by Roy Jenkins
His own activities concerned the promotion of three parliamentary resolutions and one bill. The first resolution, which was carried, provided for the setting up of a committee to enquire into the working of the Ballot Act. Dilke had believed from the outset that secrecy was vitiated by the system of numbering the voting papers which was (and still is) in force. “A dull speech on a dull subject,” was his comment on his own performance, but he secured his immediate object. The second related to the need for a redistribution of seats, never a popular subject with the House of Commons, and less so than usual at a time when more than 400 members sat for constituencies whose existence could not be justified by their size. Dilke did not succeed in carrying this resolution, but he got the whole Liberal party to commit itself to his support.
The third resolution drew attention to the abuses of unre-formed borough corporations, which were such an inherently funny subject that even Dilke’s treatment of them kept the House in almost continuous laughter. He was answered by Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he had come to know well a few weeks previously when he had taken him to “breakfast” with Gambetta, and who, Dilke thought, was funnier than he himself had been, although not so respectful of the truth.
“One of the Corporations which I had attacked was that of Woodstock,” he wrote, “and Randolph Churchill brought the Prince of Wales down to the House to hear his defence of his constituency. I had said in my speech that the Mayor of Woodstock had been lately fined by his own Bench, he being a publican, for breaking the law in a house the property of the Corporation, and that he had said on that occasion in public court, after hearing the evidence of the police: “I have always had a high respect for the police, but in future I shall have none.” Randolph Churchill, answering me, said that I had slightly mistaken the Mayor’s words, and that what he had really said was: “I have always had a high respect for the police, but in future I shall have more.” After the debate was over, Randolph came up to me outside, and said: “I was terrified lest you should have heard anything to-day, but I see you have not.” I said: “What?” He said: “He was fined again yesterday.”6
Dilke’s bill was an Allotments Extension Bill, which had originally been drawn up for Mill and which sought to provide for the letting to cottagers of lands held for the benefit of the poor. Here again Dilke did not succeed in carrying the House, but committed the Liberal party. “(They) were all four great successes, and so spoken of in all the papers,” he wrote of his parliamentary enterprises of the year.
During the summer of 1875 Dilke published Papers of a Critic, a two-volume collection of the essays and articles of his grandfather, introduced by a 30,000-word memoir which he had written in France the previous autumn. This work, naturally enough, created no great stir, although Disraeli, to whom Dilke had sent a copy, pronounced it “very refreshing.”
The session over, Dilke made another trip around the world. He visited Miss Field in New York, and then went to Japan, China, Java and Singapore. He was back in London by January, 1876, and he published an account of his travels in the Far East in a series of magazine articles which were later to be appended, somewhat incongruously, as additional chapters to subsequent editions of Greater Britain.
The session of 1876 was a comparatively uneventful one for Dilke. There were no great parliamentary controversies of which he was the centre, and the election of Chamberlain to the House of Commons, in June, was more important to him than anything which occurred within the walls of the chamber itself. Chamberlain had wanted to come into Parliament for some time. At the general election of 1874 he had stood unsuccessfully for Sheffield, and he had subsequently considered the possibility of being adopted for Norwich or Northampton. He was torn between his desire to complete his identification with Birmingham by becoming one of its members and his conviction that it was useless to enter the House of Commons after the age of forty. By the margin of a few weeks he was able to attain both his objectives. At the beginning of 1876, George Dixon, the chairman of the Education League and the senior of the three members for the town, indicated that he might be contemplating retirement. Thereafter Chamberlain and his supporters gave him no respite. Dixon was soon regretting that he had ever raised the issue. He was sufficiently attached to the House of Commons to come back later for another seat, but he was not allowed to change his mind about Birmingham. At the end of May he announced that he was applying for the Chiltern Hundreds. Chamberlain had lost Dixon’s friendship,[6] but he got his seat. He was returned unopposed on June 17th, but was prevented from appearing in the House of Commons for several weeks by a sharp, first attack of gout—a malady which, he thought, should be “reserved by a just providence for Tories exclusively,” but which in fact claimed not only himself but also Dilke and Morley as victims. By mid-July he had recovered, and on the 13th of the month, exactly five days after his fortieth birthday, he was introduced into the House of Commons by John Bright and Joseph Cowen, the radical member for Newcastle.
Dilke, although not asked to be one of Chamberlain’s sponsors on this occasion,[7] immediately set about his introduction to London political and social life. The new member for Birmingham did not acquire a London house until four years later, when he became a Minister, and, particularly at first, he passed many of his nights under Dilke’s roof. Almost as frequently as they could be absent from the House of Commons, there were dinner parties in Sloane Street designed to introduce Chamberlain to Dilke’s friends. Chamberlain was a willing guest at almost all their gatherings. Once, when Dilke had suggested they should dine together at the Political Economy Club, Chamberlain had written protesting that he was “not interested in the gay science or its professors”; but in general he was happy to be presented to all whom Dilke suggested—artists, writers, diplomats, soldiers or politicians. Nor were Dilke’s activities with Chamberlain confined to the evenings. He constantly took him to art galleries and wrote in February, 1877: “We had now the habit, whenever he came to stay with me . . . of going to the picture exhibitions.”7 A month later he even took him to the Boat Race—“at an unearthly hour in the morning for his lazy habits.”
At the end of Dilke’s most intensive period of Chamberlain dinners, in the first weeks of the session of 1877, the latter was summoned to Marlborough House to dine with the Prince of Wales. Dilke, who at that time did not know the Prince, although he was later to become one of his intimate acquaintances, wrote rather doubtfully: “I call this nobbling my party.” The “party” to which Dilke was referring and to which, he hastened to add, he did not normally apply the possessive pronoun, was composed of six members. Apart from Chamberlain and Dilke himself, there were Dillwyn, the member for Swansea, “who looked like a Methodist parson and shot like an angel,” Cowen of Newcastle, Thomas Burt, the miner who sat for Morpeth, and Edmund Gray, the Nationalist owner of the Dublin Freemen’s Journal. These six held an eve-of-the-session dinner party at 76, Sloane Street in 1877, but “the dinner . . . which assembled democratically without dressing in order to suit Burt’s habits, was not graced by that copy of the Queen’s Speech which is sent by the Government to the leaders of the regular opposition. Chamberlain and I,” Dilke added, “dressed after dinner and went off to Lady Granville’s to the regular Liberal Party Assembly where the Queen’s Speech was shown to us by Hartington.”8
This small group quickly began to disintegrate. Cowen became too friendly to the foreign policy of the Government, and Burt was dropped because “he never originated anything and was of no utility.” Gray presented a rather different problem. His chief sin appeared to be that he got drunk at Dilke’s house, left with Chamberlain’s hat, and took it to Rome with him on the following morning—an inverted act of cardinal-making to which Chamberlain reacted most unfavourably. Dillwyn remained both faithful and acceptable, and the party became one of three—“two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain and myself as equal leaders.”
The exiguousness of this group did not greatly worry Dilke. He found his relat
ions with his official leaders much smoother in this parliament than in the previous one, and he became more interested in being a force, although a firmly radical one, within the Liberal party as a whole, than in the leadership of an isolated faction. In May of 1876 he had become chairman of the Elections Committee of the Liberal Central Association, an office which he was to hold until 1880, and which gave him an influence upon the choice of candidates and a considerable position within the party machine. Then there was his personal respect for Lord Hartington, much stronger up to this point than any favourable feeling which had ever been aroused in him by Mr. Gladstone’s personality. On October 16th, 1876, he had gone so far as to write to Harcourt:
“I, as you know, think Hartington the best man for us—the Radicals—because he is quite fearless, always goes with us when he thinks it safe for the party, and generally judges rightly—or takes the soundest advice on this point. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever made a mistake at all—as yet; but Chamberlain seems, by a sort of quasi-hereditary Birmingham position, to look at him as Bright used to look at Palmerston.”9
The major foreign policy issue of the parliament—the revival of the Eastern Question, which began with the Bulgarian massacres of May, 1876, and subsided only after the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878—served further to remove Dilke from an extremist position. It was not so much that he came to agree with his leaders, which indeed would have been difficult in a period when they were so little inclined to agree with each other, as that he fell out of sympathy with his normal radical allies. From the “peace-at-any-price” men he was quickly separated, as was inevitable in almost any foreign policy dispute, but he also became detached from Chamberlain, who, he thought, went too far in support of Gladstone’s agitation.
This agitation began with the sale within three weeks of 200,000 copies of Gladstone’s hastily written and emotionally charged pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Dilke had little liking for it. He did not go as far as Beaconsfield, who said that Gladstone was worse than any Bulgarian horror, but he told Harcourt: “If Gladstone goes on much longer, I shall turn Turk.” He did not deny the evils of Turkish rule, but he believed those of Russian rule to be if anything worse.
“Were the choice between Russia at Constantinople and Turkey at Constantinople,” he told a meeting of his constituents at the beginning of 1878, “I should prefer the latter. The Turkish is in ordinary times a less stifling despotism than the Russian. . . . The Turks let any man go to church and read any book, the Russians do not, and in such a position of power as Constantinople I should prefer the Turk if, as I do not think, the choice lay only there.”10
The third choice, at which Dilke hinted in this passage, lay, he believed, in a greater Greece. This was the result which he would have liked to see emerging from the crisis, and this was a policy which was to be associated with his name for the rest of his life, which was to make him in Athens one of the most prized of English philhellenes, and to cause the municipality there to name a street in his honour.[8]
At first this approach led Dilke to support Hartington rather than Gladstone. Later, however, when Gladstone had tabled his four resolutions demanding the coercion of Turkey, which came up for debate in May, 1877, and threatened almost to destroy the Liberal party, Dilke felt that he must if necessary vote with Gladstone and against the titular leader of the opposition. The need to make this choice was in the event avoided, partly by Gladstone not pressing two of the resolutions, and partly by Hartington voting, with more loyalty than conviction, for the other two; but Dilke felt that, while open schism had been avoided, Gladstone had so mishandled the situation as to make himself look ridiculous. He therefore moved into a position, not of extreme, but of central isolation.
“The new position of the Eastern Question,” he wrote in the summer of 1877, “although it did not unite me with Mr. Gladstone, made a political breach between myself and Hartington. He fell more and more under the somewhat stupid influence of the surroundings of the Duchess of Manchester, and I, holding a position between the two wings of the party, found few with whom I myself agreed. Randolph Churchill, who upon this question was perhaps sincere, made advances towards me which led to joint action . . . in 1878. But in the autumn of ’77 I was isolated, for Chamberlain went, although with moderation, into Mr. Gladstone’s agitation.”11
One reason for Dilke’s isolation lay in the unusual combination of radicalism, realism and detailed information which always formed the basis of his foreign policy thinking. Another was that, unlike almost all the other radicals in the House, he was a metropolitan and not a provincial member. And there has rarely been a sharper split between the feeling of London on the one hand and that of Scotland and the provincial centres on the other than in these years of Beaconsfield ascendancy. Gladstone attained unprecedented popularity in the North, but was execrated in fashionable circles in the capital; and he exacerbated the split by the sharpness of his comments upon it. “Looking over all the great achievements that have made the last half century illustrious,” he announced on one occasion, “not one of them would have been effected if the opinions of the West End of London had prevailed.”12 But it was not the opinion of the West End only which was hostile to Gladstone at this time. “On Sunday, March 10th (1878), in coming back from the Grosvenor Gallery,” Dilke wrote, “I passed a great mob who were going to howl at Mr. Gladstone, at this time the ordinary Sunday afternoon diversion of the London rough.”13 On this and other occasions they howled sufficiently hard to wreck the windows of Gladstone’s new house in Harley Street.
Dilke, therefore, had a certain obvious constituency interest in not appearing too resistant to Beaconsfield’s determination to make the Russians disgorge part of their gains from the Turks; and the interest was the stronger because of his view that Chelsea was far from safe. But these considerations did not lead him to jump on the Government’s jingo band wagon.
“There was a moment after the fall of Lord Derby (from the Foreign Office) when I became a supporter of the Government in their Eastern policy,” Dilke wrote, “for they appeared to me to adopt my own, but it did not last long. . . . Speaking in the House on April 9th against the calling out of national reserves . . . . I repudiated the defence which had come from some on the Liberal side, of the conduct of Russia, and, looking upon the Government despatch as a vindication primarily of general European interests, and, in the second place, of Hellenic interests, against Russian violence and universal Slav dominion throughout the Levant, I separated myself from my party and praised the new Minister of Foreign Affairs. I was afterwards bitterly disappointed at finding the policy of the April circular abandoned by its authors in the Congress of Berlin.”14
Even during this brief period of agreement with Lord Salisbury, Dilke spoke against the Government’s action in calling out the reserves. He wanted pressure put upon Russia, but he wanted it done by conference rather than by force, and by Europe acting in concert rather than by England acting alone. Furthermore, he wanted the pressure directed not towards the maintenance of the integrity of the Turkish Empire but towards the full independence of the Balkan nationalities—it had been on this last point that he had co-operated, briefly and fruitlessly, with Lord Randolph Churchill in the early spring. These desires separated him sharply from Gladstone and most radicals but they separated him equally from the policy pursued by the Government both before and during the Congress of Berlin.
In these years of foreign policy dispute Dilke’s political position became greatly strengthened. A period of rapidly shifting alliances within the Liberal party was almost inevitably helpful to one who had previously been a rather isolated and intransigent figure. Men who had hitherto assumed automatically that he would be against them began to bid for his support. He was no longer outside the range of combination; and he came increasingly to be consulted by his party chiefs. He assisted the process by a series of highly competent speeches in the House, and by occasional well-reported, we
ll-informed, and independent addresses to his constituents.
Furthermore, in the session of 1878, he succeeded in carrying into law two important measures of electoral reform. The first was a Registration Bill, which although modest in its apparent impact, eventually effected a great addition to the number of voters on the lists. The second, an Hours of Polling Bill, made it much easier for those entitled to vote to do so. Hitherto, polling had closed at 4 p.m., a time by which it was quite impossible for many working-class voters to get to the booths. “Dilke’s Act,” as it was widely known, extended the hours until 8 p.m. At first it applied only to London, but was later extended to cover the whole country.
Not only did Dilke’s political reputation grow rapidly, but he also had the agreeable experience of being frequently told that this was so. The most notable of his political admirers was Lord Beaconsfield. Dilke never knew him well, and never indeed met him outside the House of Commons until a few weeks before his death in 1881; but he had a high respect for the successful adventure of the Prime Minister’s career, and long retained as one of his most lively memories a picture of the latter leaving the House of Commons for the last time in August, 1876, “in a long white overcoat and dandified lavender kid gloves, leaning on his secretary’s arm, and shaking hands with a good many people, none of whom knew that he was bidding farewell. . . .”15 Beaconsfield, in turn, saw in Dilke the most effective politician of his generation. “. . . Mr. Disraeli stated it as his opinion,” according to G. O. Trevelyan, “that Sir Charles Dilke was the most useful and influential member, among quite young men, that he had ever known.”16 Soon Beaconsfield went still further, and at the beginning of 1879 was responsible for a widely disseminated prophecy that Dilke was almost certain to be Prime Minister. Dilke heard of it from Chamberlain and from many others too. A year later he had become almost too well spoken of, by the newspapers at any rate, for his popularity, and was thought to have departed so far from his former intransigence that he wrote in the following terms to Mrs. Pattison: