I.
From his Russian journeys Sir Charles returned to take part in an election in which occurred his first opportunity for helping the cause of direct Labour Representation. In 1869—
'at the extreme end of the year, I returned to London, and worked hard for Odger in the Southwark Election, in which, opposed by a Conservative and a Liberal (Sir Sydney Waterlow), he beat the Liberal, with the result, however, that the Conservative got in. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice subscribed towards Odger's expenses, and Fawcett also worked for him. The incident contributed a good deal towards that separate organization of the Radicals which was attempted early in the following year.'
Already another organization of far-reaching influence had been planned, and it led to a great alliance.
'In the course of 1869 I became Chairman of the London Branch of the newly formed Education League, and my friendship with Joseph Chamberlain began, he being Chairman of the Committee of the League and its real head.'
Dilke was seven years the junior of Chamberlain, who in 1869 was thirty- three. But he had seven years' Parliamentary seniority over his friend, who did not become a member of the House of Commons till 1876. Chamberlain was in 1869, and indeed for several years later, a politician and member of the Birmingham Town Council, known throughout the Midland area for the boldness of his Radicalism—which did not stop short of avowing Republican principles—and also for extraordinary ability in developing the municipal improvements in which Birmingham under his auspices led the way. He had conceived, and in the Education League partly carried out, the idea of a political association independent of official party control, which should cover the whole country with its branches, and so become a power behind and beyond the Parliamentary leadership. Sir Charles, on his side, brought into the partnership the resources possessed by a young man of considerable reputation both in literature and in public life, who at an early age had established himself in a metropolitan seat.
'The principle of the League was that of general education, and of compulsion and freedom from fees as a consequence. The teaching of religion was left to the Sunday-schools, and upon this head difficulties soon arose.' The mass of English Liberals inherited the Protestant conviction that "simple Bible teaching" could offend nobody, and must be good for everybody, and consequently should be included in the term "education," while the view of more sophisticated politicians was given by Sir William Harcourt (then Mr. Vernon Harcourt). He wrote to Sir Charles in 1870:
"We are fighting with inferior forces, and everything must depend upon husbanding our strength, using it to the best advantage, and not exposing ourselves to needless defeats. We must always seem to win, even though we do not get what we want. That is what up to this point we have accomplished. But we must not allow ourselves to be precipitated upon destruction by men who may be philosophers, but who are no politicians…. We must now retire on the second line of defence. What is that to be? I lay down first that the thing to be resisted is denominationalism. If it can be got rid of altogether— best; but if not, then to the greatest degree—next best. Now, as a politician (not as a philosopher) I am quite satisfied that neither in the House of Commons nor in the country can we beat denominationalism by secularism. If we attempt to meet the flood by this dyke it will come over our heads. We must break the force of the wave by a slope, and deal with its diminished weight afterwards as best we may."
'Harcourt then went on to defend that to which I was strongly opposed —namely, Bible reading—on the ground that "we should give our republic not the best possible laws, but the best which they will bear. This is the essence of politics. All the rest is speculation…. We must make up our minds before the meeting on Monday, for in the multitude of counsellors there is folly."'
A definite principle was at stake. Under this proposal the teaching, though called undenominational, would not in fact be so. Bible reading, subject, no doubt, to a conscience clause, would be enforced on Roman Catholics, Jews, and secularists, and Bible reading, though undenominational as regarded the different divisions of Protestant Christianity, would still be denominational as regards these three: 'I myself took the extreme and logical line of not only opposing Bible reading, but of opposing Mr. Jacob Bright's and Mr. Cowper Temple's amendments for excluding creeds, and for setting up a general undenominational Protestantism of the majority.'
He was in agreement with John Stuart Mill in resisting a proposal which in his opinion did injustice to large classes of the community for the sake of introducing what (in his own words) "could be only religion of the driest and baldest kind, and such as would be hardly worthy of the name."
At the beginning of 1870 Sir Charles was not openly in revolt, though after working for Odger against the Government candidate, he had gone on to condemn in a speech the Whig influences and fear of the House of Lords, which in his opinion were destroying Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill. Mr. Gladstone showed a desire to conciliate this overactive critic by inviting him to second the Address to the Crown.
Accordingly at the opening of Parliament on February 8th, 1870, Sir Charles had his part to play in the modest ceremonial which still survives, rather shamefacedly, in the House of Commons, when a couple of commoners, uniformed or in Court dress, are put forward as the spokesmen of that sombre assembly.
His speech, advocating the European concert, dwelt on the cloudless calm which lay—in February, 1870—over the civilized world, and for another six months wrapped it in delusive peace.
For the moment domestic affairs held the field. In spite of Bright's observation about driving six omnibuses abreast through Temple Bar, Forster's Education Bill was pressed forward along with the Irish Land proposals, and the Government were at once in trouble with their advanced wing, in which Sir Charles Dilke was a leader of revolt. He acted as teller along with Henry Richard when Richard took sixty dissentient Liberals into the Lobby in support of a general motion demanding that school attendance should be compulsory, and that all religious teaching should be separately paid for out of voluntary funds. When compromise was accepted: [Footnote: The Cowper Temple clause practically left religious teaching to local option. Each school was to give or not give such religious teaching as it thought well, so long as no Board School was used to attach a child to a particular denomination.]
'I was, I believe, the only Liberal member who resisted the Cowper Temple amendment as accepted by the Government, and I resigned my post as Chairman of the London Branch of the Education League. I published a letter explaining the reasons for my resignation; the Committee wrote in reply that they fully agreed with me in matters of principle, and asked me to reconsider my resignation.'
This, however, he refused to do, since the London Branch and the League generally were abandoning the principle in the support they gave to compromise.
Throughout the Committee stage his name appears in all the numerous division lists, voting against Government as often as with it. Thus it was from a position of complete independence that he carried two amendments of great importance.
'The Bill as brought in made the School Boards mere committees of Boards of Vestries, and the amendment that School Boards should be elected by the ratepayers, which was forced on and ultimately accepted by the Government, was mine. I also was the author of the proposal that the School Board elections should be by ballot, which was carried.' [Footnote: He always regretted the substitution later of the Educational Committees of County Councils for the School Boards.]
The ballot was then the question of the hour, and it was a matter upon which his study of foreign and Colonial institutions had made him an authority. In 1869 he had given evidence before the Select Committee on Parliamentary and Municipal Elections, 'explaining the working of the ballot in France, in the United States, and, above all, in Tasmania and Australia.' The evidence which he gave was of service in the preparation of the Ballot Bill of 1870, which closely followed the example set by Tasmania and South Australia.
Sir John Gorst, who was already a well-known figure in English politics, though not yet in Parliament, remembered attending a debate specially to hear what this newcomer had to say upon the question of the hour.
This first practical application of the ballot, 'forced on and ultimately accepted by the Government,' did not pass unchallenged. When Sir Charles's amendment was at last put to the vote, he was privileged to tell with George Glyn, the Chief Whip, in a division which took place 'after the fiercest conflict ever up to that known within the walls of Parliament, we having sat up all night.' There was a long series of dilatory motions, a fresh one being moved after a division had disposed of its predecessor 'This was the first birth of obstruction, and the lesson taught by Mr. G. C. Bentinck on this occasion was afterwards applied by "the colonels" in the proceedings on the Army Purchase Scheme in 1871, and then by Butt's Irish after 1874.'
In all the discussions on the Ballot Bill for Parliamentary elections Sir Charles steadily opposed the introduction of a scrutiny which involved the numbering of the ballot papers. This appeared to him 'a pernicious interference with the principle of secrecy, chiefly important because it would be impossible to convince ignorant voters that their votes would not be traced.' His view 'prevailed,' he says, 'in the House of Commons, but the provisions of which we secured the omission from the second Ballot Bill were once more inserted by the House of Lords' at its passage in 1871.
There was another matter connected with the franchise in which Sir Charles had effected by an amendment an even more remarkable change, and that in his first session. The proposal to give women ratepayers the franchise in municipal elections, or rather 'to restore to them a right which was taken away by the Municipal Reform Act of 1835,' was his. Two amendments were on the paper, and though by a chance Mr. Jacob Bright's was taken first, the suggestion, as Mr. Bright admitted, really came from Sir Charles, and it was carried in the session of 1869. This proposal, as he explained to a meeting of the London Society for Woman's Suffrage over which Mrs. Grote presided, was in his opinion 'merely experimental, and only a first step to adult suffrage.' In 1870 he seconded Jacob Bright's Woman's Suffrage Bill, which was carried through the second reading—'the only occasion when a majority of the House of Commons declared for the principle till 1897.' Divergencies of opinion had in the meantime arisen. The Bill of 1870 did not debar married women from obtaining the vote. When in later years a proviso excluding them was introduced, Dilke, with Jacob Bright, withdrew from the parent society. He held throughout his life that to attempt compromise on this matter was to court failure, and that women would never get the vote except as part of a scheme for universal suffrage. This was no mere academic opinion; and he gave later on proof of his earnestness for the principle involved in convincing fashion.
To the argument still urged against that principle—the argument that most women are against it—he gave his answer in 1870:
"You will always find that in the case of any class which has been despotically governed—and though I do not wish to use strong language, it cannot be denied that women have been despotically governed in England, although the despotism has been of a benevolent character—the great majority of that class are content with the system under which they live."
He pointed out that to admit women to the franchise did not compel those to vote who did not desire to do so.
In this matter Jacob Bright was his leading associate in Parliament; but outside Parliament he was working with Mill.
To the two questions already dealt with—Education and Woman's Suffrage— was now added a third, which Sir Charles describes as 'chief of all the questions I had to do with in 1870—the land question.' There is this endorsement on one of Mill's letters written in 1870:
"I acted as his secretary for above a year on (a) his land movement = taxation of land values; (b) the women's suffrage proposal, which followed the carrying of his municipal franchise for women by me in 1869 and the School Boards, 1870."
The Radical Club was founded, with Sir Charles as Secretary, in 1870, and Mill was among the original members of the Club. [Footnote: The others were Professor Cairnes, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Frank Hill (editor of the Daily News), Leslie Stephen, Mr. Leonard Courtney, Mr. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. W. C. Sidgwick, Mr. McCullagh Torrens, and Mr. Fawcett. Sir David Wedderburn, Mr. Peter Taylor, and Mr. Walter Morrison were added at the first meeting, as also was Mr. Hare. At the first meeting it was decided that women should be eligible. Half the Club was to consist of members of Parliament, half of non-members.] From this platform Mill propounded, in 1870, his views on land—views which forty years later became the adopted principles of the Liberal party; and at the inaugural public meeting of the Land Tenure Association in 1870 Sir Charles for the first time promulgated the doctrine of taxing the "unearned increment." He insisted that England's system of land tenure was "unique in the world," and answerable for tragic consequences.
"One who has seen our race abroad under fair conditions knows how frank and handsome the Englishman is elsewhere, and might be here. But when he looks around him in Sheffield or in East London, he sees none but miserable and stunted forms. The life of the English labourer is a steady march down a hill with a poorhouse at the bottom. At the same time the observer finds, when he asks for the remedy, that in these matters there is not a pin to choose between the two parties in the State." [Footnote: A note sent to Lord Courtney in 1909 will show exactly what Sir Charles's position had been on this fundamental matter from the very outset of his political career:
"Mill's object was—
"To claim for the benefit of the State the interception by taxation of a great part of the unearned increase of the value of land which is continually accruing, without effort or outlay by the proprietors, through the growth of population and wealth.
"To purchase land for the State, and let for co-operative agriculture under conditions of efficiency and to smallholders on durable cultivating interests."
He adds a reference to his own Bill "for utilizing public and quasi-
public lands under public management, with repeal of the Statute of
Mortmain and forbidding of alienation."
This Bill was introduced by him in the early seventies, but obtained
no support till 1875 (see Chapter XIII., p. 192).]
Within the previous twenty-five years over six hundred thousand acres of common land had been enclosed, under Orders sanctioned by Parliament. Of this vast amount only four thousand had been set apart for public purposes. In 1866 the commons near London were threatened, and a Society for their preservation was formed, in which Mr. Shaw Lefevre was the moving spirit. [Footnote: Now Lord Eversley.] Sir Charles became in 1870 Chairman of the Society. Among the latest of his papers is a note from Lord Eversley accompanying an early copy of the new edition of his Commons and Forests "which I hope will remind you of old times and of your own great services to the cause." 'We saved Wisley Common and Epping Forest,' says the Memoir. It was more important that on April 9th, 1869, the annual Enclosure Bill was referred to a Select Committee, notwithstanding the determined opposition of the Government. The date is memorable in the history of the question, for the Committee recommended that all further enclosures should be suspended until the general Act had been amended, as it was in 1876.
About the same time Sir Charles became publicly committed to another cause, barren of political advantage, into which he put, first and last, as much labour as might have filled the whole of a creditable career. He began to take an active part in connection with the Aborigines Protection Society and presided at its Annual Meeting in 1870. This, says the Memoir laconically, 'threw on me lifelong duties.'