For the moment domestic affairs held the field. In spite of Bright's observation about driving six omnibuses abreast through Temple Bar, Forster's Education Bill was pressed forward along with the Irish Land proposals, and the Government were at once in trouble with their advanced wing, in which Sir Charles Dilke was a leader of revolt. He acted as teller along with Henry Richard when Richard took sixty dissentient Liberals into the Lobby in support of a general motion demanding that school attendance should be compulsory, and that all religious teaching should be separately paid for out of voluntary funds. When compromise was accepted: [Footnote: The Cowper Temple clause practically left religious teaching to local option. Each school was to give or not give such religious teaching as it thought well, so long as no Board School was used to attach a child to a particular denomination.]
'I was, I believe, the only Liberal member who resisted the Cowper Temple amendment as accepted by the Government, and I resigned my post as Chairman of the London Branch of the Education League. I published a letter explaining the reasons for my resignation; the Committee wrote in reply that they fully agreed with me in matters of principle, and asked me to reconsider my resignation.'
This, however, he refused to do, since the London Branch and the League generally were abandoning the principle in the support they gave to compromise.
Throughout the Committee stage his name appears in all the numerous division lists, voting against Government as often as with it. Thus it was from a position of complete independence that he carried two amendments of great importance.
'The Bill as brought in made the School Boards mere committees of Boards of Vestries, and the amendment that School Boards should be elected by the ratepayers, which was forced on and ultimately accepted by the Government, was mine. I also was the author of the proposal that the School Board elections should be by ballot, which was carried.' [Footnote: He always regretted the substitution later of the Educational Committees of County Councils for the School Boards.]
The ballot was then the question of the hour, and it was a matter upon which his study of foreign and Colonial institutions had made him an authority. In 1869 he had given evidence before the Select Committee on Parliamentary and Municipal Elections, 'explaining the working of the ballot in France, in the United States, and, above all, in Tasmania and Australia.' The evidence which he gave was of service in the preparation of the Ballot Bill of 1870, which closely followed the example set by Tasmania and South Australia.
Sir John Gorst, who was already a well-known figure in English politics, though not yet in Parliament, remembered attending a debate specially to hear what this newcomer had to say upon the question of the hour.
This first practical application of the ballot, 'forced on and ultimately accepted by the Government,' did not pass unchallenged. When Sir Charles's amendment was at last put to the vote, he was privileged to tell with George Glyn, the Chief Whip, in a division which took place 'after the fiercest conflict ever up to that known within the walls of Parliament, we having sat up all night.' There was a long series of dilatory motions, a fresh one being moved after a division had disposed of its predecessor 'This was the first birth of obstruction, and the lesson taught by Mr. G. C. Bentinck on this occasion was afterwards applied by "the colonels" in the proceedings on the Army Purchase Scheme in 1871, and then by Butt's Irish after 1874.'
In all the discussions on the Ballot Bill for Parliamentary elections Sir Charles steadily opposed the introduction of a scrutiny which involved the numbering of the ballot papers. This appeared to him 'a pernicious interference with the principle of secrecy, chiefly important because it would be impossible to convince ignorant voters that their votes would not be traced.' His view 'prevailed,' he says, 'in the House of Commons, but the provisions of which we secured the omission from the second Ballot Bill were once more inserted by the House of Lords' at its passage in 1871.
There was another matter connected with the franchise in which Sir Charles had effected by an amendment an even more remarkable change, and that in his first session. The proposal to give women ratepayers the franchise in municipal elections, or rather 'to restore to them a right which was taken away by the Municipal Reform Act of 1835,' was his. Two amendments were on the paper, and though by a chance Mr. Jacob Bright's was taken first, the suggestion, as Mr. Bright admitted, really came from Sir Charles, and it was carried in the session of 1869. This proposal, as he explained to a meeting of the London Society for Woman's Suffrage over which Mrs. Grote presided, was in his opinion 'merely experimental, and only a first step to adult suffrage.' In 1870 he seconded Jacob Bright's Woman's Suffrage Bill, which was carried through the second reading—'the only occasion when a majority of the House of Commons declared for the principle till 1897.' Divergencies of opinion had in the meantime arisen. The Bill of 1870 did not debar married women from obtaining the vote. When in later years a proviso excluding them was introduced, Dilke, with Jacob Bright, withdrew from the parent society. He held throughout his life that to attempt compromise on this matter was to court failure, and that women would never get the vote except as part of a scheme for universal suffrage. This was no mere academic opinion; and he gave later on proof of his earnestness for the principle involved in convincing fashion.