"MY DEAR FATHER,
"I have been for some days considering whether I would write to you upon my present theme before or after my journey across the plains, but I have come to the conclusion that it is in every way better that I should do it now. Before leaving you, I had prepared, with the knowledge only of Casswell" (one of his Trinity Hall set), "elaborate plans for my long-thought-of visit to Australia.
"After landing in the States, I came to think that, in spite of the evident advantages to be gleaned by taking the two tours in one, you might be seriously averse to my more lengthy absence. When, however, I came to sketch out plans for the great work which I have long intended some day to write, and of which I completed the first map during my stay at Ottawa, I found that I must go to Australia before getting very far through with the book, and that I could not be even so much as certain of my basement and groundwork until after such a visit.
"Were I to postpone my trip to Australia, I might find it impossible ever to go there, remembering that it is not a tour which can be made from England, at any time, much more quickly than I shall have made it now; and whenever I did make it, you would have to expect an absence more prolonged than that for which this letter will prepare you. Of course that absence is fully as grievous to me as to you, and nothing but necessity would drive me to it. Of course my going will depend upon my health, and upon the letters I shall receive at San Francisco. I have ample funds to take me as far as Sydney, and to enable me to live there a long time, were anything to prevent your letters reaching there as soon as I do. I enclose a letter to Knight for Tasmanian introductions; you can no doubt get me Australian from Sir Daniel Cooper and others. I propose to visit Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Geelong, Adelaide, Hobart Town, Wellington, and Auckland, but the order in which I take them, of course, depends on local circumstances. Will you send me some money to Sydney, with such introductions as you can get? If they don't turn up, I shall start a Shaker colony, or a newspaper, or row people ashore from the emigrant ships."
When the travellers halted to rest for some time at Denver, after six days' journey across the plains, Charles Dilke, with a brain excited by the keen atmosphere of the prairie, "sketched out many projects of a literary kind."
'In addition to my book on Radicalism, there was a plan for a book of "Political Geography" based on the doctrine that geographical centres ultimately become political centres—ideas which are also to be traced in Greater Britain under the name of Omphalism; and a scheme for a book to be called "The Anglo-Saxon Race or The English World," which is noted as dating from June, 1862, and being a head under which should be treated the infusion of foreign elements into the Saxon world—such as, for example, Chinese immigration. A fifth work was to be on "International Law," in two parts—"As it is," and "As it might be." Another was to be on the offer to an unembodied soul of the alternatives of non-existence, or of birth accompanied by free-will, followed by life in sin or life in Godliness.'
But all the time literature figured in his mind only as an accompaniment to political life. There was more than jest in the young man's answer to Governor Gilpin of Colorado, when that dignitary suggested permanent stay in Denver, with promise of all sorts of honours and rewards in his infant state. Charles Dilke writes home:
"I told him that unless he would carry a constitutional amendment allowing a foreign-born subject to be President of the United States, he would not receive my services. This he said he would 'see about.'"
What underlay the jesting is set out in this letter to his brother Ashton, sent by the same mail that carried to his father news of the projected journey to Australia: