II.
Sir Charles Dilke's concern with the vast network of problems arising throughout Africa and the Pacific Islands from the contact of white men with natives was infinitely detailed; yet more and more it tended to reduce itself to one broad issue. In this relation the coloured man is everywhere the white man's labourer; Dilke's object was to insure that he should not be his slave. Against actual slavery he was always a crusader, and for long years he contended against the recognition of it implied by the practice of restoring runaway slaves in Zanzibar. Under a Liberal Government, he carried his point at last. A letter written on August 17th, 1907, fitly sums up this matter:
"Dear Sir Charles Dilke,
"I have just heard, on arriving here, that the announcement has been made in the House of Commons of the intention of the Government to abolish the legal status of slavery in Mombasa and the Coast District on October 1st. I can hardly say how much pleasure this has given me, nor can I refrain from writing to say how much we out here are indebted to you for the part you have taken in bringing the Government to this decision. I feel that without your assistance the affair would have dragged on, possibly, for years. With many and grateful thanks,
"Believe me, yours very sincerely,
"Alfred R. Tucker,
"Bishop of Uganda"
To Sir Charles men turned if protest had to be made against the illegal flogging of natives, or against those punitive expeditions which under a Liberal Government were often called military patrols.
As early as 1870 he had become a correspondent of the Aborigines'
Protection Society; in 1871 he supported their action in defence of the
Demerara negroes; and to the end of his life he was in constant
communication with their leading men.
His brief tenure of office gave him power to put in force principles for which he had contended as a private member. In 1877 he wrote to Mr. Chesson that since 1868 he had been interested to secure fair treatment for China, [Footnote: In 1869 Sir Charles wrote letters to the Times on Chinese affairs, which, says the Memoir, 'possess a certain interest as showing that I held the same views as to China which I have always continued to have at heart,' and which may be sufficiently illustrated by quotation of a single phrase. He condemned "the old, bad, world-wide party … which never admits that weak races have rights as against the strong.">[ but China's friends must bring pressure to bear to limit the use of torture. In 1880, having become Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he was able to inform the same correspondent that he had "succeeded in making it certain that a strong direction would be made on the subject of Chinese torture."
Cases of gross barbarity, cases of actual slave trading, always found him ready to act, but his great object was to check the growth of all systems and institutions which made for industrial servitude—to his mind a graver peril than direct slavery. Thus, in 1878 he was in correspondence with the Aborigines' Protection Society concerning the proposed establishment of a Chartered Company in Borneo, and observed that such arrangements could not be justified by proving the existence of bad government in independent Native States. "The worse the government of these States, the greater the difficulties which crop up when we intermeddle." In 1881 as a Minister he resisted the grant of that charter. All these surrenders of territory and jurisdiction to commercial associations filled him with suspicion. He knew that expedients lay ready to the white man's hand by which the native population could easily be enslaved; and to these even the best representatives of direct colonial government under the Crown were prone to resort. In 1878 he had written anxiously to Mr. Chesson concerning the labour tax in Fiji, which, although instituted by a Governor in whom the society had special trust, seemed "opposed to all the principles for which you have hitherto contended." Nearly twenty years later he was maintaining this vigilance. "I am always uneasy about Fiji," he wrote to Mr. Fox Bourne in August, 1896. "I attacked the labour system when it was instituted, and continue to hold the strongest opinion against it." But by that time the new developments which he had resisted in the seventies had spread fast and far.
"The fashion of the day," he wrote in September, 1895, "sets so strongly towards veiled slavery that there is nothing now to be done by deputation to Ministers. We ought to appeal to the conscience of the electorate, and I am willing greatly to increase my little gifts to your society if that is done."
Part of his concern was engendered by the revelation, then recent, that the Chartered Niger Company imposed by contract a fine of £1,000 on any agent or ex-agent of theirs who should publish any statement respecting the company's methods, even after his employment was ended. "I am convinced," Sir Charles wrote, "that the secrecy which it has been attempted to maintain puts them wholly in the wrong, even if they are angels;" and upon this ground he kept up a steady campaign against the Niger Company by question and debate in Parliament until Government bought the company out and assumed direct responsibility for the country.
South Africa was a graver centre of disquietude, for there commercial enterprise was on a greater scale. He wrote in December, 1900, after Great Britain had occupied the Transvaal: "My point is that the Rand Jews have already got slavery, and our Government must repeal the laws they have. Reading together the Pass Law and the coloured labour clause, which you will find was the end of the latest Gold Law, we have slavery by law."
The remedy lay, for him, in the guarantee of citizenship, at least in some degree, to this class of labour; and with that object he put himself at the centre of a concerted movement as soon as opportunity offered. When, after the Boer War, the mine owners returned to the Rand, and, pleading shortage of Kaffir labour, demanded the introduction of indentured Chinese coolies, Sir Charles vigorously protested. The question played a considerable part in the elections which returned the Liberals to power with an enormous majority. It was not, however, as the party man that Sir Charles made his protest, but as the upholder of human rights. He feared lest "South Africa is to become the home of a great proletariat, forbidden by law to rise above the present situation."
When the Union of South Africa was proposed, it became manifest that division existed as to the status of non-European citizens. In 1906, when the Liberals came into power, immediate action was taken by a small group of members, who addressed a letter to the Prime Minister begging that, in view of the contemplated federation, steps should be taken to safeguard such political rights as natives actually enjoyed in the various colonies, and also the tribal institutions of separate native communities. The letter advocated also an extension of Native Reserves, and it was promptly followed (on February 28th) by a motion, brought forward by Mr. Byles, which declared that "in any settlement of South African affairs this House desires a recognition of Imperial responsibility for the protection of all races excluded from equal political rights, the safeguarding of all immigrants against servile conditions of labour, and the guarantee to the native populations of at least their existing status, with the unbroken possession of their liberties in Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and other tribal countries and reservations."
Sir Charles himself took no part in the debate; but he notes: 'I am proud to have planned this letter and drawn the motion for Byles so that it was carried unanimously by the House.' A resolution much stronger in terms could easily have been carried in that Parliament; but it would not have been unanimous, and it could hardly have been enforced later on. Here a principle was so firmly laid down that the House could not recede from it; and the importance of the step soon became apparent. When the Bill for the South African Union came before Parliament in 1909, Colonel Seely, who had been one of the signatories to the letter of 1906, represented the Colonial Office in the Commons; and Sir Charles, warned by friends of the natives in South Africa, questioned him as to whether the Bill as drafted empowered the self-governing colonies to alter the existing boundaries of the Protectorates. He received a private promise that the matter should be put beyond doubt; and this was done in the Committee stage by a solemn declaration that the Imperial Government absolutely reserved its right of veto upon the alienation of native lands. As soon as the text of the proposed Constitution became known, he raised his protest against what he considered a permanent disfranchisement of labour; for labour in South Africa, he held, must for all time be coloured labour. Six weeks later, when the Bill was brought to Westminster, Mr. W. P. Schreiner, who came specially to plead the rights of the civilized men of colour, was in constant intercourse with Sir Charles, and scores of letters on detailed proposals for amendment attest the thoroughness of that co-operation. Dilke, with the support of some Labour men and Radicals, fought strenuously against the clauses which recognized a colour-bar, and in the opinion of some at least in South Africa, the essence of the position was secured.
[Footnote: Mr. Drew, editor of the Transvaal Leader, wrote:
"I am truly glad that (if my view of the somewhat vague cablegram is correct) you have alienation of native lands reserved everywhere in South Africa. This provision, together with the entrenchment of the Cape Franchise, will form a solution of the question not unfavourable to the natives. It gives the natives and their friends something to bargain with. If the Cape Franchise should ever go, its place will be taken by something which will benefit all the natives and be acceptable to all."
From a different quarter came even stronger expression of gratitude.
M. Jacottet, of the Swiss Mission, wrote:
"I beg on behalf of all my fellow-missionaries in Basutoland, as well as of all the friends of justice and liberty in this territory, to thank you most sincerely for your courageous and strong advocacy of the rights and interests of Basutoland and the other territories. All thoughtful and civilized Basutos know how much they are indebted to you, and your name is held in reverence by them.">[
Sir Charles, always a strong advocate of colonial autonomy, nevertheless did not go to extreme lengths in this doctrine. An Imperialist first, he was fully prepared to say to the colonies, So long as you claim Imperial protection, you must recognize the full rights of citizenship within the Empire. He feared gravely the tendencies which might develop under the British flag, if uncontrolled liberty of action were given to the Colonial Parliaments in dealing with such questions as forced labour. "The Australian rule in New Guinea is going to be terrible," is a stray note on one of his communications with the Aborigines' Protection Society.
This labour question was to him essentially the problem of the future, and he watched its developments with ceaseless anxiety. At the annual meeting of the society in April, 1910, he spoke of the energy which the Colonial Office displayed in promoting the growing of cotton as laudable but dangerous. "The chiefs had sometimes exercised compulsion to make their tribes cultivate the unfamiliar product." More generally he felt that wherever the white man introduced taxation there would be a tendency to requisition labour, and that all such projects would inevitably generate an interested commercial support. The Portuguese system of recruiting for the cocoa plantations might be barbarous; but if it were pleaded in defence that without it the supply of cocoa must fail, Sir Charles foresaw the gravest difficulties with the House of Commons. "How are we to make that 'would-be' practical Assembly tell the Government to induce Portugal to put an end to so enormous a cultivation?" The only method of avoiding these evils was to prevent their growth; and the soundest plan was to insure that the natives retained their own familiar means of livelihood, and so could not be brought down to the choice between starvation and selling their labour in a restricted market. For that reason he fiercely opposed the whole policy of concessions, and by public and private representations he pressed the Colonial Office to reject every such alienation of native rights in the land.
He had promised to read a paper on Indentured and Forced Labour at the Native Races Conference held in July, 1911. It reviewed all the facts of the situation as they existed—the growing demand for indentured service, the respective record of the European Powers, and the varying results produced by varying methods which the same Power has adopted in different regions. It was, he thought, not easy to decide whether the anti-slavery cause had lost or gained ground in his lifetime; new insidious and widespread forms of the evil had taken a hold. Great Britain's escutcheon was marred by the inclusion of a colour-bar in the most recent Constitution of her oversea dominions; and the Government of India had recently failed to obtain from some British States that measure of rights for emigrating British Indian subjects which it had formerly been able to secure. Forced labour was being employed under British auspices in Egypt; while the French, who had "more nearly than any other nation" done away with this evil in colonies, were open to grave reproach in the matter of concessions—especially in that region where French administration was affected by the neighbouring example of the Congo Free State. The danger both of forced labour and of concessions was that they alike tended to destroy native law and tribal custom, and so to create 'one universal black proletariat'—a vast reservoir of cheap defenceless labour.
What he wrote was duly read at the Conference, and is included in the volume of their proceedings called Inter-Racial Problems. But before the Conference took place, silence had been imposed for ever on this advocate of equal justice. Among his papers is the manuscript of this composition corrected for the press by him within a week of his death— work done against the entreaty of those who cared for him, but work that he would not leave undone.
In defending the interest of the native races, Dilke always felt himself to be defending the dignity and the safety of labour at home—even though the representatives of European labour did not recognize the common concern. He was defending labour where it was weakest; and it is in his championship of the weak that one of the younger men who worked with him and learnt from him sees the characteristic note of his life. General Seely writes:
"To many of the younger men who found themselves in the Parliament of 1900 Dilke was an enigma. We could all appreciate his immense store of knowledge, his untiring industry, his courtesy to younger men, and his striking personality. But what the real purpose was to which he was devoting these talents, what was the end in view—put shortly, 'what he was at'—was to us a puzzle.
"Clearly, it was no bitter hostility either to a Government with which as a Radical he profoundly disagreed, or to an Opposition amongst whom he sat, but whose chiefs had not restored him to their inner councils. Not the former, for in matters of foreign policy and in Imperial Defence, where his unrivalled knowledge gave him powerful weapons of attack, he never pursued an advantage he had gained beyond very moderate limits. Not the second, for no man was more steadfast in his attendance and in his support, given by speech and in the lobby, to those of his own political faith.
"Still less was it personal ambition or self-seeking; for if he spoke often, it was only to put forward some definite point of view, and not for the purpose of taking part in a debate just because the House was crowded and the occasion important.
"Least of all was his constant attendance in the House of Commons the refuge of a man with no other object in life, for no man was more many-sided or had so many and such varied interests.
"His Parliamentary action was often baffling to the observer, especially in its restraint. It was only after many years that the present writer found the master-key to Dilke's actions, and it was revealed in a flash at the time of the passing of the South Africa Union Act. The question was the representation of the native population in the Union, and the cognate questions of their treatment and status. Dilke came to see me. He pleaded the native cause with earnestness, with eloquence, with passion. The man was transfigured as the emotions of pity and love of justice swept over him. No record could be kept of what he said; there could have been no thought of using his eloquence to enlist popular support or improve a Parliamentary position, for we were alone. And so I came to see that the mainspring of all his actions was the intense desire to help those who could not help themselves—to defend the under-dog.
"Looking through the long list of the speeches he made, and of the questions he asked, from the beginning of the Parliament of 1900 until the time of his death, one sees plainly that this was his guiding motive. No detail was so small as to escape his attention if the people he was endeavouring to protect were poor and helpless.
"On the wider questions of the general treatment of natives he displayed the same meticulous care in finding out the true facts of the case. In the controversy that raged round the administration of the Congo, he would not move until he had ascertained the facts, not only from official documents, but from inquiries he himself had set on foot. Indians, Africans, Chinese, as well as his own countrymen and countrywomen, all would find in him a champion and defender, provided only that they were poor, unrepresented, or oppressed."