'On December 6th I spoke at Birmingham Town Hall, and Chamberlain, who was Mayor, and who was my host, had the whole borough police force present or in reserve, and had every interrupter (and there were several hundred) carried out singly by two policemen, with a Conservative Chief of Police to direct them, after which I delivered an extremely humdrum speech to a very dull assembly. [Footnote: He spoke on the House of Lords.] Chamberlain was more lively, and made a speech in ridicule of Second Chambers, in which I still (1895) agree. On the other hand, in Chelsea we carried the war into the enemy's camp. The "loyal inhabitants" tried to hold a meeting at the Vestry Hall to censure me, on which occasion no article or piece of furniture larger than a match was left in existence in the room, and the meeting concluded with a vote of confidence in me, carried in the dark after the gas had been put out. The second attempt was made outside the borough, at the Duke of Wellington's Riding School at Knightsbridge, but the result was the same. Although the meeting was a ticket meeting, the hall was stormed, and the loyal address to the Queen captured and carried off in triumph by my friends. It is still (May, 1905) at the Eleusis Club—the centre for the Radical working men in Chelsea.'
Hostility concentrated on Sir Charles because the courage and cogency with which he expounded views shared by many men of standing, and men far senior to himself at this time, marked him out for the public as the leader:
'Fawcett had taken a far more active republican line, as had Chamberlain, and both of them had joined republican clubs in towns, while Fawcett had himself founded one in the University of Cambridge, which had but a short existence. I had refused to join these clubs, and to work in any way in connection with republican propaganda, but it was difficult to get people to understand my position, and the perfect legality of holding republican opinions was even denied by many, while the wisdom of expressing them was denied by almost all. Some thought that I was of opinion that an immense amount of revolutionary feeling existed in the country, and that I wished to lead a storm to my own profit. Some thought that I was sorry I had said what I did.
'It never seemed to occur to anyone that there were many persons who had been trained up in families republican in sentiment, and that it was possible that I should have never been anything but a republican without the trace of a "reason," and thought it honest to say so when I was charged with Republicanism as with some fearful crime. But to think and even to say that monarchy in Western Europe is a somewhat cumbersome fiction is not to declare oneself ready to fight against it on a barricade. It is only to protest against the silence of many being read into agreement with the fulsome nonsense that the majority talk about the personal loyalty of the country to the reigning House. My Republicanism was, however, with me a matter of education. My grandfather was a conservative republican in old age, a radical republican in youth, but a republican through life, and, as I have said before, my young ideas were my grandfather's ideas. It is a mistake to think that republican opinions in England died with Algernon Sidney, that Tom Paine was about the only English sympathizer with the French Revolution, and Shelley, Landor, and Swinburne only three mad poets. It is forgotten now that Burns subscribed to the funds of the French Republic, that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Moore all wrote republican odes to it, and that at the beginning of the century Southey and Brougham were republican, not to speak of Bentham and Godwin and other writers on whose books I had been brought up.'
Sir Charles was not only denounced, but boycotted. [Footnote: Shirley
Brooks of Punch wrote in his diary, under date December 5th, 1871:
"Macmillan asked me to dine, but as Sir C. Dilke, who has been spouting
Republicanism, was to be one, I would not go, hating to dine with a man
and abuse him in print, as I must do." (Life, Letters, and Diaries of
Shirley Brooks, by G. S. Layard).] He seems for the moment to have had
only two close friends available in London, Mr. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond
Fitzmaurice. The former—
'who had been deeply engaged in the anti-dowry agitation, although keeping himself in the background … used to come every Sunday to go for walks with me; generally the two of us only, though on one of these occasions he brought Wilfrid Lawson, the wit of the public platforms, but a dismal man enough in private, [Footnote: Sir Charles's friendship with the great Temperance Reformer was cemented five years later by his adhesion to the Temperance ranks.
'February 4th, 1877, in Paris on my road I received a letter from Wilfrid Lawson, who had learnt that I had turned teetotaller. I was as a fact teetotaller for some eleven years, from 1874-1885. Lawson's letter was in verse with a chorus:
"Coffee and tea,
Coffee and tea,
Those are the liquors for Lawson and me."
There was a good deal of chaff of the Bishop of Peterborough in the
letter, as this Bishop, whose name unfortunately rhymed to "tea," had
been speaking against Lawson's views in the House of Lords:
"Some day, perhaps, we both bishops may be,
And both much more sober than Doctor Magee,
Who finds that he cannot be sober and free;
But it's only last week that I heard from you, Dilke,
That you'd rashly and recklessly taken to milk.
Abandon the habit, I beg and I pray,
Only think what the scoffers and mockers will say.
They'll say, with a cynical grin and a laugh,
'He has taken to milk—just the thing for a calf.'
Oh, abandon that milk—stick to coffee and tea,
For those are the liquors for you and for me.