'the experts always want to buy, and always say that the thing is invaluable and a chance which will never happen again. No one can care for the National Gallery more than I do; I know the pictures very well, for I go there almost every week.'
He thought, however, that some wholesale purchases for public collections had been all but worthless, with perhaps one admirable thing in a mass of rubbish.
Secondly, there arose in May a discussion over the Duke of Wellington's statue, which Leighton and the Prince of Wales wanted to remove from Hyde Park Corner, but which Sir Charles cherished as an old friend. It was one of the matters on which he and Mr. Gladstone were united by a common conservatism:
'The ridiculous question of the Duke of Wellington's statue had come up again at the Cabinet of August 9th, and the numbers were taken three times over by Mr. Gladstone, who was in favour of the old statue and against all removals, in which view I steadily supported him, the Cabinet being against us, and Mr. Gladstone constantly trying to get his own way against the majority. It was the only subject upon which, while I was a member of it, I ever knew the Cabinet take a show of hands.'
In the last Cabinet of the Session they 'once more informally divided about the Wellington statue'; and he recorded the fact that he 'still hoped to save it.' Yet in the end he failed; and 'now,' he notes pathetically, 'I should have to go to Aldershot to see it if I wished to do so.'
CHAPTER XXXII
FOREIGN AND COLONIAL AFFAIRS OCTOBER, 1882, TO DECEMBER, 1883
Sir Charles Dilke's transference to the Local Government Board scarcely lessened his contact with the more important branches of the Foreign Office work, while his entry into the Cabinet greatly increased the range of his consultative authority.
The Triple Alliance was a fact, but only guessed as yet. It is not till the middle of 1883 that Sir Charles writes:
'On June 4th, 1883, I heard the particulars of the alliance of the Central Powers, signed at Vienna between Germany and Austria in October, 1879, and ratified at Berlin on October 18th of that year, to which Italy had afterwards adhered.' [Footnote: Sir Charles knew that Prince Bismarck had tried first for an English alliance, and wrote on August 17th, 1882, to Sir M. Grant Duff: "N. Rothschild told me that the late Government had twice declined an offensive and defensive alliance offered by Germany." See also Life of Lord Granville, vol. ii., p. 211.]