered more than once in Chelsea, but told as he told them they will never be told again.
This habit of associating the prosaic business of his daily work in Parliament with picturesque traditions, and of peopling the dingy streets of London with great figures of the past, gave colour and character to his town life. He entertained still–at 76, Sloane Street, or at the House of Commons.
For exercise he relied on fencing, rowing, and his morning ride. Busy men, he held, needed what ‘good exercise as contrasted with mere chamber gymnastics’ could give them: ‘a second life, a life in another world– one which takes them entirely out of themselves, and causes them to cease to trouble others or to be troubled by the vexations of working life.’ [Footnote: _Athletics for Politicians_, reprinted from _North American Review_.]
He was nowhere more characteristically English than through his faith in this regimen, and in the pages of the _North American Review_ he addressed to American public men in 1900 an advocacy of ‘Athletics for Politicians.’ This exists as a pamphlet, and some of the friends who received it were surprised to find themselves cited in confirmation of the theory that nearly all English politicians, ‘having been athletes as boys, have found it wise as well as pleasant to keep to some sport in later life.’ But Mr. Chamberlain, ‘the most distinguished debater in the Government of the United Kingdom, who has an excellent seat on a horse, but is never now seen on one, and who is no mean hand at lawn tennis, which he scarcely ever plays,’ had to be cited as a heretic who thought himself ‘better without such gymnastics.’
Sculling on sliding-seats [Footnote: In 1873 ‘sliding-seats’ had just taken the place of fixed ones, and Sir Charles, having gone as usual to see the Boat Race, criticized the crews, in a notice which he wrote, as not having yet learnt to make the best possible use of the slide.] and rapier fencing were the exercises which Sir Charles recommended to men no longer young. He continued his fencing in London and Paris. In Paris he frequented chiefly the school of Leconte in the Rue Saint Lazare, and always kept an outfit there. Teachers of this school remember with wonder Sir Charles’s habit of announcing, at the termination of each stay in Paris, the precise day and hour, perhaps many months ahead, at which he would appear–and at which, like Monte Cristo, he never failed to be exactly punctual–to the joy and amusement of the expectant school.
It was at his riverside home that he found the exercise which beyond all others pleased him best.
‘1890 I took a good deal of holiday in the summer and early autumn, doing much rowing with McKenna and others in a racing pair; we challenged any pair of our united ages.’
‘On my fifty-third birthday,’ he notes, ‘I began to learn sculling. My rowing, to judge by the “clock,” still improves. Fencing, stationary or declining.’
He timed himself regularly in his daily burst up and down the reach with some first-rate oarsman, very often ‘Bill’ East, now the King’s Waterman, whose photograph stood with one or two others on the mantelpiece of his study in Sloane Street. In the same way he kept a daily record of his weight, which up to 1904 ranged between fourteen stone and thirteen.
Dockett was essentially a boating-place, a place for sun and air, where life was lived in the open or in the wide verandah hailed by Cecil Rhodes and others as the only ‘stoep’ in England. His son, who was travelling abroad much at this time, shared Sir Charles Dilke’s love for Dockett, and was frequently there in the intervals of his journeyings. Other than boating friends came to lunch or to dine and sleep, for the mere pleasure of talk. Such were the Arnold-Forsters, the H. J. Tennants, Lady Abinger (the daughter of his old friend Sir William White) and her husband: and there came also members of Parliament–Mr. Lloyd George, or in a later day Mr. Masterman; and the knights errant of politics, Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. Schreiner. Many nationalities were represented–often, indeed, through official personages such as M. Cambon, the French Ambassador, or some member of the French Embassy. Baron Hayashi and his wife came with many other Japanese friends, and the various representatives of the Balkan States met in pleasant converse. It was one of these who afterwards wrote: ‘I never pass the house in Sloane Street without raising my hat to the memory of its former inmates.’ That close friend M. Gennadius came also, and his predecessors in the Greek Legation, M. Metaxas, M. Athos Romanes, and half a score of other diplomatists, including Tigrane Pasha, and even Ras Makonnen, who was brought to Dockett by the British representative in Abyssinia, Sir John Harrington, a friend and correspondent of Dilke. Thither also for leisure, not for athletics, came Cecil Rhodes, described in _Problems of Greater Britain_ as a ‘modest, strong man’; there came Prince Roland Bonaparte, Coquelin, and Jules Claretie, with a host of others, politicians, wits, and artists, English and foreign. M. Claretie thus, after Sir Charles’s death, chronicled one visit:
‘Nous avons canote, mon fils et moi, sur la Tamise avec Sir Charles, un de ces “Sundays” de liberte. Quand il avait bien rame, il rentrait au logis, et s’etendant en un petit kiosque au seuil duquel il placait des sandales, l’homme d’etat, ami du sport, accrochait a la porte un ecriteau ou se lisait ces mots: “Priere de faire silence. Je dors.” Helas! Il dort a tout jamais maintenant le cher Sir Charles. Ce fut une energie, un cerveau, un coeur, une force.’ [Footnote: _Le Temps_, February, 1911.]
Then there were men illustrious in another sphere, the famous oars of their generation. Mr. S. D. Muttlebury, most illustrious of them all, has compiled a list of Cambridge ‘blues,’ young and old, who rowed with Sir Charles at his riverside home. These were–
_School_ _College_
Bell, A. S. .. .. Eton .. .. Trinity Hall. Bristowe, C. J. .. Repton .. .. ” Escombe, F. J. .. Clifton .. .. ” Fernie, W. J. .. Malvern .. .. ” Howell, B. H. .. — “
McKenna, R. .. King’s College ” London
Maugham, F. H. .. Dover College .. ” Muttlebury, S. D. .. Eton .. .. Trinity College. Rowlatt, J. F. .. Fettes .. .. Trinity Hall. Steavenson, D. F. .. — ” Wauchope, D. A. .. Repton .. .. ” Wood, W. W. .. Eton .. .. University College, Oxford.
In the list here given, Judge Steavenson was Sir Charles’s contemporary. Judge Wood, [Footnote: He was the son of Dilke’s friend and constituent, the Rector of Newent.] his neighbour at Chertsey, known among Etonians as ‘Sheep’ Wood, was a University oar of the sixties, and rowed for Eton at Henley against the Trinity Hall crew which included Steavenson and Dilke. But most of the others were young. Mr. Charles Boyd [Footnote: Mr. Charles Boyd, C.M.G., sometime political secretary to Cecil Rhodes.] sketched the life in an article written just after Sir Charles’s death:
‘To know Dilke as he was you had to be with him at Dockett Eddy, on the river. Dilke’s ability is praised everywhere, but almost, one thinks, his manly, ungushing kindness exceeded it. He could never do enough for people, or too stealthily, as it were. He had a special kindness for young men, for Trinity Hall men perhaps by preference; the black and white blazer of his old college carried a certain prescriptive right to share in every belonging of the most famous of old Hall men. But many, oars or others, at different times in the past fifteen to twenty years, as sons of the house, spent between Shepperton and Chertsey Locks, or on the tennis lawns among Sir Charles’s famous willows, or lying on deck-chairs on the long, deep verandah, the happiest and healthiest of week-ends or more extended summer holidays. There are few pleasanter reaches of our river, and none quieter, than this, for the rush and the intolerable crowds are above stream or below stream, but not here. And there is no such holiday house for young men as Dockett, hidden in its willow walks and islanded by the Thames in front and by the expanse of Chertsey Mead behind.
‘Less a country-house, indeed, than a camp of exercise. You did as you pleased, but under Sir Charles’s guidance you were pleased to be strenuous. He called everybody to bathe at 7 a.m., and where was ever better fresh-water bathing-place than the floating raft below the boat-house at Dockett? Etiquette required you to dive in and go straight across to the other bank, touch, and return; when, like as not, Sir Charles, in shorts and sweater, might be seen very precisely preparing tea on the landing-stage for the deserving valiant. His little kindnesses had an added and affecting quality from his reserve and sternness. A rare figure of an athlete he was, and a rare athlete’s day his was in that retreat. For hours before he called and turned out the morning guard he had been up busy gardening, or reading, or writing. At a quarter to nine he breakfasted. Very shortly after breakfast an ex-champion sculler the admirable Bill East, would arrive from Richmond, and he and Sir Charles would row in a racing skiff a measured mile or more of the river. One summer at least he changed from rowing kit to boots and breeches after his rowing, and rode till luncheon. At four o’clock there would be a second bout with East, and thereafter, having changed from his rowing kit into flannels and his Hall cap, he would take Lady Dilke in her dinghy, which nobody else has ever used or will use.
‘After these exercises came dinner, and after dinner talk; and what talk! How his intellectual weight and equipment affected those who were much with him as young men, and who had a chance to revise their impressions after years of close observation of the world and its big men, a scrap of dialogue may illustrate. One who in his “twenties” was much at Sloane Street and Dockett, and who passed later into close working relations with several at least of the most conspicuous, so to say, of Front Bench men in the Empire, after an interval of thirteen years sat once more for a whole long evening with three others at the feet of Gamaliel. A well-known scholar and historian put questions which drew Sir Charles out; and all were amazed and delighted by the result. After Sir Charles had gone, one of the others, a distinguished editor, said to the wanderer: “Come, you have known the Mandarins as well as anybody. Where do you put Dilke with them?” “Well, I rule Lord Milner out,” said —-: “but all the others, compared to Sir Charles, strike me in point of knowledge, if you must know, as insufficiently informed school- boys.” That is how his brain struck this contemporary. As for the moral qualities observed, you get to know a man well when you see him constantly and over years at play. And what intimate’s affection and respect for Sir Charles, and confidence in him, did not grow greater with every year? It seems admitted that he was a great man. Well, if there is anything in the intimate, not undiscerning impression of nearly eighteen years, he was a good man, or goodness is an empty name.’
Another account of his talk and ways comes from Mr. Spenser Wilkinson:
‘I moved to London in 1892, and from that time on found the intimacy with Dilke one of the delights of life. We used always to meet, either for breakfast or lunch, at Dilke’s house in Sloane Street, or for lunch at the Prince’s Restaurant in Piccadilly, or at 2.30 in the lobby of the House of Commons. I was also frequently a guest at the dinner-parties either at Sloane Street on Wednesdays, when Lady Dilke was alive, or at the House of Commons. Then there were small house-parties on Saturday and Sunday at Dockett Eddy, near Shepperton on the Thames, where Sir Charles had built two cottages, and where a guest was expected to do exactly what he pleased from the time when he was punted across the river on arrival until he left the punt on departing. In winter I used to bicycle over to the cottage at Pyrford, where Dilke and his wife were always to be found alone and where I spent many a charming afternoon.
‘Every man takes a certain tinge from the medium in which he is, and is therefore different in different company and different surroundings. I knew three Dilkes. First there was the statesman, the man of infinite information which he was ever working to increase. When you went to see him it was on some particular subject; he wanted precise information, and knew exactly what he wanted. With him my business was always finished in five minutes, after which I used to feel that I should be wasting his time if I stayed. This Dilke, in this particular form of intercourse, was by far the ablest man I ever met.
‘Then came Dilke the host, the Dilke of general conversation. Here again he towered above his fellows. The man who had been everywhere and knew everybody–for there seemed to be no public man of great importance in any country with whom Dilke was not acquainted and with whom he had not corresponded–a man who was almost always in high spirits and full of fun, had an inexhaustible fund of delightful conversation, about which the only drawback was that, in order to appreciate it, you had to be uncommonly well informed yourself.
‘But the Dilke I liked best was the one I used to have to myself when I spent a day with him either in the country or on the river, when neither of us had anything to do, when there was no business in hand, and when we either talked or were silent according to the mood. In these circumstances Dilke was as natural and simple as a civilized man can be. If one started an uncongenial subject, he would say. “It does not interest me,” but the moment one approached any of the matters he cared for he mobilized all his resources and gave himself with as little reserve as possible.
‘Dilke was a past-master in the art of ordering his time, and this was the secret of the vast quantity of work which he was able to do. He was a voracious and quick reader, as is proved by the number of books which he used to review for the _Athenaeum_, of which he was proprietor. Yet he was an early riser and went to bed early, and a part of his day was given to exercise.
‘A great deal of time was consumed in interviews with all sorts and conditions of men, and his attendance at the House of Commons, constant and assiduous, accounted for a large part of half the days in the year. But everything was mapped out in advance; he would make appointments weeks, or even months, in advance, and keep them to the minute. His self-control was complete, his courtesy constant and unvarying; he was entirely free from sentimentality and the least demonstrative of mankind, yet he was capable of delicate and tender feelings, not always detected by those towards whom they were directed. He was simple, straightforward, frank, and generous. It was delightful to do business with him, for he never hesitated nor went back upon himself. Modest and free from self-consciousness, he was aware both of his powers and of their limitations. I once tried to persuade him to change the manner of his Parliamentary speeches, to stop his minute expositions of facts and to make some appeal to the emotions of his hearers–at any rate in cases where he had strong feelings of his own. He made one experiment in accord with this suggestion, and told me that it had been most successful; but he said that he would not try it again, because it was not in accord with his natural bent, and he was unwilling to be anything but himself.’
Dockett was the home of the Birds. Sir Charles’s evidence before the Select Committee on the Thames as to the destruction of kingfishers led to a prohibition of all shooting on the river, and to an increase of these lovely birds. In 1897 he had two of their nests at Dockett Eddy. His acres of willow-grown all-but-island were made a sanctuary for birds, and therefore from Dockett only, of all his homes, cats were kept away. Nests were counted and cherished; it was a great year when a cuckoo’s egg was discovered among the linnet’s clutch, and its development was watched in breathless interest. Owls were welcome visitors; and the swans had no better nesting-place on the Thames than the lower end of Dockett. They and their annual progeny of cygnets were the appointed charge of Jim Haslett, Dilke’s ferryman and friend. Pensioners upon the house, they used to appear in stately progress before the landing raft–the mother perhaps with several little ones swarming on her back or nestling in her wings, and from time to time splashing off into the water. Always at their appearance, in answer to Sir Charles’s special call, a cry of ‘Swan’s bread’ would be raised, and loaf after loaf would disappear down their capacious throats. A place with such privileges was not likely to be undisputed, and many times there were battles royal against ‘invaders from the north,’ as Sir Charles called the Chertsey swans who came to possess themselves of the Dockett reach and its amenities. Swan charged swan, with plumage bristling and wings dilated, but not alone they fought; Jim Haslett and his employer took part against the invaders, beating them off with sticks; and even in the night, when sound of that warfare rose, the master of Dockett was known to scull out in a dinghy, in his night gear, carrying a bedroom candlestick to guide his blows in the fray.
Evening and morning he would steal along the bank in his dinghy, counting and observing the water-voles, which he was accustomed to feed with stewed prunes and other dishes, while they sat nibbling, squirrel-like, with the dainty clasped in their hands.
A few gay beds of annuals by the house, a purple clematis on the verandah, and a mass of syringa at the landing-stage, were all the garden permitted; roughly mown grass paths here and there led through the wild growth of nature, where the willows met overhead.
Such was his summer home, described in the lines of Tibullus which were carved on the doorway of the larger house:
‘Jam modo iners possim epntentus vivere parvo Nec semper longae deditus esse viae,
Sed canis aestivos ortus vitare sub umbra Arboris, ad rivos praetereuntis aquae.’
[Footnote: Thus translated by the Rev. W. Tuckwell:
‘Here, fancy-free, and scorning needless show, Let me from Life’s dull round awhile retreat, Lulled by the full-charged stream’s unceasing flow, Screened by tall willows from the dog-star’s heat.’]
He guarded its quiet, and, champion as he had always been of the public right of common on land and on the river, he was resentful when its privilege was carelessly abused. He rebuked those who broke the rules of the river in his marches–above all, such as disturbed swans or pulled water-lilies. After every Bank Holiday he would spend a laborious day gathering up the ugly leavings.
Many associations endeared to him what he thus defended. When he was out in the skiff, darting here and there, Lady Dilke, in the little dinghy which he had caused to be built for her–called from its pleasant round lines the _Bumble Bee_–would paddle about the reach. After her death he would paddle out in the dinghy which no one else might take out, and lie for hours watching the light change on that familiar and tranquil beauty of green mead and shining water, of high-waving poplar and willow, with drooping boughs awash. When he also was gone, the little boat was not suffered to pass into the use of strangers, but burnt there on the bank.
In his other home at Pyrford, all the day’s relaxations were of this intimate kind. [Footnote: Here, too, work was disturbed by his natural history researches. He writes apologetically to Mr. Hudson as to some mistake in a letter: ‘I can plead as a disturbing cause three young brown owls, quite tame; one barks, and two whistle, squeak–between a railway guard and a door-hinge. The barker lets me get within four or five feet before he leaves off yapping. He worries the cuckoo into shouting very late. I leave the owls unwillingly, late–one night 1 a.m. They are still going strong.’] Here also was no formal garden; Nature had her way, but under superintendence of a student of forestry. Sir Charles was a planter of pines; great notebooks carefully filled tell how he studied, before the planting, the history of each species, how he watched over the experiments and extended them. [Footnote: Here is a detail entered concerning Lawson’s cypress–_Erecta vividis_: ‘I remember Andrew Murray, of the Royal Horticultural, first describing Lawson’s cypress, introduced by his brother in 1862, when my father was chairman of the society of which Murray was secretary. Our two are gardener’s varieties, one greener and the other bluer than the true Lawson. The American name is Port Orford cedar. It will not do very well on our bad soil, but I’ve given it a pretty good place. It is said that Murray _first_ sent it to Lawson of Edinburgh in 1854. This variety was made by A. Waterer in 1870.’]
In summer, on the dry heathy commons of Surrey, there is always danger of a chance fire spreading, and it was part of his care to maintain a cleared belt for fending off this danger. Much of his day went in gathering debris and undergrowth, so as to keep clear ground about the trees, and then the heaped-up gatherings rewarded him with a bonfire in which he had a child’s pleasure, mingled with an artist’s appreciation of the shapes and colours of flame. It was for praise of this beauty that he specially loved Anatole France’s _Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque_, with its celebrations of the salamanders and their vivid element.
The heath blossom in all its kinds was cultivated, and it was his invariable custom to come up on a Monday from Pyrford with a spray of his favourite white heather in his buttonhole.
Here, too, were associations, interesting if not exactly historic. The Battle of Dorking was fought close by, and in this neighbourhood the Martians descended.
Chief of Pyrford’s distinctions was the discovery on Sir Charles’s own land, by Mr. Horace Donisthorpe, of a beetle (Lomechusa) which in Queen Anne’s day Sir Hans Sloane had first identified in Hampstead, parasitic in a nest of red ants. A second specimen was found in 1710 in the mail- coach between Gloucester and Cheltenham; but from Queen Anne’s day till 1906 it was regarded as extinct, until once more it was discovered, and discovered in its true place among the ants, on whose gestures and behaviour towards it, whether as indicating worship or serfdom, Sir Charles dilated with such rhetoric of description that the beetle assumed dimensions in the mind disappointing when it was viewed in reality.
Another rarity of insect life at Pyrford was a spider whose appearances have been oftenest noted at Hampton Court. These creatures, large, black, and horrific, were accordingly known as ‘Hampton Courters,’ but received no welcome, being slain on sight, their slayer quoting a characteristic saying which he had heard from Anatole France:
‘We all know of dangers which seem more terrible than they are. The spider alone suffers death for his carelessness as to this habit of exaggeration. Many an uncle spider walks about by candlelight, and is slain by us on account of his monstrous shadow, whereas his body, being but small, would have escaped our rage.’
It was here that much of his Memoir was dictated, based on an enormous mass of letters, papers, and private diaries, kept throughout his Government career. After 1891 there is only a scattered series of entries, increasingly sparse as time went on. Mr. Hudson recalls their walks from the station at Woking to Pyrford across the then open common, the lunch of eggs and milk, and the hours of work, during the period between the publication of _Problems of Greater Britain_ and Sir Charles’s return to Parliament for the Forest of Dean.
These two country homes, Pyrford and Dockett, held Sir Charles so fast with their simple pleasures that the once insatiable traveller ceased to roam. At the close of 1892, after his return to Parliament, he sold his house and garden at Toulon. Pyrford to a great extent had come to take its place. But to the end of his days he was a constant visitor to that Provencal country which he loved. Apart from them there was another place where, though he neither owned nor rented house or land, he was no less at home than among his willows or his pines. No resident in the Forest of Dean was better known in it than its member, and nowhere had Sir Charles more real friends. For many years he spent three periods among them: his Whitsun holiday, which was very much a visit of pleasure; a visit in autumn, when he attended all meetings of the Revision Courts; and finally a month in the dead of winter, when he went round to meetings in each polling district, at night educating his electors in the political questions of the time, and in the day working with his local friends at the register till it became the most accurate record of its kind in all Great Britain–so perfect, indeed, that he was at last able to discontinue his attendance at the Revision Courts, though never relaxing his keen personal interest in every change.
His friendships in the Forest were not bounded by class or party. He had the support, not merely of the Liberal and Labour groups, but of many strong Conservatives, here as before at Chelsea. Mention has been made of Mr. Blake, and another friend was Mr. John Probyn, who had stood as a Liberal candidate for Devizes as far back as 1868, and had not changed his views. Of his many faithful friends and supporters, one, the honorary secretary of the Liberal Association for all Sir Charles’s years of membership, had as far back as 1886 proclaimed his faith in him. [Footnote: Mr. John Cooksey, formerly proprietor of the _Dean Forest Mercury_.] Another equally active in conveying the original invitation to Sir Charles was the agent of the Forest miners, a Labour leader of the wisest type, [Footnote: Mr. G. H. Rowlinson.] who writes:
‘He did not live for himself; it was always others first. I never made an appeal to him for any case of need in vain. With regard to local matters, he seemed at the beck and call of nearly everyone. Nothing was too small or too large for him to undertake to assist any constituent, and oftentimes an avowed and lifelong political opponent. In a multitude of ways he did us service with his knowledge of affairs, his influence, his experience, his ability and work.
‘In the matters of commoners’ right, the right of “turnout” on the Forest, free miners’ rights, questions of colliery owners, matters relating to the Crown, the development of the lower coal seams–in all these (and many of them are local intricate historical questions involving a mass of detail) he rendered valuable service.
‘In his electoral battles he was always a keen fighter and a courteous opponent. In every campaign he seemed more anxious to beat his opponent by sheer weight of reason and argument, and intellect and knowledge, than by any appeal to party passion or feeling.
‘I have been at a great many of his meetings, and never saw him shirk a question, nor saw one put to him that he did not, nine times out of ten, know more about than the questioner, however local the point might be.
‘As an example, he was holding a meeting at Newnham. Questions were invited; none asked. Sir Charles looked disappointed; so Mr. King, of the “Victoria,” in a friendly way, thought he would put him a poser, and asked his opinion about Sir Cuthbert Quilter’s Pure Beer Bill.
‘For about twenty minutes Sir Charles talked beer–the origin, ingredients, what it should be, what it often is and what it is not, what it is in other countries. As Mr. King remarked afterwards, he told him more about beer than he ever knew before, though he had been in the trade all his life.’
Probably none was more rejoiced at the unexpected display than the genial Tory host of the Victoria, who lived to deplore his friend and to quote especially one of his observations: ‘If you see a man put on “side,” Sir Charles once said to me, you may be sure he feels the need of it.’ [Footnote: Among those who worked with him and for him best and longest should be named at least Mr. Charles Ridler and Mr. T. A. H. Smith of Lydney, Mr. Henry Davis of Newent, Mr. B. H. Taylor, and Mr. S. J. Elsom.]
Part of the service which he rendered to the constituency was by means of the honorary presidency of the Liberal Four Hundred, first created, to be held by himself, in 1889. Under this title the foremost spokesmen of Liberalism were in successive years brought into the Forest; [Footnote: The list included Mr. Asquith, Lord Morley, Mr. McKenna, Mr. Lloyd George, and Lord Loreburn.] and thus member and constituents worked together alike in political and in personal friendship. He hailed the little clump of trees on the conical top of Mayhill, the first landmark which indicated the Forest, almost as if it stood above his home. All was homelike to him as he drove from the pastoral country by the Severn, with its apple and pear orchards, to the typical mining town of Cinderford, and on to the great expanse of Forest in whose midmost glade was the Speech House Hotel, more ancient than the hollies about it, which had been planted to mark Charles II.’s Restoration. The Panelled Room, always reserved for his use during his stay there, had been for many generations the place in which the free miners met to hold their courts; it had been built for the purpose, as the gallery for speakers showed.
He loved the Forest–not only the distant spots of interest, but every tree, delighting to act as guide to all its pleasant places. So each new guest was taken to see High Beeches and the great wind-swept row of Scots firs by Clearwell Court. The aged oak-tree, which at a distance resembled a barn–for nothing was left but its great trunk above the roots–was another point of pilgrimage; so were the dwarf thorns on Wigpool Common, which reminded him of the tiny Japanese trees centuries old, as, indeed, probably were these.
Then there were the expeditions to the rocking stone called the Buckstone, a relic of the Druids; to the Scowles, the wonderful Roman iron workings like the Syracusan quarries; to Symons Yat, where the old military earthworks ended in a triple dyke, with the Severn and the Wye on either side; to Newland Church, in which a fifteenth-century brass shows the free miner of those days equipped for work; or to the lovely valley by Flaxley Abbey, once in the precincts of the Forest, where the monks had their fish-ponds, and where on the side of the hills their old ironworks may still be seen.
He and Lady Dilke rode early in their stay to all these outlying places, with Miss Monck as their constant companion. She was President of the Women’s Liberal Association, stayed with them during their long visits to the Forest, and was with him for the election at the end. [Footnote: Miss Emilia Monck, sister of Mr. Berkeley Monck, of Coley Park, Heading, of which he was several times Mayor, and which he contested as a Liberal in 1886.]
These were far rides, but close about the Speech House the place teems with interest. In the last years he would walk every evening to look at the great stag-headed ruins of the oaks, which thrust their gnarled and crooked limbs fantastically into the closing night, or stand watching the shadows fall on the spruce rides which stretch out near the old inn, till, in the fading light, it seemed as though figures were moving in and out on the greensward of the great vistas. In the bright sunshine, imposing silence on himself and his companions, he would watch for long together the life in one of the forest glades, the moving creatures in the grass, the tits playing on the branches of a silver birch silhouetted against the sky, the little blue butterflies chasing each other over the pink crab-apple bloom. He would follow the tapping of a woodpecker, and wait in the evening for the owl’s cry to begin; and here, as elsewhere, to be with him was to see in everything unsuspected things.
In the winter, Speech House was at first Sir Charles’s headquarters for part of January, but there, 500 feet above the sea, the roads were sometimes impassable from snow. At last Lady Dilke became too delicate to face the mid-winter visit, and, except for elections, Whitsuntide and the autumn were the two occasions for their stay. He went also each year to the miners’ demonstration–in 1908 so ill that it seemed impossible that even his power of endurance could enable him to bear the strain, and in 1910 again because he said he ‘would not fail Rowlinson and the miners,’ though he fainted after the meeting there.
One of their early headquarters in the Forest was Lindors, the home of two among their first and warmest friends–Mr. Frederick Martin and his wife. It is in a lovely little valley with sheltered lawns, the rush of the water sounding always behind the house, above which the old castle of St. Briavels stands. The ancient prison is still there, and the castle dates back to the thirteenth century, and claims an almost unbroken succession of Constables of the Castle and Wardens of the Forest of Dean, beginning with John de Monmouth.
After Speech House the Victoria at Newnham saw them oftenest. Its interior is fascinating, with a low hall and fine old oak stairway, broad and shallow; a bit of quaint French glass let into the staircase window bears an illustrated version of La Fourmi et la Cigale. Lady Dilke found there a remnant of fine tapestry–a battle scene with a bold picture of horses and their riders. She traced and located this as belonging to a great panel which is in the Palace at Madrid. At each election, after the declaration of the poll, Sir Charles made from a balcony of the Victoria or from a motor-car his speech to the cheering constituents, who had followed him from the town-hall, first under happiest circumstance, with his wife waiting for him in the porch, later alone, till the last occasion, in December, 1910, when he fought and won the election, dying, but with dogged courage; and as he spoke of the long term of Liberal government which would ensue before a new electoral struggle, friends standing near caught the words, ‘When I shall not be here.’
* * * * *
Sir Charles had given up the habit of travel except for some special purpose, as when in 1897 he journeyed with Lady Dilke to see the Nattiers at Stockholm, or in another year to Bordeaux for her work on French Art in the Eighteenth Century. But every Christmas they went for a month to Paris. It was the great holiday of their year, and all the engagements were made far ahead. There was interest in their Parisian associations, for their differing attainments made them part of various separate coteries not familiarly accessible to English people.
Their friends were of all worlds, political, literary, artistic, and social; and since Sir Charles’s intimacy with France dated back to boyhood, and Lady Dilke’s to the days of her first close study of French art, which, beginning in the sixties with the French Renaissance, terminated in her big work on French Art in the Eighteenth Century, their friendships extended over a long period of years, though each fresh visit enlarged their circle of friends and acquaintances.
In the memoir prefixed to her _Book of the Spiritual Life_ Sir Charles says of his wife:
‘Those who are familiar with several languages learn instinctively to take the natural manners of the people who are for the moment their companions. So it was with Lady Dilke…. In Paris she was French with sufficient difference to give distinction.’ As to himself, his great friend M. Joseph Reinach wrote, ‘Dilke connaissait la France mieux que beaucoup d’entre nous.’ But while his command of the French language and his knowledge of many sides of French life quickened his genial intercourse with the French, he never failed to impress them as an English statesman. He paid his French friends the compliment of adopting many little mannerisms; and however pure the French he spoke, he always entertained himself by keeping up to date his acquaintance with French slang, so that the latest developments of fashionable Paris jargon were familiar to him. Yet that never could be said of him which he himself noted of his friend M. Richard Waddington, brother to William Waddington, for many years Ambassador in London, and, in Sir Charles’s opinion, a man of even higher ability than the Ambassador. Of this friend, half French, half English, he said that he had two mentalities, and that among Englishmen he was English, among Frenchmen French. Sir Charles’s talk with Frenchmen was unrestrained; as Bismarck felt of England, so he of France: ‘We have nothing to conceal from the French; they are our natural allies.’ But it was always the Englishman who spoke; no slight veneer of manner in his social intercourse could conceal that.
There are many scattered entries in his Diary which show how great a relaxation the Paris holiday yielded.
‘At Christmas at Paris we were always gay, though often among the aged. The gayest dinner I remember was at Henri Germain’s with Gerome, Gaston Boissier, Laboulaye, and others, all about eighty, I being the chicken of the party.’
Gerome, the painter, is often mentioned. Laboulaye must have been Paul Laboulaye, born 1833, the diplomatist who had been Ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1886. It was during his embassy that the _rapprochement_ took place between France and Russia which was announced to Europe by the welcome of the French fleet to Cronstadt.
Gaston Boissier, Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, and a great classical scholar, figures again with another friend, M. Bonnat, in Sir Charles’s memoir of his wife; for he notes that during their last Christmas in Paris, in 1903, ‘the gaiety of their meetings’ with these two friends and others ‘had been as unrestrained as ever.’ Earlier memories recall the sculptors Christophe and Gustave Moreau. Christophe’s beautiful ‘Mask,’ of which Lady Dilke had written, stands in the Tuileries Garden, and was some time ago horribly disfigured by inkstain. One of Sir Charles’s late letters was written to M. Joseph Reinach, to ask whether anything had yet been done to cleanse this work of the sculptor she venerated. Only two small casts were made by Christophe from the statue, and one of these, given to her by him, decorated the Pyrford home. So did a picture by Francois Louis Francais, another artist friend, chief in his day of the water-colour school, a picture which had inspired one of her stories, and gave the motto, ‘Dites-moi un Pater,’ to her _Shrine of Death_. In all the later and in some of the earlier friendships Sir Charles shared, as he did in those of the great custodians of art treasures. M. de Nolhac, the poet and the Curator of Versailles, was prominent among them, and Eugene Muentz, head of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Lady Dilke’s correspondence with the latter, extending over a period of twenty-three years, is preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale.
One great friend among collectors was M. Gustave Dreyfus, a high authority on Donatello and on the medallists of the Italian Renaissance. At his house there was another attraction in the shape of the concierge’s cat, on whom Sir Charles would call before paying his respects upstairs. At another house a cat named Pouf was held in great honour by him, and his feelings were deeply wounded when, with feline capriciousness, it turned, on Paul Hervieu’s entrance, to bestow all its blandishments on the writer. His love of cats was as well known to his French as to his English friends, Emile Ollivier writes in 1891 from La Moutte: ‘Campion lui-meme cherche d’un regard afflige son protecteur disparu’; and M. Andre Chevrillon, being ‘touche par la facon dont je vous ai entendu parler de ce divin animal,’ sent him Taine’s sonnets ‘A trois chats, Puss, Ebene, et Mitonne, dedies par leur ami, maitre, et serviteur.’
Memorials of dinners with the well-known collector Camille Groult were preserved in the shape of some sketches, one of a cavalier in peruke and cravat, another an excellent crayon head of the host, by Domingo, the Spanish artist, drawn on the back of a torn menu and given by him to Lady Dilke.
The Groults’ admiration of the beauty of Dockett Eddy was testified in the gift of a little reflecting mirror, a ‘camera obscura,’ which, held to the light, made exquisite vignettes of river, clematis, and syringa; and a dinner at 76, Sloane Street was marked by the gift of little copies of M. Groult’s famous lately acquired Fragonard, in which Cupid levels his arrows at the dainty feet of a well-known dancer of the time.
The sculptor Rodin was an acquaintance of late years, and a Christmas card sent to 76, Sloane Street, in the form of a framed and signed pencil sketch of a female head, was that master’s tribute to Sir Charles’s heresy that Rodin drew much better than he sculptured.
‘For old Francais,’ says Sir Charles, ‘Lady Dilke had the veneration she felt for Christophe among sculptors,’ and for a few women, such as Mme. Renan. To both the Renans they were bound by ties of familiar friendship, and some of their pleasantest hours were spent at the College de France. On November 11th, 1880, there is a note of Sir Charles’s of a talk with Gambetta: ‘They discussed Renan’s “Souvenirs,” which were appearing in the _Revue_ for November, wonderfully entertaining, and perfectly beautiful in style.’ It was Renan who had presented Lady Dilke’s two volumes on the French Renaissance, in 1880, to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, with an admiring report, and Sir Charles’s admiration for Renan’s writing was great. Of Mme. Renan he says: ‘This homely-looking old dame was not only a good wife, but a woman of the soundest sense and the most upright judgment.’
The same feeling of attachment and respect bound them to Mme. de Franqueville, [Footnote: Mlle. Erard.] the first wife of Sir Charles’s old friend M. de Franqueville, whom he saw often both in Paris and London. They visited them at La Muette, famous for its memories of Marie Antoinette, where in the early years of her prosperity she would take her companions to play at dairying with dainty emblazoned milkpails.
One whose friendship dated far back was Emile Ollivier, and with him Sir Charles often discussed, both in Paris and at St. Tropez, a vanished era in France’s history, that of the ‘Liberal Empire.’ To these talks the Prime Minister of Napoleon III. would bring such wealth of oratory and such fertility of gesticulation that his hearers felt themselves transported to a crowded chamber, of which he occupied the rostrum, and woke with bewilderment to find themselves in the tranquil calm of his sun-flooded Southern home. There were those who said that the point of view urged with such conviction varied, and Sir Charles retains a _mot_ of M. Jusserand: ‘Emile Ollivier change souvent d’idee fixe.’ Mme. Emile Ollivier, his devoted second wife and helper, was also a great friend, and her photograph was one of those which Lady Dilke kept near her.
‘Relations of the pleasantest kind,’ says Sir Charles, were formed with the Due d’Aumale, in Mr. Bodley’s phrase ‘last of the grands seigneurs of France.’ On September 25th, 1895, the Duke wrote asking them ‘to spend a whole day going through the books at Chantilly.’ ‘The charm of these books, however, and of these repeated visits of 1895 and 1896, lay in the fact that books and drawings alike excited historic memory.’
‘In October, 1895, we were in Paris, and took Went [Footnote: Sir Charles Dilke’s son, the present Sir C. Wentworth Dilke.] to stay at Vaux, that he might see the finest of the chateaux, and also the room where, according to Dumas, Aramis and Porthos carried off Louis XIV., though d’Artagnan saved him again. We also went ourselves to lunch at Chantilly with the Due d’Aumale, who told us how Mme. Adelaide, his aunt, used to slap his brother, the Prince de Joinville, already a distinguished naval officer, and stop his talking politics with, “Tais-toi, mechant morveux, qui oses critiquer la politique de ton pere.” Comtesse Berthe de Clinchamp has looked after the house since the days of the Duchesse d’Aumale, though she lives in another house. This distinguished old dame was also there. A daughter of the Due de Chartres was once slapped by her aunt, the Comtesse de Paris, in public, for asking to be taken to stay at Chantilly with “tante de Clinchamp.” In 1896 to 1897 we were a great deal at Chantilly, finding the Duke interesting with his reminiscences of his father’s account of the Court of Louis XVI. With the ex-King of Westphalia, and Bismarck, the Duc d’Aumale was in old age the most interesting companion that I have known. It was the projecting of his stories into a newer generation that made them good. Sir S. Smith (“Long Acre”) was a bore at the Congress of Vienna, but would have been delightful to us could we have known him.’ [Footnote: Sir Sidney Smith must have been prolix over his achievements at the siege of Acre and elsewhere. It is certain that a reputation for bombast injured his career and caused his remarkable achievements to be underrated.]
When in May, 1897, the Duke suddenly died, Lady Dilke wrote a little article which, in spite of the sadness of the circumstances of his death and the consequent deep note of pathos, in certain parts of the obituary recalled very happily the brightness of their talks. Letters of the time speak of the losses which the Dilkes and their friends had sustained by the fire at the charity bazaar which had indirectly caused the Duke’s death, through that of the Duchesse d’Alencon, his favourite niece. One of Lady Dilke’s dearest friends in France, the Marquise de Sassenaye, had escaped, but several of her relations who were with her had died a dreadful death. The tie with these friends was very close, and the daughter of the Marquise de Sassenaye, the Baronne de Laumont, and her granddaughter, the Comtesse Marquiset, were among Sir Charles’s last guests at the House of Commons. But he did not live to know that his friend the Baron de Laumont and his only son laid down their lives for France in 1915.
Colonel Picquart Sir Charles had met in 1891 during the ‘belles journees de ces manoeuvres de l’Est,’ chronicled by M. Joseph Reinach. He deeply admired the character of this noble and chivalrous gentleman, who, convinced that wrong had been done to an innocent man, sacrificed his fine career to save him, and suffered for his Dreyfusism by imprisonment and military degradation. Sir Charles met Picquart often at the table of M. Labori and elsewhere, and at one dinner when Emile Zola was present in 1899 there were also two English friends, the genial Sir Campbell Clarke, Paris correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_, and his kind wife, at whose house in Paris the Dilkes dined almost every Christmas Day. He touched in this way the struggle over the Dreyfus affair, and his attitude is summed up in a letter conveying through M. Reinach to Colonel Picquart ‘that intense sympathy which I do not express publicly only because all we English say does more harm than good.’ [Footnote: ‘At Christmas, 1900, in Paris we met Labori and Colonel Picquart two nights running, and heard fully the reasons of their quarrel with the Dreyfus family, which will probably all come out. Labori with great eloquence, and Picquart quietly, developed the view that Dreyfus, by virtually accepting the amnesty along with his own freedom, has taken up the position of a guilty man and sacrificed all those who have sacrificed everything for him. When, during the season of 1901, Labori came to London, and we saw much of him, he had toned down this view, or did not think it wise to express it. But it came out in November, 1901.’]
His friendship with M. Joseph Reinach, so often mentioned, dates back to the days when the latter was Gambetta’s secretary. ‘C’est par Gambetta que j’ai connu Dilke,’ says M. Reinach. ‘Gambetta avait pour lui une vive affection.’ In London and in Paris they met and talked and fenced, and kept in touch by close political correspondence. ‘Dilke was a great friend of mine, and I thought him a true and intrepid patriot and citizen,’ said M. Reinach; and perhaps of all M. Reinach’s great qualities it was his courage which most provoked the admiration of Sir Charles and of his wife. They knew all the three brothers, and M. Salomon Reinach, asking Sir Charles to come and discuss manuscripts, signs himself ‘in admiration of your enormous knowledge’–a happy tribute from one of whom it was said ‘il sait tout.’ ‘Salomon Reinach, the outgoing President of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,’ writes Sir Charles in 1908 to Lord Fitzmaurice, ‘is what Arthur Strong (Librarian of House of Lords) was, and Acton tried to be, “universal.” He asked me to listen to him for two whole evenings, till we became a nuisance to our hosts–on the way in which, despite our Historical Manuscripts Commission, we still lock up papers. His strongest examples were Horace Mann’s letters to Horace Walpole, and the letters received by the Duke of Wellington (the loss of nearly all the letters written by J. S. Mill moves me more).’
M. Pallain, Regent of the Bank of France, was another friend whose acquaintance with Sir Charles dated back to the days when he was Gambetta’s secretary. His book on Talleyrand, the ‘fameux livre de Pallain,’ as Sir Charles calls it in a letter to M. Jusserand, was hardly less interesting to him than his mastership of French finance.
The Siegfrieds, representatives of the wealthy and serious Protestant world, were friends who shared Sir Charles’ interest in questions of social reform, as was that wisest of permanent officials, M. Fontaine, head of the French Labour Department; and he discussed these matters also with the great representative of Roman Catholic Socialism, Count Albert de Mun. The list of his Diary engagements, ranging over a long period of time, is filled with the names of French writers, from Ludovic Halevy, the novelist and dramatist (passages from whose _Belle Helene_ he would recite and whistle), to Anatole France; and of politicians of every school of thought, from Leon Say, ‘a statesman of rare competence,’ to M. Delcasse, whom he saw often, Deschanel, Leon Bourgeois, Millerand, Viviani, and that great friend of Greece–M. Denys Cochin; Calmette, the editor of the _Figaro_, assassinated by Mme. Caillaux; and Lepine, the Prefect of Police; while Jaures was a London as well as a Paris guest.
The excellence of much French acting attracted Sir Charles and his wife to the theatre in Paris, though in London their visits to a play were rare. M. Jules Claretie, the Academician, and for nearly thirty years, till his death in 1913, the distinguished Director of the Theatre Francais, constantly put his box at their disposal, and rarely failed to join them for a talk between the acts.
There is a reply from General de Galliffet, the ‘beau sabreur’–that brilliant soldier whom Sir Charles had followed through the French manoeuvres accepting a theatre invitation in 1892: ‘J’ai, en principe, l’horreur du theatre; j’en benis le ciel puisque je pourrai ainsi mieux jouir de votre societe et de celle de Lady Dilke.’
In these visits to Paris they went always to the Hotel St. James, in the Rue St. Honore, attracted by the beauty and interest of their rooms there. It is the old Hotel de Noailles, and the staircase and landing, and several of the rooms, are still as they were when three members of the family–grandmother, mother, and daughter–were guillotined at the time of the French Revolution. The guardroom at the head of the stairs, with its great folding doors, and the paved landing with its old _dalles_, are intact, as are some of the state-rooms. Their sitting-room and the great bedroom opening from it looked out on to the courtyard, where in old days, before it became a courtyard and when the garden stretched away to the Seine, Marie Antoinette walked and talked, the story goes, with La Fayette, with whom her friend Mme. de Noailles had arranged an interview. The windows and balconies here, and part of the garden front, resemble exactly their representations in pictures of the period.
They saw many of their friends during the year both at the House of Commons and at Dockett. Describing them in London, dining in the room decorated by Gambetta’s portrait, M. Jules Claretie writes: ‘La premiere fois que j’eus l’honneur d’etre l’hote de Sir Charles la charmante Lady Dilke me dit, souriante, “Ici vous etes en France. Savez-vous qui est notre cuisinier? L’ancien brosseur de General Chanzy.”‘ And among Sir Charles’s collection of Dockett photographs was one in which the chef, accompanied by the greater artist, the elder Coquelin, was fishing from a punt on the Thames.
‘Je me rappelle avec tristesse,’ says the same friend in February, 1911, ‘les beaux soirs ou, sur la terrasse du Parlement, en regardant, de l’autre cote de la Tamise, les silhouettes des hauts monuments, la-bas, sous les etoiles, dans la nuit, nous causions avec Sir Charles de cet _Athenaeum_, la revue hebdomadaire ou il accumulait tant de science, et dont j’avais ete un moment, apres Philarete Chasles et Edmond About, le correspondant Parisien; puis de Paris, de la France de Pavenir-du passe aussi.’
When M. Jules Claretie came to London to deliver a lecture in 1899 on the French and English theatre, Sir Charles was asked to preside, and also to assist in welcoming him at the Ambassador’s table. The charming and unfailing friendship of that Ambassador, M. Paul Cambon, is worthy of record, and Sir Charles’s admiration for him was very marked. He used to say that so long as a great Ambassador, either French or English, represented his nation in Paris or London, the other representative might be a cipher, and M. Cambon’s embassy in London sufficed for both countries. ‘He is a man,’ he wrote to Mr. Morley in 1892, ‘who (with his brother Jules) will survive Ribot, and even Freycinet.’
Another close friend was M. Jusserand, whose graceful studies of English literary history adorned the Pyrford bookshelves. While he was counsellor to the Embassy in London he was a frequent guest at 76, Sloane Street, and when he became Ambassador at Washington he still kept in constant touch with Sir Charles.
‘Des qu’on nous parle d’un homme d’etat etranger, ministre ou diplomate,’ says M. Joseph Reinach, writing of Sir Charles, ‘c’est notre premiere question: Aime-t-il la France? C’est une sottise. Un Italien n’aime que l’Italie, un Russe n’aime que la Russie, un Anglais n’aime que l’Angleterre.’ It may be so. In 1887 Sir Charles wrote to M. Reinach concerning the possibility that Bismarck would attack France, which, he added, ‘everybody thinks likely except your humble servant, Lord Lyons, and Sir E. Malet, our new man at Berlin.’ If it did happen, said he, ‘whatever use I can be I shall be, either if I can best serve France by writing here, or by coming to be a private of volunteers and by giving all I can to the French ambulances.’ Some there are who can recall Sir Charles’s face as he turned over the pages of M. Boutet de Monvel’s _Jeanne d’Arc_, and dwelt on that first picture in which the little ‘piou-pious’ of the modern army advance, under the flag on which are inscribed the battles of the past; while the Old Guard rises from the earth to reinforce their ranks, and the ghostly figure of Jeanne d’Arc, symbolizing the spirit of France, leads on to victory. Listening as he talked, his hearers became infected with Sir Charles’s spirit, and thinking of the past, looking to the future, he so kindled them that when he closed the book they all were ‘lovers of France.’
CHAPTER LII
LABOUR
1870-1911
I.
‘From 1870 to this date one man has stood for all the great causes of industrial progress, whether for the agricultural labourers, or in the textile trades, or in the mining industries, or with the shop assistants. That man is Sir Charles Dilke.’ So, in 1910, spoke Dr. Gore, the present Bishop of Oxford, at that time Bishop of Birmingham.
In Sir Charles’s early days, economists were still governed by individualist doctrines. The school of _laissez faire_ was the prevailing school of thought, and in its teaching he was trained. “We were all Tory anarchists once,” was his own summary of the views which characterized that economic theory. But to “let alone” industrial misery early became for Sir Charles a counsel of despair. _Greater Britain_, published in 1868, when he was twenty-five, gave indications of a change of view, and his close friendship with John Stuart Mill directly furthered this development. Mill’s lapses into heresy from the orthodox economics of the day were notable, and Sir Charles was wont to point to a passage written by Mill in the forties showing that sweated wages depressed all wages, and to claim him as the pioneer of the minimum wage.
It was left for Mill’s disciple to become one of the foremost champions of the legislation which now protects the industrial conditions of the worker, and also the guardian of its effective administration.
His policy was distinguished by his determination to act with those for whom the legislation was created, and to induce them to inspire and to demand measures for their own protection. The education of the industrial class, the object of “helping the workers to help themselves,” was never absent from his mind. This view went farther than the interest of a class: he held the stability of the State itself to be menaced by the existence of an unorganized and depressed body of workers. An organized and intelligent corporate demand put forward by trained leaders chosen from the workers’ own ranks was essential to the development and stability of industrial conditions and to appropriate legislation. Sir Charles was therefore the unwavering advocate of trade-unionism. It is worth while to emphasize his attitude, since views now generally accepted were not popular in the sixties. His first speech to his Chelsea electors in 1867 dealt with his trade-union position, as it did with the need for strengthening the Factory Acts.
Violent utterances on the part of certain sections of Labour did not affect his advocacy of its claims, for he would have endorsed the words of Cardinal Manning written to him on September 13th, 1884: “It is the cause of the people mismanaged by imprudent and rough words and deeds; but a people suffering long and stung by want of sympathy cannot speak like county magistrates.” During the later period of his life he tried, at innumerable meetings all over Great Britain, to help trade-unionists to make their claims understood. So he came to fill “a unique position as counsellor, friend, and adviser to the Labour cause.” [Footnote: Letter from the Rt. Hon. George Barnes, Labour M.P. for the Blackfriars division of Glasgow, and Minister for Pensions in Mr. Lloyd George’s Government of 1916, once general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.]
His belief in trade-unionism was never shaken; for though he did not pretend that in the distant future trade-unionism would be sufficient to redress all social ills, holding it, as Lady Dilke did, to be, not “the gospel of the future, but salvation for the present,” he believed that during his lifetime it was far from having perfected its work. He was a strong municipal Socialist, but with regard to State Socialism he would never bind himself to any general theory; he was in favour of large experiments and of noting those made elsewhere; beyond this he “did not see his way.”
His faith in the maintenance of all safeguards for trade-unions was well demonstrated by his action on the occasion of the Taff Vale judgment and its sequel. [Footnote: _Taff Vale Judgment_.–As trade-unions were not incorporated, it was generally assumed that they could not be sued, but in 1900 Mr. Justice Farwell decided that a trade-union registered under the Trade-Union Acts, 1871 and 1876, might be sued in its registered name; and this decision, after being reversed in the Court of Appeal, was restored by the House of Lords in 1901. The result of this case (the Taff Vale Railway Company _v_. the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants) was that damages could be obtained against a trade-union for the acts of their officials in “picketing” during a strike; and by making the trustees in whom the funds were vested defendants, an order could be obtained for the payment of damages and costs out of the accumulated funds of the trade-union.] He wished to keep for them the inviolability of corporate funds which formed their strength and staying power. While he admitted that theoretically a good case could be made out against such inviolability, he was clear that in practice it was essential to the continued existence of Labour as an organized force, capable of self-defensive action. The conference on the effect of the Taff Vale decision held in October, 1901, was arranged by him after consultation with Mr. Asquith, who suggested Sir Robert Reid and Mr. Haldane as legal assessors. How grave was the position which the judgment had created may be gathered from the declaration of Mr. Asquith in a letter to Sir Charles written on December 5th, 1901: “How to conduct a strike legally now, I do not know.” He advised the introduction of two Bills, one to deal with the question of trade-union funds, the other with picketing, etc. In April, 1902, Sir Charles Dilke introduced the deputation, organized to ask for special facilities for discussion, to Lord James of Hereford, who received it on behalf of the Cabinet, and to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Leader of the Opposition.
In an article contributed by him to the _Independent Review_ of June, 1904, he notes a private offer of the Government for dealing with the matter by a small Royal Commission of experts, whose recommendations should be immediately followed by legislation. This was refused by the Labour leaders, and he thought it a lost opportunity for what might have been a favourable settlement. [Footnote: Mr. D. J. Shackleton, an Insurance Commissioner, and appointed Permanent Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Labour in December, 1916, was in 1906 M.P. for Clitheroe, and a prominent member of the Labour party. He writes of the passing of the Trade Disputes Act, which reversed the Taff Vale judgment: “It was my privilege to be the spokesman for the Labour party and Joint Board on the Trade Disputes Bill in the House of Commons. On the evening when the Bill was read a third time in the House of Lords, the three National Committees gave me a complimentary dinner at the House of Commons. In the course of my speech in reply to the toast, I expressed, on behalf of the Labour movement and myself, our sincere and grateful thanks to Sir Charles for the very valuable help he had given us through all our Parliamentary fights. My consultations with him whilst the Bill was before the House were almost daily. On many occasions he crossed the floor to give me points in answer to speeches that were made in opposition to the Labour position.”] But at the same time ‘the Taff Vale judgment virtually brought the separate Labour party into existence, and the difficulty of upsetting the judgment and of amending the law of conspiracy will,’ he said, ‘nurture, develop, and fortify it in the future.’ To him this was matter for satisfaction. [Footnote: A full account of the action taken by Sir Charles on the Taff Vale judgment and the Trade Disputes Act which reversed its decision will be found in Appendix II. to this chapter, furnished by Miss Mary Macarthur (now Mrs. W. C. Anderson). Miss Macarthur, secretary of the Women’s Trade-Union League from 1903, worked with Sir Charles on many questions.]
His absence from the House of Commons from 1886 to 1892 gave him leisure for deep study of industrial questions, and he drew much of illustration and advice from his knowledge of colonial enterprise in social reform. Thus, in his advocacy of a general eight-hour day, observation of colonial politics largely guided his suggestions. In his first speech in the Forest of Dean in 1889, he said: “Australia has tried experiments for us, and we have the advantage of being able to note their success or failure before we imitate or vary them at home.” The experiments in regard to regulation of hours and wages which colonial analogy justified should, he urged, be carried out by Government and by the municipalities as employers and in their contracts. His visits to our Colonies were followed by constant correspondence with Colonial statesmen, especially with Mr. Deakin, and the introduction here of minimum-wage legislation may be traced to Sir Charles’s close study of Colonial experiment.
But he never narrowed his policy to developments which would confine the leaders of Labour to the management of the internal affairs of their trade-unions; he early urged the representation of Labour by Labour in Parliament, where its influence on legislation affecting its interests would be direct, and there is a note in his Diary in 1906, when the “Labour party” in Parliament came into existence, chronicling the “triumph of the principles” to which during his life that part of his activities devoted to Labour had been given.
In 1894, when the Independent Labour party was emerging into light, he had advocated in talks with Labour friends its development into the Labour party of later days. But he noted the limits which bounded his own co-operation except as an adviser: “My willingness to sink home questions and join the Tories in the event of a war, and my wish to increase the white army in India and the fleet–even as matters stand–are a bar.”
There were those who prophesied that the Labour party’s appearance had no permanent interest; that it owed its existence to political crises, and would soon fade out of the life of Parliament. Sir Charles, on the contrary, was clear that it constituted a definite and permanent feature in Parliamentary life. It might vary in number and in efficiency; it might, like other parties, have periods of depression; but it was henceforth a factor to be reckoned with in politics. Its power, however, must largely depend upon its independence. The point to which an independent party can carry its support of the Government in power must not be overstepped, and when, as in 1910, in the case of the “Osborne judgment” [Footnote: Mr. Osborne was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He brought an action against them for a declaration that the rule providing contribution for Parliamentary representation is invalid, and for an injunction to restrain the funds being used in this way. He was successful in the Court of Appeal and in the House of Lords (A.S. of R.S. _v_. Osborne, 1910, A.C., 87). This practically made it impossible for trade-unions to support the Labour party.] or the Unemployed Bill, he thought that he detected weakening in the ranks of the Labour party in their fight for these Bills, he noted it gravely.
His view that Labour should find its leaders in its own ranks was not shared by Chamberlain and others who initiated Labour legislation; [Footnote: April, 1893, letter to Dilke from Chamberlain: “A political leader having genuine sympathy with the working classes and a political programme could, in my opinion, afford to set them [Labour leaders] aside.” Reference to this letter has been made also in Chapter XLIX., p. 288.] but Dilke’s principle was to act as spokesman for Labour only so long as it stood in need of an interpreter; when the movement had attained stability and become articulate, his work as the advocate who had expressed its aspirations and compelled public attention for them was done.
His policy did not involve his silence on points in which he differed from the Labour party. In his first speech in the House of Commons in 1893, on the question of the destitute alien, he did not agree with some trade representatives, who would in those days have excluded aliens, in fear of their competition. His dissection of the figures on which the plea of exclusion was based showed that they were misleading, since emigration and immigration were not accurately compared. He maintained that protective legislation with regard to conditions and wages would deal with the danger from competition which the trades feared, and he pointed out that anti-alien legislation must strike at the root of that right of asylum which had always been a distinguishing feature of British policy.
He met the contention of those who wished for a Labour Ministry by pointing out that co-ordination and readjustment, not addition to the number of Ministers, was needed. The size of our Cabinets was responsible for many governmental weaknesses in a country where Ministers were already far more numerous than was the case in other great European countries; too numerous to be accommodated on the Treasury Bench, and with salaries which would almost have met the cost of payment of members.
From Labour developments everything was to be hoped, and nothing to be feared, in the interests of the State or community. The only danger which menaced the gradual and wise evolution of Labour was “an unsuccessful war.” The danger to peaceful evolution from such a war would be great indeed. He warned those who advocated the settlement of international difficulties by arbitration, that this result could only be obtained when the workers of the different countries were in a position to arrive at settlement by this means. Till then we could not neglect any precaution for Imperial Defence.
Complete data are needed to carry out efficient work, and to Sir Charles’s orderly mind the confusion of our Labour and other statistics, and the absence of correlation arising from their production by different departments, were a source of constant irritation. Both by question and speech in the House of Commons and as President of the Statistical Society he laboured to obtain inquiry into “this overlapping, to obtain co-ordination of statistics and the possibility of combining enforcement with economy under one department,” instead of under three or four. [Footnote: Sir Bernard Mallet, Registrar-General, gives an account of Sir Charles’s work in this direction. See Appendix I. to this chapter.]
Trade-unionism had by no means achieved “its perfected work,” and outside the highly organized trades there was a vast unorganized mass of labour, largely that of women. The existence of such a body of workers undermined the Labour position, and of all Sir Charles’s efforts to improve industrial conditions none is more noteworthy than that which was done by himself and Lady Dilke for women and children. His wife’s work for the Women’s Trade-Union League, to which are affiliated women’s trade-unions (the League increased its membership from ten to seventy thousand during her lifetime), brought him increasingly in touch with women’s work; and, from his return to Parliament in 1892 to the end, scarcely a month in any Session passed without many questions being put by him in the House of Commons on points dealing with their needs. These questions tell in themselves a history of a long campaign; sometimes dealing with isolated cases of suffering, such as accident or death from ill-guarded machinery, or a miscarriage of justice through the hide- bound conservatism of some country bench; sometimes forming part of a long series of interrogatories, representing persistent pressure extending over many years, directed to increased inspection, to the enforcement of already existing legislation, or to the promotion of new. The results were shown not only by redress of individual hardships and by the general strengthening of administration, but by the higher standard reached in the various measures of protective legislation which were passed during his lifetime. Nearly every Bill for improving Labour conditions, for dealing with fines and deductions, for procuring compensation for accident, bore the stamp of his work. [Footnote: As Minister he helped in measures far outside his department. Mr. W. J. Davis, father of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade-Union Congress, tells how once, at Dilke’s own suggestion, he and Mr. Broadhurst came to see Sir Charles, then Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, about the Employers’ Liability Bill and the Contracting-out Clause. “We spent an hour with him in the smoking-room,” says Mr. Davis, “and left, Sir Charles having agreed to see the full Committee at 9.30 next morning. The House did not rise until 3 a.m., but Sir Charles was at our offices in Buckingham Street prompt to time. In the afternoon he met a few of us again, to consider an amendment for extending the time for the commencement of an action to six months instead of six weeks. This desirable alteration he succeeded in obtaining. When the Bill was passed–which, with all its faults, restored the workers’ rights to compensation for life and limb–there was no member of the Government, even including the Home Secretary (Sir William Harcourt), from whom the Parliamentary Committee had received such valuable help as from the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.”]
Characteristically he mustered for use every scrap of information available on a subject. Thus, he detected in the Employment of Children Act (1903) powers which neither the framers nor the promoters of the Act had foreseen, and, by speech and question, pressed their use till these previously unknown powers of protection for children were exercised by the officials to the full. Equally characteristic was his fashion of utilizing his specialized knowledge of regulations in one department in order to drive home his point in another. Thus, having cited the case of a stunted child told off to carry loads amounting to 107 pounds, he was able to add the information that, “in regulating the weight to be lifted by blue-jackets in working quick-firing guns, the limit was put at 100 pounds.”
His care for women workers was not confined to public advocacy; it showed itself in unostentatious and unremitting help to those who worked with him or came to him for advice. Such advice was not confined to large questions of policy: he spent himself as faithfully on the smallest points of detail which made for the efficiency of the work. His knowledge furnished “briefs” for that group of workers which his wife’s care for the Women’s Trade-Union League drew round them both, and it guided and inspired their campaign. He watched every publication of the League. However busy, he would find time to correct the proofs of articles brought to him, to dissect Blue-books and suggest new points; each quarter he read the review which was issued of the League’s work.
The man who knows, and is ready to help, is early surrounded by clients. Tributes from the organizers and leaders of the great trades are as frequent as the testimony to his help which came from workers in unorganized and sweated trades. The representative of a mining constituency in later years, his work for the miners was great, and repaid by their trust and support. [Footnote: “During the whole of his Parliamentary life he was always ready and willing to help the miners, assist in preparing and drafting Mines Bills, regulations for increased safety in mines, and the eight hours. He was in charge of the Mines Regulation Amendment Bill, bringing it before the House every Session until the Government appointed a Royal Commission, and ultimately brought in a Bill which became an Act of Parliament. By his tact and influence he managed some years ago to get a short Bill passed raising the working age underground from twelve to thirteen,” writes Mr. T. Ashton, secretary of the Miners’ Federation.] From a standpoint which gives an estimate of all his Labour work come these words from Mr. Sidney Webb:
“He was an unfailing resource in every emergency. No one will ever know how much the Progressive Movement, in all its manifestations, owed to his counsel, his great knowledge, and his unsparing helpfulness. Trade-unionism among women as well as men; the movement for amending and extending factory legislation; the organization of the Labour forces in the House of Commons, are only some of the causes in which I have myself witnessed the extraordinary effectiveness which his participation added. There has probably been no other instance in which the workmen alike in the difficulties of trade-union organization and amid the complications of Parliamentary tactics have had constantly at their service the services of a man of so much knowledge and such extensive experience of men and affairs. But the quality that more than any other impressed me in Sir Charles Dilke as I knew him was his self-effacement. He seemed to have freed himself, not only from personal ambitions, but also from personal resentments and personal vanity. What was remarkable was that this ‘selflessness’ had in it no element of ‘quietism.’ He retained all the keenness of desire for reform, all the zest of intellectual striving, and all the optimism, of the enthusiast.”
II.
That “true Imperialism” which Sir Charles advocated was never more clearly shown than in matters of Social Reform. His demand that we should learn from the example of our Colonies was dictated by his desire to promote the homogeneity of the Empire. He believed in developing our institutions according to the national genius, and he viewed, for example, with distrust the tendency to import into this country such schemes as that of contributory National Sickness Insurance on a German pattern. His attitude during the early debates on Old-Age Pensions helped to secure a non-contributory scheme. He laid, then as always, special stress on the position of those workers who never receive a living wage and already suffer from heavy indirect taxation, holding that to take from such as these is to reduce still further their vitality and efficiency. During the debates on the Workmen’s Compensation Act he urged the extension of the principle to out-workers and to all trades. The protection should be universal and compulsory.
In a speech of April 27th, 1907, he promised to “fight to the death any scheme of Old-Age Pensions based on thrift or on the workers’ contributions.” Later, when the proposals as to workmen’s insurance were nebulous, but nevertheless pointed to a contributory scheme, he, criticizing some words of Mr. Haldane’s, spoke his anxiety lest “to have a system for all labour, including the underpaid labour of unskilled women, based on contributions by the individual, might involve the difficulty expressly avoided by the Government in the case of pensions– namely, the use of public money to benefit the better-paid class of labour, inapplicable to the worst-paid class, but largely based on taxation which the latter paid.” One of his last pencillings on the margin of an article reviewing the Government’s forecast of the scheme for sickness insurance includes a note of regret and indignation at the apparent omission to make any special provision for the lowest-paid classes of workers.
One neglected class of Labour whose grievances he sought to remedy by a measure which has not yet reached fulfilment was that of the shop assistants. Year after year, from 1896, he spoke at their meetings, introduced their Bill in the House of Commons, urged its points, inspired its introduction in the Lords, till at last the Liberal Government, in 1909, introduced proposals embodying its main features. The question of the representation of the shop assistants on the Grand Committee when the Bill should reach that stage was discussed by him just five days before his death, and many attributed very largely to his absence the fact that the Government were obliged to permit mutilation of their proposals before they became law in 1911. The National Union of Shop Assistants have commemorated his work for them by giving his name to their new headquarter offices in London.
An amusing tribute to his legislative activities and the effect they produced on reactionaries is to be found in a speech by that famous “die-hard” of the individualist school, the late Lord Wemyss, who warned the House of Lords that their lordships should always scrutinize the measures that came from “another place,” and “beware of Bills which bear on their backs the name of that great municipal Socialist, Sir Charles Dilke.”
A minor but important characteristic of Sir Charles’s views as an administrator was his conviction that wherever the interests of women and children are concerned the inspectorate should include an effective women’s staff. The appointment of women inspectors for the Local Government Board made by him in 1883 was a pioneer experiment, which he vainly urged Sir William Harcourt to follow in the Home Department–a reform delayed till twelve years later, when Mr. Asquith as Home Secretary carried it out.
But his most important service to Labour in the direction of administration is connected with the Home Office Vote. Though Bills were closely followed by him in Committee, he refused to take part in any obstruction upon them, holding that “all obstruction is opposed to the interests of Radicalism, in the long-run.” Acting on this view, he with others helped the Government to get votes in Supply. The true policy was, in his view, to obtain “ample opportunity for the discussion of important votes at those times of the Session when we desire to discuss them.” So he dealt with Home Office administration on its industrial side. Some more marked and centralized criticism of the workings of this great department was necessary than that supplied by questions in Parliament, correspondence, and private interviews. The administration of the War Office, the conduct of Foreign Affairs, or of the Admiralty, claimed the attention of the House of Commons as the annual vote on the Estimates came round. It was not so with the “Ministry of the Interior,” and it was practically left to Sir Charles to create that annual debate on the Home Office Vote, which dealt with the industrial side of that department’s administration. Year after year he reviewed its work, forcing into prominence the Chief Inspector’s Report on Factories and Workshops; examining the orders, exemptions, exceptions, and regulations, by which the Home Office legislates under the head of administration, always with a view to the levelling up of industrial conditions and the promotion of a universal incidence of protection for the workers. “We can trust no one but Sir Charles Dilke in Parliament to understand the principles of factory legislation,” wrote Mr. Sidney Webb in comment on some destructive Government proposals as to industrial law. This appreciation of the fundamental ideal underlying our legislative patchwork of eccentricities went hand in hand with a half- humorous and half-lenient understanding of his countrymen’s attitude to such questions. “We passed Acts in advance of other nations,” he said, “before we began to look for the doctrines that underlay our action, and long before we possessed the knowledge on which it was said to have been based.” But for one afternoon in the year the attention of the House of Commons was intelligently focussed on the details of the suffering of those, the weakest workers of all, on whose shoulders the fabric of our industrial system rests. Matters left previously to the agitation of some voluntary society or to the pages of the “novel with a purpose” were marshalled according to their bearing on different administrative points, and discussed in orderly detail. The overwork of women and girls in factory or workshop; the injury to health and the risks that spring from employment in dangerous trades; poor wages further reduced by fines and deductions; the employment of children often sent to work at too early an age, to stagger under loads too heavy for them to bear; the liability to accident consequent on long hours of labour–these were the themes brought forward on the Home Office Vote, not for rhetorical display, but as arguments tending to a practical conclusion, such as the inadequacy of inspection or the insufficient numbers of the available staff.
In the atmosphere thus created much progress was possible. Take, for example, one dangerous trade, that of the manufacture of china and earthenware, in which during the early nineties suffering which caused paralysis, blindness, and death, was frequent and acute. Speaking as late as 1898 on the Home Office Vote, and quoting from the official reports, Sir Charles showed that the cases for the whole country amounted to between four and five hundred out of the five to six thousand persons exposed to danger. Under his persistent pressure Committee after Committee inquired into this question and promulgated special rules; attention was focussed on the suffering, and this evil, though still unfortunately existing, abated both in numbers and acuteness, till at his death the cases had fallen to about a fifth of those notified in 1898.
His standpoint was one which raised industrial matters out of the arena of party fight, and on both sides of the House he found willing co-operators.
Help came not from the House of Commons alone. Lord James of Hereford, Lord Beauchamp, Lord Milner, lent their aid on different occasions, and Lord Lytton paid generous tribute to one “who was always ready to place his vast knowledge and experience, his energy and industry, at the service of any cause which has for its object the social well-being of the people of this country.”
In Sir Charles’s crowded day, the early luncheon at half-past twelve which allowed time for talk before the House met was often set aside for interviews. During the meal itself conversation for the greater part ranged wide, but towards the end he would turn to his guest with a demand for information on the point at issue, or, if his advice were needed, with an appeal for questions. The mass of information which he elicited was due to the simplicity of his talk with all who came to him. “He asked me my views as if I were of his own standing,” said the young secretary of the Anti-Sweating League after his first interview.
[Footnote: Apart from these scattered conversations, Sir Charles met the united representatives of trade-unionism once a year at the opening of Parliament, for then the Trade-Union Congress Parliamentary Committee lunched with him and talked over Labour questions at the House of Commons. This custom, which began in 1880 and lasted through Mr. Broadhurst’s secretaryship, was resumed in 1898, and was continued to the end, and the meeting was fruitful of results. “These annual conversations,” says Mr. Davis, “had much more to do with the policy of the legislative Labour party than could be understood by the party as a