'I discussed it under various heads, of which the first was Great Britain, the second the British Colonies, the third the United States, showing, as this table was made before I left England, the predominance which Colonial questions were already assuming in my mind.' Also: 'In the last part of the sketch of the work I dealt with the political Radicalism of the future. I wrote strongly in favour of the removal of the disabilities of sex. I took the Irish Catholic view of the Irish question, and I commenced the discussion of some of those questions which made the freshness and the success of Greater Britain—for example, "Effects upon Radicalism of Increased Facility of Communication," and "Development of the Principle of Love of Country into that of Love of Man."'
'Such,' he writes, at the end of that passage which describes the purposes and the labours of his last academic terms—'such were the dispositions in which I commenced my journey round the world.'
CHAPTER VI
"GREATER BRITAIN"
In June, 1866, Charles Dilke, not yet twenty-three, started on the travels which are recorded in the first and most popular of his books, Greater Britain. Its original draft was in reality the numbered series of long descriptive letters which he sent home to Sloane Street.
His first prolonged absence, coupled with the unspent shock of his grandfather's death, had bred in him a homesickness, which under the influence of a Virginian summer he tried to dissipate by an outburst of verse; but the medium was unsuited to his pen, and he soon returned to the 'dispositions' with which he started on his journey.
'Leaving England as I did with my mind in this kind of ferment, my visit to Boston became deeply interesting to me, as I met there a group of men undoubtedly, on the whole, the most distinguished then collected at any city in the world. At one party of nine people, at Cambridge, I met Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Lowell ("Hosea Biglow"), Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and Dr. Hedge the great preacher. It is hard to say by which of them I was the most charmed. Emerson, Longfellow, Asa Gray, and Wendell Holmes seemed to me equal in the perfection of their courtesy, the grace of their manner, and the interest of their conversation, while Hedge and Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and which had a powerful effect upon my work of the time; to be traced indeed through the whole of the American portion of Greater Britain.'
There is no need here to attempt any sketch of a journey which is described in a book which is still read after half a century. Charles Dilke began with the South, where the earth had scarcely closed over the graves of the great war, where the rebel spirit still smouldered fiercely, and where reorganization was only beginning to establish itself. He went on to New York, to New England, and to Canada; then, crossing the line of the Great Lakes, followed that other highway of the northern continent, the Mississippi, to St. Louis. Here he met with Mr. Hepworth Dixon, then editor of the Athenaeum, and the character of his journey changed: he travelled in company, and he travelled for the first time under privations and in real danger. Together they crossed the plains from the eastern head of the Pacific Railway at a period of Indian war, and parted at Salt Lake City.
This is a marking-point in the experience. Before Charles Dilke set out to cross a land still debatable, where travel still was what travel had been for the pioneers, he wrote home two letters. Both are dated August 26th, 1866, from Leavenworth in Kansas, now a sober town of twenty thousand inhabitants, then carrying recent memories of the days "when the Southern 'Border Ruffians' were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of Abolitionists stuck on poles," and even after the war basing its repute for health on the story that, when it became necessary to "inaugurate" the new graveyard, "they had to shoot a man on purpose."
The first of these letters is to his father: