Dilke (7 page)

Within a month or so of his first speech he was sharply at odds with the Liberal Government, which he found excessively timid, on an election expenses bill, on a move to disenfranchise a corrupt borough, on university tests, on competitive entry to the civil service, and on the navy estimates. On the first four points he was strongly radical, but on the last he supported a technical criticism put forward by the former Conservative First Lord of the Admiralty. These displays of independence brought remonstrances both from the Chief Whip, George Glyn, and from Sir Wentworth Dilke. He was disinclined to listen to either. “I don't mean to let either you or Glyn frighten me into supporting the Government when I think they are wrong,” he wrote to his father in April, “but I vote with them when I am at all doubtful. I voted with them against Groves on
d. postage which was a very tight fit for my conscience.”
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This was one of the last letters he wrote to his father. Sir Wentworth Dilke was at that time on a tour of northern Europe with his younger son. He reached St. Petersburg, where he was to be English Commissioner at a Horticultural Exhibition, but almost as soon as he got there he was attacked by what was described as a “deadly form of Russian influenza.” Charles Dilke was summoned from London by telegram and set out immediately for Russia. Before he could complete the long train journey across Europe, his father was dead. In St. Petersburg he could do no more than arrange for the transportation of the body back to England, and make some useful Russian contacts which he was to follow up in a series of seven return visits in the following three years.
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In the course of his twenty-sixth year, therefore, Charles Dilke not only became a member of Parliament, but also succeeded to his father's baronetcy and to a large part of his family fortune. Wentworth Dilke divided his property into two unequal parts, two-thirds going with the tide to his elder son, and one-third to his younger son. Three years later Charles Dilke was to alter this arrangement by voluntarily making over a sixth of the total to Ashton Dilke and thus placing himself and his brother upon an equal footing. In the subsequent decade Ashton Dilke, largely as a result of successful newspaper proprietorship, became a very much richer man than his brother. But Charles Dilke was never badly off. He did not, of course, have the income of a great landed magnate or a famous financier, but for a member of the top ranks of the upper-middle class, pursuing throughout most of his life no gainful occupation, he was extremely well placed. In 1870 his unearned income was £8,000. By 1872, when the new arrangement with Ashton Dilke had been made, it had fallen to £7,000, and by 1880, owing to the “depression of trade,” it had fallen further to £5,700. In this last year, however, it was supplemented by an official salary for part of the year which amounted to £980. He saved little, as indeed, with a capital of £100,000 at his disposal, he had small need to do, but in most years he lived within his income. 1872, the year of his first marriage, when he spent £9,330, was an exception, but 1880, with total outgoings of £5,050, was a more typical year.

About half of Dilke's income came from journalistic properties with which his grandfather had been concerned. In 1880, which was a bad year, these provided £2,845—£1,900 from the
Athenœum
, £620 from the
Gardener's Chronicle
, and £325 from
Notes and Queries
. Of the remainder, nearly £1,800 came from dividends and interest on various Stock Exchange securities, £700 from house and other property in London, and the remaining £1,150 from miscellaneous sources, including
one or two small family trusts.
Greater Britain
, twelve years after publication, produced a royalty of £8 12s.

Despite this comparative affluence to which he succeeded, Charles Dilke did not respond to his inheritance by any immediate increase in his scale of living. On the contrary, one of his first actions was to dispose of Alice Holt—“a mere shooting place”—and of Hawkley, another Hampshire property which his father had acquired. 76, Sloane Street, on the other hand, now became Charles Dilke's own home, and remained so until the end of his life. Mrs. Chatfield, his grandmother, continued to run the house, as she had done in his father's lifetime, and her niece, Miss Folkard, and Ashton Dilke, when he was not at Cambridge or abroad, continued to live there.

Dilke's activities in English politics were reduced neither by the death of his father nor by the rearrangement of affairs and the Russian visits to which this gave rise. During 1869, his first session in Parliament, he succeeded, with Jacob Bright, in restoring to women ratepayers the right to vote in municipal elections which they had lost in 1835. He also took the lead in securing the abolition of hanging, drawing and quartering in New Zealand. At the end of that year, he worked hard for Odger, who was supported also by Fitzmaurice and Fawcett, at the Southwark by-election. Odger stood as a radical working man's candidate against an official Whig, and the result of the contest was to hand to the Tories what was normally a safe Liberal seat. Another result was to strengthen Dilke's sense of isolation from the main body of his party, and to turn his thoughts increasingly towards some sort of independent radical organisation.
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During the session of 1870 Dilke was again active in the cause of women's suffrage, and succeeded, once more in association with Jacob Bright, in obtaining a Second Reading for a measure providing for this. The bill died in Committee, but it was the only time until 1897 that the House of Commons pronounced in favour of the principle. In this year, too, Dilke became chairman of the Commons Preservation Society, which fought a largely successful campaign, both inside and outside Parliament, to stop the enclosure of open spaces—a process which had been going on fast for the previous quarter of a century. “We saved Wisley Common and Epping Forest,” Dilke noted. Another office which Dilke took on at the same time was that of secretary of the newly-formed Radical Club. The club was to have forty members, half of them in the House and half outside. Mill was the leading member, and others of note were John Morley, Leslie Stephen, Frank Hill (the editor of the
Daily News
), and Henry Sidgwick. It never attained quite the influence which was anticipated by its founders.

By far the most important issue in home politics during these years was the education controversy. English popular education was appallingly inadequate. In Birmingham, which was to become the centre of a great agitation, less than half the children received any schooling at all, and that given to most of the remainder was irregular in time and indifferent in quality. In the rest of the country the position was little better. Such schools as existed were voluntary and denominational. The demand for a large measure of educational reform was greatly reinforced by the franchise reform of 1867. There were obvious political as well as commercial dangers in allowing the urban working class, now given the vote, to remain so largely illiterate. When the Liberal Government came into office, a number of its members and most of its supporters believed that one of its most pressing tasks was to introduce a national system of elementary education. And at least one powerful group amongst these supporters—the nonconformist middle-class element—insisted that the national system should be universal, compulsory and non-sectarian. Such religious
instruction as continued in the schools should be confined to simple bible-teaching. This was the basis on which, at the beginning of 1869, the National Education League was set up, with George Dixon, one of the members for Birmingham, as chairman, Jesse Collings as secretary, and Joseph Chamberlain as vice-chairman.

Chamberlain, seven years Dilke's senior, was then thirty-three years of age. He was a successful business man, with no political experience—he did not become a member of the Birmingham City Council until later that year—but with a pulsating, ruthless energy, and a clear if sometimes narrow sense of political purpose. He was by no means an uncultivated man. Indeed, for one of his background at the time he was very much the reverse. He spoke French well, he was widely read, and he was always willing to be interested in new subjects, from painting to wine, of which he had previously known little. But the pursuit of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge were completely subordinated, with him, to the achievement of results. He wanted power, although he was indifferent to place, and he was contemptuous of speculation that did not lead to action.

From the first he was the effective leader of the Education League; and he made it, in the words of his biographer, “the most powerful engine of agitation since the Anti-Corn Law League.”
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But it was not powerful enough to make the Government produce the sort of bill which it wanted. The Prime Minister was about as far from his nonconformist supporters on the education issue as it is possible to imagine. Like many highly-educated classicists, he was never very interested in the subject, and least of all was he interested during the period of preparation of the Bill when his mind was wrapped in the Irish land question to the exclusion of almost all else. In so far as he did think about the matter his thoughts were those of a High Anglican who attached first importance to the proper teaching of the catechism. From this it followed naturally, as he was later laconically to tell a Hawarden audience, that he thought “voluntary schools the best.”

The member of the Cabinet most directly concerned with
the issue was Lord de Grey, the Lord President. Although a man of firm Liberal views on most subjects, de Grey was soon to become a convert to Roman Catholicism, and was no better from the nonconformist point of view than Gladstone himself. The third minister involved was W. E. Forster, who had charge of the bill in the House of Commons. Forster, who shared with the Queen alone the great Victorian distinction of having a railway terminus
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named after him, seemed more promising to the Education League. He was a Quaker by upbringing, and he had been excluded from that communion on the ground that he had married a sister of Matthew Arnold. He had spent twenty years of his life preaching the need for State action to remedy the deficiencies of English education, and he sat for Bradford, which had a strong radical tradition. But Forster was a complicated man. Despite his Quaker background and his marriage with Dr. Arnold's daughter, his favourite recreation was card-playing and his favourite companion in this pursuit was the Duchess of Manchester. He developed a close sympathy for the Anglican church and a desire to preserve what was good in the existing order—which meant building a national education system around the framework of the voluntary schools. In addition he was a stubborn, irascible man, with a great capacity for defying his constituents or anyone else who disagreed with him.

The bill which Forster introduced into the House of Commons on February 17th, 1870, in a speech of high distinction, and which he was later to defend with unfailing tenacity, was a major blow to the nonconformists and the radicals. The existing voluntary schools were to be the pivot of the new system. Indeed the denominations were to be given a year's grace in which to fill up gaps before any public elementary school should be established; and even in these public elementary schools any religious instruction which the newly-established local School Boards thought proper might be provided. The National Education League responded to the challenge by launching a new campaign and by organising a great deputation, nearly 500 strong, including forty-six members
of Parliament, which waited upon Gladstone, de Grey and Forster at 10, Downing Street, on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 9th. There were two principal spokesmen of the deputation. The first was Chamberlain, still very new to national politics; and the second was Dilke, who had more political sophistication and more experience, but less years and, perhaps, less natural authority on the issue.

Dilke's position in the controversy was somewhat different from Chamberlain's. He was not a nonconformist provincial manufacturer. He was a metropolitan
rentier
, whose religious views when they existed were Anglican, but who was passing through a period of temporary scepticism. As such he was not particularly attracted by the “bible-teaching” approach of the National Education League. Nevertheless he was a radical, suspicious of Gladstone, impatient of the established English tradition, and horrified by the relative educational backwardness of his country. He was therefore more than willing to accept the chairmanship of the London branch of Chamberlain's League and to take a prominent part in the deputation to the Prime Minister. But he was essentially a secularist and not a protestant in his approach to the question of religion in schools. Later in the year he was the only Liberal member of Parliament who voted against the Cowper-Temple amendment, which was accepted by the Government as its main concession to nonconformist pressure and which provided that, in the Board schools, a simple undenominational religion should be taught. This compromise, in Dilke's view, did injustice to important classes in the community—notably the Roman Catholics and the non-believers—while the religion which it would introduce would be only “of the driest and baldest kind, and such as would be hardly worthy of the name.” In this view he was supported by Mill but by hardly anyone else. The London branch of the League was not with him, and he resigned the chairmanship. Chamberlain, still a practising Unitarian at this time, believed that secularism would be a hopelessly disruptive platform on which to stand. And Harcourt, who was working in partial alliance with the League, agreed with Chamberlain from the very different
premise of a loose, Whiggish attachment to the Church of England, to which religious body he usually referred in patronising, Erastian terms as the “parliamentary church.” “Now as a politician (not as a philosopher),” he wrote to Dilke, “I am quite satisfied that neither in the House of Commons nor in the country can we beat Denominationalism by Secularism.”
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