There was no lack of masterful grip and handling of detail in the other great orator of the Liberal party, yet the young Radical's attitude to his leader was one of admiration indeed, but always of limited sympathy. Not only did a long generation lie between them, but Charles Dilke had been bred a Radical, and Gladstone had been bred a Tory. The Government policy after 1868 was dominated by the education controversy, and was dictated by Forster. There was probably no man among his colleagues with whom Dilke more often came into collision. Forster was a strong natural Conservative, though he had been brought up in the traditions of Radicalism, and Mr. Gladstone was suspected of not being willing to abolish Collegiate as well as University tests.
On the Opposition front bench Disraeli's primacy was not less marked than Mr. Gladstone's, and his romantic figure always fascinated Dilke. But his special admiration was for Gathorne Hardy (afterwards Lord Cranbrook), in whom High Toryism found its most eloquent and sincerest spokesman. Later, in 1876, Sir Charles was to complain ironically that the Conservatives "never will be able to employ the services of the man best fitted by nature to be their leader. Mr. Gathorne Hardy will never lead the Conservative party because he is not a Liberal."
In 1869 he saw little of either the Tories or the Whigs, 'but acted with the Radicals.' He had modified his first estimate of the composition of the House. This Radical group largely represented the industrial towns and Nonconformist interests. It included Peter Rylands, member for Warrington; Peter Taylor, member for Leicester; Henry Richard, member for Merthyr Tydvil; George Anderson, member for Glasgow; and Llewellyn Dillwyn, member for Swansea. Some, such as Peter Taylor, were theoretical Republicans, but all were peace-at-any-price men, Bright's votaries, though when Bright joined the Government they were ready to vote against Bright.
The group contained also some men of Charles Dilke's own stamp, with whom Cambridge associations created a bond. 'Harcourt, of whom I saw much, was then a below-the-gangway Radical.' He, though sixteen years Dilke's senior, was also a newcomer, but a newcomer well known already at Westminster by his famous letters to the Times, signed "Historicus," and by his career at the Parliamentary bar. Another was Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who had been Charles Dilke's contemporary and coadjutor at the Union. A great figure in the Radical group came from Trinity Hall— Fawcett, who had first won his seat for Brighton in 1865.
Among Government Liberals, Lord Granville in the House of Lords was an hereditary friend, through his attachment to Dilke's father, but belonged to a much older generation. Grant Duff, a man to whom later on Dilke came to be strongly attached, was Under-Secretary of State for India. From the first, however, a close alliance formed itself between Charles Dilke and a junior member of the Government, who had still been debating at the Union when Dilke came to Trinity Hall. Entering Parliament in 1865, Mr. Trevelyan had distinguished himself by a vigorous campaign against the system of purchase in the Army, and, in 1868, he was put in office as Junior Lord of the Admiralty. Senior to Charles Dilke by five years, he had not known him at Cambridge; but they "speedily became very intimate." So writes Sir George Trevelyan in a letter of 1911:
"I was a very young Minister, worked hard all day by Mr. Childers, a very strict but very friendly taskmaster, and never, according to the Treasury Bench discipline of those heroic times, allowed to be absent from the House of Commons for a single moment. I used to come to the House unlunched, and desperately hungry; and I got my dinner at four o'clock in an empty dining-room. Afternoon after afternoon, Charles Dilke used to come and sit with me; and a greater delight than his company, young to the young, I can hardly describe. But it does not need description to you, for never did anyone's talk alter less as time went on. The last time I saw him was at the swearing-in of Privy Councillors last May (1910), when we talked for half an hour as if we were respectively thirty and five-and-twenty years old."
An enrichment of that talk, as his friend remembers it, lay in Charles Dilke's multifarious knowledge. "This man seems to know all about everything in the world," someone remarked in those days. "Yes," was the answer, "and last week we were talking about the other world: Dilke seemed to know all about that too."
It was characteristic of Charles Dilke to choose for his maiden effort the most highly technical of subjects, and one which lent itself as little as possible to tricks of oratory. He would recall how Mr. George Melly, the member for Stoke-on-Trent, had cautioned him: "Don't talk to them about God Almighty; even Mr. Gladstone can't; they'll only stand it from John Bright." On March 9th, 1869, Mr. William Vernon Harcourt (as he then was) came forward with a motion for the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into registration in Parliamentary boroughs. Upon this Charles Dilke made his first speech, filled with detailed knowledge, and with suggestions drawn from French procedure. Later speakers recognized the special competence shown, and when the Select Committee was appointed, he was named to serve on it—thus taking his place at once in the normal working life of the House.
'I acquired in the early months of this Session a knowledge of the registration and rating systems which lasted for a good many years, and the plan for the restoration of compounding, which was accepted by Mr. Goschen and moved by him in the form of new clauses in his Bill in April, 1869, was of my suggestion. By the joint operation of this plan, and of the Registration Act of 1878, which was my own, an immense increase of the electorate in boroughs was effected.'
No subject could have appeared less attractive than all this dull lore of compound householders and lodger's franchises.