I should, however, be giving but an insufficient picture of Dr. Caliban were I to leave the reader with no further impression of his life work, or indeed of the causes which have produced this book.
His father had left him a decent competence. He lay, therefore, under no necessity to toil for his living. Nevertheless, that sense of duty, “through which the eternal heavens are fresh and strong” (Wordsworth), moved him to something more than “the consumption of the fruits of the earth” (Horace). He preached voluntarily and without remuneration for some years to the churches in Cheltenham, and having married Miss Bignor, of Winchelthorpe-on-Sea, purchased a villa in that rising southern watering-place, and received a call to the congregation, which he accepted. He laboured there till his recent calamity.
I hardly know where to begin the recital of his numerous activities in the period of thirty-five years succeeding his marriage. With the pen he was indefatigable. A man more ποικίλος—or, as he put it, many-sided—perhaps never existed. There was little he would not touch, little upon which he was not consulted, and much in which, though anonymous, he was yet a leader.
He wrote regularly, in his earlier years, for The Seventh Monarchy, The Banner, The Christian, The Free Trader, Household Words, Good Words, The Quiver, Chatterbox, The Home Circle, and The Sunday Monitor. During the last twenty years his work has continually appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Siècle, and the Tribuna. In the last two his work was translated.
His political effect was immense, and that though he never acceded to the repeated request that he would stand upon one side or the other as a candidate for Parliament. He remained, on the contrary, to the end of his career, no more than president of a local association. It was as a speaker, writer, and preacher, that his ideas spread outwards; thousands certainly now use political phrases which they may imagine their own, but which undoubtedly sprang from his creative brain. He was perhaps not the first, but one of the first, to apply the term “Anglo-Saxon” to the English-speaking race—with which indeed he was personally connected through his relatives in New Mexico. The word “Empire” occurs in a sermon of his as early as 1869. He was contemporary with Mr. Lucas, if not before him, in the phrase, “Command of the sea”: and I find, in a letter to Mrs. Gorch, written long ago in 1873, the judgment that Protection was “no longer,” and the nationalization of land “not yet,” within “the sphere of practical politics.”
If his influence upon domestic politics was in part due to his agreement with the bulk of his fellow-citizens, his attitude in foreign affairs at least was all his own. Events have proved it wonderfully sound. A strenuous opponent of American slavery as a very young man—in 1860—he might be called, even at that age, the most prominent Abolitionist in Worcestershire, and worked indefatigably for the cause in so far as it concerned this country. A just and charitable man, he proved, after the victory of the North, one of the firmest supporters in the press of what he first termed “an Anglo-American entente.” Yet he was not for pressing matters. He would leave the “gigantic daughter of the West” to choose her hour and time, confident in the wisdom of his daughter’s judgment, and he lived to see, before his calamity fell upon him, Mr. Hanna, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Elihu Root, and Mr. Smoot occupying the positions they still adorn.
He comprehended Europe. It was he who prophesied of the Dual Monarchy (I believe in the Contemporary Review), that “the death of Francis Joseph would be the signal for a great upheaval”; he that applied to Italy the words “clericalism is the enemy”; and he that publicly advised the withdrawal of our national investments from the debt of Spain—“a nation in active decay.” He cared not a jot when his critics pointed out that Spanish fours had risen since his advice no less than 20 per cent., while our own consols had fallen by an equal amount. “The kingdom I serve,” he finely answered, “knows nothing of the price of stock.” And indeed the greater part of his fortune was in suburban rents, saving a small sum unfortunately adventured in Shanghai Telephones.
Russia he hated as the oppressor of Finland and Poland, for oppression he loathed and combatted wherever it appeared; nor had Mr. Arthur Balfour a stronger supporter than he when that statesman, armed only in the simple manliness of an English Christian and Freeman, combatted and destroyed the terrorism that stalked through Ireland.
Of Scandinavia he knew singularly little, but that little was in its favour; and as for the German Empire, his stanzas to Prince Bismarck, and his sermon on the Emperor’s recent visit, are too well known to need any comment here. To Holland he was, until recently, attracted. Greece he despised.
Nowhere was this fine temper of unflinching courage and sterling common sense more apparent than in the great crisis of the Dreyfus case. No man stood up more boldly, or with less thought of consequence, for Truth and Justice in this country. He was not indeed the chairman of the great meeting in St. James’ Hall, but his peroration was the soul of that vast assemblage. “England will yet weather the storm....” It was a true prophecy, and in a sense a confession of Faith.