The book was written at high pressure—in twelve months of desk work, beginning in June, 1867, when the traveller returned from his year's wandering—and it was not written under favourable conditions. He had contracted malaria in Ceylon, which gradually destroyed his appetite, and so induced a state of weakness leading to delirium at night. The end was an attack of typhoid fever, which came on while the book was still in the press; and his father, thinking it important to hurry the publication, took on himself to correct the proofs while his son was ill. The result was a crop of blunders; but nothing interfered with the unforeseen success of the book, which was published in the last months of 1868. Large portions of the work were translated into Russian, its circulation in America was enormous (under a pirate flag), and in England it rapidly ran through three editions, and was praised in the newspapers almost without exception.
In the reviews which appeared there stood out a general acceptance of the book as fair and friendly to all. In spite of its audacious patriotism, it was no way limited in sympathy. This fairness of mind received the homage of Thiers in a great defence of his Protectionist budget. "Un membre du parlement d'Angleterre, qui est certainement un des hommes les plus éclairés de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'écrire un livre des plus remarquables," he said, and pressed the argument that Charles Dilke's defence of Protection from the American and Australian point of view gained authority by the very fact that its author was libre-échangiste d'Europe. Dilke always called himself, more accurately, "a geographical Free Trader." He accepted, that is to say, the doctrine for Great Britain unreservedly, only because of Great Britain's geographical conditions. This was very different from the orthodox English Liberal's view of Free Trade as a universal maxim to be accepted under penalty of political excommunication.
On a matter of even wider import for Imperial statesmanship his sympathies were at once and clearly declared. From this his first entry into the arena of public debate he was the champion of the dark-skinned peoples— all the more, perhaps, because he recognized clearly that the Anglo-Saxons were "the only extirpating race." In lands where white men could rear their children it seemed to him inevitable that the Anglo-Saxon race should replace the coloured peoples as, to take his own illustration, the English fly was superseding all other flies in New Zealand. Yet at least while the American-Indians or the Maoris remained, he was determined to secure justice for them; and he incurred angry criticism for outspoken condemnation of English dealing with the natives in Tasmania. But a great part of his book is devoted to discussion of questions which must be of constant recurrence, affecting the relations of Englishmen to natives in lands where the English are only a governing handful. These matters received special comment in a letter from John Stuart Mill at Avignon on February 9th, 1869. Mill, although a stranger to Dilke, was moved to write his commendation in the most ungrudging terms:
"It is long" (he said) "since any book connected with practical politics has been published on which I build such high hopes of the future usefulness and distinction of the writer, showing, as it does, that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and enlightened views of them.
"There are so few opinions expressed in any part of your book with which I do not, so far as my knowledge extends, fully and heartily coincide, that I feel impelled to take the liberty of noting the small number of points of any consequence on which I differ from you. These relate chiefly to India; though on that subject also I agree with you to a much greater extent than I differ. Not only do I most cordially sympathize with all you say about the insolence of the English even in India to the native population, which has now become not only a disgrace, but, as you have so usefully shown, a danger to our dominion there; but I have been much struck by the sagacity which, in so short a stay as yours must have been, has enabled you to detect facts which are as yet obvious to very few: as, for instance, the immense increase of all the evils and dangers you have pointed out by the substitution of the Queen's army for a local force of which both men and officers had at least a comparatively permanent tie to the country; and again, that the superior authority in England, having the records of all the presidencies before it, and corresponding regularly with them all, is the only authority which really knows India; the local governments and offices only knowing, at most, their own part of it, and having generally strong prejudices in favour of the peculiarities of the system of government there adopted, and against those of the other party." [Footnote: James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, was the historian of India, and for a long time one amongst its official rulers at the India House.]
Then followed an exhaustive and very friendly criticism, in which the most interesting points are his challenge of Dilke's proposal to make the Secretary of State for India a permanent office, not changing with party upheavals, and, lastly, this:
"If there is any criticism of a somewhat broader character that I could make, I think it would be this—that (in speaking of the physical and moral characteristics of the populations descended from the English) you sometimes express yourself almost as if there were no sources of national character but race and climate, as if whatever does not come from race must come from climate, and whatever does not come from climate must come from race. But as you show in many parts of your book a strong sense of the good and bad influences of education, legislation, and social circumstances, the only inference I draw is that you do not, perhaps, go so far as I do myself in believing these last causes to be of prodigiously greater efficacy than either race or climate, or the two combined."
The writing of this letter marked the beginning of a friendship which lasted till Mill's death. If the book had done nothing but secure Dilke this friend, it would have been well rewarded. But rewards were not lacking. The fortunate author was crowned with a great popular success invaluable for a young man about to enter political life. Yet more important even than the prestige acquired was the sum of experience gained.