The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

S >> Stephen Gwynn >> The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50

But, happily, in all the ordinary intercourse of life, ease and geniality
were native to him; he got on readily with all manner of men; and nothing
could have been better for him than the plunge into a society where all
was in the rough. He shed his priggishness once and for all somewhere on
the "Great Divide." What makes the permanent charm of _Greater Britain_ is
its sense of enjoyment, its delighted acceptance of new and unconventional
ways. In crossing the plains, he first made the experience of actual
physical privations, and for the first time saw and fell in love with "the
bright eyes of danger."

Through all the seriousness and solid concentration of _Greater Britain_
there runs a vein of high spirits. Facts are there, but with them is a
ferment of ideas and of feeling. Part of that feeling is just a contagious
delight in the joyous business of living. But the strong current which
lifted him so buoyantly was an emotion which no shyness or stiffness
hampered in the expression--in its essence an exultant patriotism of race.
Democracy meant to him in this stage of his development, not any abstract
theory of government, but the triumph of English ideas.

California, then in the full rush of mining, was the touchstone of
Democracy; where, out of the chaos of blackguardism, through lynchings and
vigilance committees, judge and jury were at work evolving decent security
and settled government.

"The wonder is" (he wrote) "not that, in such a State as California
was till lately, the machinery of government should work unevenly, but
that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a
test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden
State and City....

"California is too British to be typically American: it would seem
that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or
the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is
only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at
Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the
rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States--
that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in
the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that
there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice
--that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are
imposing English institutions on the world." [Footnote: _Greater
Britain_ (popular edition), p. 193.]

The same thought is summed up in the chapter where he sets down his
recollected impressions on board the ship that carried him southwards
along the shores of America from the Golden Gate towards Panama:

"A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to
the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from
the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat
of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on
the shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first 'smells the
molasses' at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits
him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You may have
seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have
failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that
her image grows up in the mind.

"The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York
is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he
leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact,
and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race--
the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the
man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food
costs four pence."[Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 216.]

That is the governing idea of the book--an idea in which were merged those
other projects which passed before him when he halted at Denver; and it is
set forth with most fulness and vigour in the opening chapters, which deal
with a "Greater Britain" that is outside the British Empire--with the
Britain that no longer dwells under the British flag.

He left the Pacific shores in tremendous spirits, and on the voyage to New
Zealand was a provider of entertainment for his fellow-
passengers, writing an _opera bouffe_, _Oparo, or the Enchanting Isle_, in
which he himself spoke the prologue as Neptune, 'two hundred miles west-
sou'-west of Pitcairn Island.' His head might be full of politics and of
the ethics which touch on politics; but he was in the humour to turn his
mind to jesting and to find material for comedy as well as for grave
discourse in the advent of white men to cannibal islands.

The rest of the book is a sequel or corollary. English institutions are
studied in New Zealand and in Australia, among autonomous communities of
Britons. Later on they are studied in Ceylon and India, where they have
their application to white men, living not as part of a democracy, but as
the arbiters of their fate to Orientals.

Dilke's own exposition of this governing conception was set out in the
preface to the book:

"In 1866 and 1867 I followed England round the world: everywhere I was
in English-speaking or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that
climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples, had
modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was
always, one.

"The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of
strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur
of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps
eventually to overspread.

"In America the peoples of the world are being fused together, but
they are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue
are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that
Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater
Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more
than found plantations of her own--that she has imposed her
institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of
Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the
world.

"Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds:
the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the
Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small
islands are by courtesy styled 'Great,' America, Australia, India,
must form a 'Greater Britain.'"

He wrote of this passage in his Memoir:

'The preface of _Greater Britain_, in which the title is justified and
explained, is the best piece of work of my life. It states the
doctrine on which our rule should be based--remembered in Canada--
forgotten in South Africa--the true as against the bastard
Imperialism. As will be seen from it, I included in my "Greater
Britain" our Magna Graecia of the United States. As late as 1880,
twelve years after the publication of my book, not only was the title
"Greater Britain" often used for the English world--as I used it--but,
speaking at the Lotus Club of New York, Mr. Whitelaw Reid used it
specially of the United States. Tom Hughes, he declared, "led a
pioneer English colony to this Greater Britain, to seek here a fuller
expansion." It is contracting an idea which, as its author, I think
lofty and even noble, to use "Greater Britain" only of the British
Empire, as is now done.'

The touch of enthusiasm in this book lifted his writing to its highest
plane. He himself was specially proud of the praise which P. G. Hamerton
bestowed on the landscape passages: [Footnote: See Appendix, pp. 72, 73.]
and they have the quality, which his grandfather schooled him in, of being
really descriptive. But his characteristic excellence is found far more in
such a passage as that which follows his sketch of the time when "the
thinking men of Boston and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell
Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more ... morally seceded from their
country's councils," because in those councils the slave-holders still had
the upper hand. Here are a few of its ringing sentences:

"In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first
brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her
cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest
blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging
on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks,
and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and
Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin
almost every male student and professor marched, and the University
teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8,000 school-teachers
in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3,000 volunteered for
the war. Everywhere the students were foremost among the Volunteers,
and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one."
[Footnote: _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 41.]

The book was written at high pressure--in twelve months of desk work,
beginning in June, 1867, when the traveller returned from his year's
wandering--and it was not written under favourable conditions. He had
contracted malaria in Ceylon, which gradually destroyed his appetite, and
so induced a state of weakness leading to delirium at night. The end was
an attack of typhoid fever, which came on while the book was still in the
press; and his father, thinking it important to hurry the publication,
took on himself to correct the proofs while his son was ill. The result
was a crop of blunders; but nothing interfered with the unforeseen success
of the book, which was published in the last months of 1868. Large
portions of the work were translated into Russian, its circulation in
America was enormous (under a pirate flag), and in England it rapidly ran
through three editions, and was praised in the newspapers almost without
exception.

In the reviews which appeared there stood out a general acceptance of the
book as fair and friendly to all. In spite of its audacious patriotism, it
was no way limited in sympathy. This fairness of mind received the homage
of Thiers in a great defence of his Protectionist budget. "Un membre du
parlement d'Angleterre, qui est certainement un des hommes les plus
eclaires de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'ecrire un livre des plus
remarquables," he said, and pressed the argument that Charles Dilke's
defence of Protection from the American and Australian point of view
gained authority by the very fact that its author was _libre-echangiste
d'Europe_. Dilke always called himself, more accurately, "a geographical
Free Trader." He accepted, that is to say, the doctrine for Great Britain
unreservedly, only because of Great Britain's geographical conditions.
This was very different from the orthodox English Liberal's view of Free
Trade as a universal maxim to be accepted under penalty of political
excommunication.

On a matter of even wider import for Imperial statesmanship his sympathies
were at once and clearly declared. From this his first entry into the
arena of public debate he was the champion of the dark-skinned peoples--
all the more, perhaps, because he recognized clearly that the Anglo-Saxons
were "the only extirpating race." In lands where white men could rear
their children it seemed to him inevitable that the Anglo-Saxon race
should replace the coloured peoples as, to take his own illustration, the
English fly was superseding all other flies in New Zealand. Yet at least
while the American-Indians or the Maoris remained, he was determined to
secure justice for them; and he incurred angry criticism for outspoken
condemnation of English dealing with the natives in Tasmania. But a great
part of his book is devoted to discussion of questions which must be of
constant recurrence, affecting the relations of Englishmen to natives in
lands where the English are only a governing handful. These matters
received special comment in a letter from John Stuart Mill at Avignon on
February 9th, 1869. Mill, although a stranger to Dilke, was moved to write
his commendation in the most ungrudging terms:

"It is long" (he said) "since any book connected with practical
politics has been published on which I build such high hopes of the
future usefulness and distinction of the writer, showing, as it does,
that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on
many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly
predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and
enlightened views of them.

"There are so few opinions expressed in any part of your book with
which I do not, so far as my knowledge extends, fully and heartily
coincide, that I feel impelled to take the liberty of noting the small
number of points of any consequence on which I differ from you. These
relate chiefly to India; though on that subject also I agree with you
to a much greater extent than I differ. Not only do I most cordially
sympathize with all you say about the insolence of the English even in
India to the native population, which has now become not only a
disgrace, but, as you have so usefully shown, a danger to our dominion
there; but I have been much struck by the sagacity which, in so short
a stay as yours must have been, has enabled you to detect facts which
are as yet obvious to very few: as, for instance, the immense increase
of all the evils and dangers you have pointed out by the substitution
of the Queen's army for a local force of which both men and officers
had at least a comparatively permanent tie to the country; and again,
that the superior authority in England, having the records of all the
presidencies before it, and corresponding regularly with them all, is
the only authority which really knows India; the local governments and
offices only knowing, at most, their own part of it, and having
generally strong prejudices in favour of the peculiarities of the
system of government there adopted, and against those of the other
party." [Footnote: James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, was the
historian of India, and for a long time one amongst its official
rulers at the India House.]

Then followed an exhaustive and very friendly criticism, in which the most
interesting points are his challenge of Dilke's proposal to make the
Secretary of State for India a permanent office, not changing with party
upheavals, and, lastly, this:

"If there is any criticism of a somewhat broader character that I
could make, I think it would be this--that (in speaking of the
physical and moral characteristics of the populations descended from
the English) you sometimes express yourself almost as if there were no
sources of national character but race and climate, as if whatever
does not come from race must come from climate, and whatever does not
come from climate must come from race. But as you show in many parts
of your book a strong sense of the good and bad influences of
education, legislation, and social circumstances, the only inference I
draw is that you do not, perhaps, go so far as I do myself in
believing these last causes to be of prodigiously greater efficacy
than either race or climate, or the two combined."

The writing of this letter marked the beginning of a friendship which
lasted till Mill's death. If the book had done nothing but secure Dilke
this friend, it would have been well rewarded. But rewards were not
lacking. The fortunate author was crowned with a great popular success
invaluable for a young man about to enter political life. Yet more
important even than the prestige acquired was the sum of experience
gained.

APPENDIX

EXTRACT FROM "LANDSCAPE," BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON

A traveller who did not set out with the intention of word-painting, but
to see how men of English race fared wherever they had settled, said that
'travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's value, to
despise no feature of the landscape.' If Sir Charles Dilke wrote that
rather from the political than the artistic point of view, it is not the
less accurate in any case, for the landscape, however uninteresting it may
seem, or even ugly, is never without its great influence on human
happiness and destiny. The interest in human affairs which Sir Charles
Dilke has in common with most men of any conspicuous ability, does not
prevent him from seeing landscape-nature as well as if his travels had no
other object. His description of the Great Plains of Colorado is an
excellent example of that valuable kind of description which is not merely
an artful arrangement of sonorous words, but perfectly conveys the
character of the landscape, and makes you feel as if you had been there.

"Now great roaring uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy
plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual
change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged
bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing
breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless,
and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless
prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering
feature of the Plains.... The impression is not merely one of size.
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no
patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveller wishing here to
end his days.

"To those who love the sea, there is here a double charm. Not only is
the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the
crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny
blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the
ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it
from the top of the next hillock....

"The colour of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in
fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever." [Footnote: _Greater
Britain_, p. 80 (popular edition).]

If the reader will take the trouble to analyze this description, he will
perceive that, although powerful, it is extremely simple and sober. The
traveller does not call in the aid of poetical comparisons (the only
comparison indulged in is the obvious one of the Atlantic), and the effect
of the description on the mind is due to the extreme care with which the
writer has put together in a short space the special and peculiar
characteristics of the scenery, not forgetting to tell us everything that
we of ourselves would naturally fail to imagine. He corrects, one after
another, all our erroneous notions, and substitutes a true idea for our
false ones. The describer has been thoroughly alive; he has travelled with
his eyes open; so that every epithet tells. The reader feels under a real
obligation; he has not been put off with mere phrases, but is enriched
with a novel and interesting landscape experience.

In a good prose description, such as these by Kingsley and Sir Charles
Dilke, the author has nothing to do but to convey, as nearly as he can, a
true impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties
that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous
misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing
didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions,
without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as
concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; and yet
at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. It
is not easy to fulfil these conditions all at once, and therefore we meet
with many books of travel in which attempted descriptions frequently
occur, which fail, nevertheless, to convey a clear idea of the country. A
weak writer wastes precious space in sentimental phrases or in vain
adjectives that would be equally applicable to many other places, and
forgets to note what is peculiarly and especially characteristic of the
one place that he is attempting to describe.

CHAPTER VII

ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT

I.

While engaged in the writing of Greater Britain, Charles Dilke entered
upon the main business of his life by coming forward as a candidate for
the House of Commons. Immediate action was necessary; for the position of
parties indicated the near approach of a General Election.

The constituency to which he addressed his candidature in the autumn of
1867 was the borough of Chelsea, a new Parliamentary division created by
the Reform Act of that year. It was of vast extent, embracing Chelsea,
Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensal Town, and Kensington. In Chelsea Charles Dilke
had his home, and, as representing the Parliamentary borough, he would
speak "backed by the vote and voice of 30,000 electors." "I would
willingly wait any time," he said in his opening address on November 25th,
in the Vestry Hall at Chelsea, "rather than enter the House of Commons a
member for some small trumpery constituency." The electors should hear his
opinions, "not upon any one subject or upon any two subjects or any three,
but as nearly as might be upon all."

His speech began with the electoral machinery of democracy--questions of
franchise and redistribution.

Purity of election he laid down as a necessary condition of reform, and to
that end two points must be assured: the removal of election petitions
from the House of Commons to a legal tribunal, [Footnote: A Bill with that
object was at the time passing through Parliament.] and, secondly, the
security of the ballot. Upon the first matter he came perhaps to doubt the
new system after he had seen it tried; upon the second he was able to tell
his audience from first-hand knowledge that in Australia opposition to the
ballot was unknown, and that in Virginia a conquered minority looked to it
as their best defence against oppression.

From the machinery of Government he passed to its application. Ireland was
then the burning question, and Dilke's attitude upon Ireland may be
indicated in a sentence. After the Church should have been disestablished,
the land system reformed, [Footnote: His views on the Irish Land Question
had been stated in _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 209: "Customs
and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish
soil, can be recognized and made the basis of legislation without bringing
about the disruption of the Empire. The first Irish question that we shall
have to set ourselves to face is that of land. Permanent tenure is as
natural to the Irish as free-holding to the English people. All that is
needed of our statesmen is that they recognize in legislation that which
they cannot but admit in private talk--namely, that there may be essential
differences between race and race."] and a wide measure of Parliamentary
reform given to Ireland; after they should have passed Fawcett's Bill "for
throwing open Trinity College, Dublin, and destroying the last trace of
that sectarian spirit which has hitherto been allowed to rule in Ireland"
--they might hope "not perhaps for instant quiet in the country, but at
least for the gradual growth of a feeling that we have done our duty, and
that we may well call upon the Irish to do theirs."

There went with that a moderate censure upon the lawlessness of Fenianism.
But the Irish question did not occupy so much space in his discourse as in
those of most speakers at that moment, and this for a reason which he gave
later in his life: 'About Ireland I was never given to saying much,
because, except for a short time in 1885, when moderate Home Rule could
have been carried, I never thoroughly saw my own way.' But as early as
1869 he deplored the lack of local deliberative bodies which elsewhere did
much of the State's work, and in 1871 he advocated their creation as a
means of relieving Parliament. This, rather than any special sympathy with
Nationalism as such, was always the governing consideration with him on
the Irish question. 'I showed in this way,' he notes, 'a working of the
opinion which in 1874 caused me to vote, alone of English members
unpledged by their constituents, in support of Mr. Butt when he brought
forward his Home Rule Bill.' [Footnote: Eight in all voted; all except
Dilke represented Northern constituencies, with a large Irish vote among
miners or operatives.]