When all the political journalists in England were reviewing, after his death in 1911, the remarkable career that they had watched, some for half a lifetime, one of the veterans among them wrote: [Footnote: The Newcastle Daily Chronicle.]
"We do not think that Sir Charles Dilke owed a great deal to the Liberal party, but we certainly think that the Liberal party owed a very great deal to Sir Charles Dilke. In the dark days of 1874, when the party was deeper in the slough of despond than it has ever been before or since in our time, it was from the initiative and courage of Sir Charles Dilke that salvation came. His work in organizing the Liberal forces, especially in the Metropolis, has never received due acknowledgment.'
The centre of his influence was among those who knew him best—his own constituents. 'I had indeed invented a caucus in Chelsea before the first Birmingham Election Association was started,' he says of his own electoral machinery. [Footnote: See Chapter XVII., p. 268.] The Eleusis Club was known all over England as a propagandist centre. Here he had no occasion to explain his speeches at Newcastle or elsewhere. "We were all republicans down Chelsea way when young Charlie Dilke came among us first," said an old supporter. Yet the propaganda emanating from the Eleusis Club was not republican.
Here and all over the constituency he made innumerable and unreported speeches to instruct industrial opinion. He laid under contribution his whole store of extraordinary knowledge, suggesting and answering questions till no Parliamentary representative in the country was followed by his supporters with an attention so informed and discriminating.
"Nothing of the sort had been known since David Urquhart, in the first half of the Victorian age, opened his lecture-halls and classrooms throughout the world for counter-working Palmerston, and for teaching artisans the true inwardness of the Eastern Question." [Footnote: Mr. T. H. S. Escott, the New Age, February 9th, 1911.]
Sir Charles himself gives in the Memoir some sketch of the feelings with which Liberals confronted that rout of Liberalism, and of the steps taken to repair the disaster.
'Harcourt wrote (upon paper which bore the words "Solicitor-General" with a large "No longer" in his handwriting at the top):
'"Rari nantes in gurgite vasto. Here we are again…. To tell you the truth, I am not sorry. It had to come, and it is as well over. We shall get rid of these canting duffers of the party and begin afresh. We must all meet again below the gangway. We shall have a nice little party, though diminished. I am very sorry about Fawcett, but we shall soon get him back again."
'My first work was to bring back Fawcett, and by negotiations with Homer, the Hackney publican (Secretary of the Licensed Victuallers' Protection Association), into which I entered because Fawcett's defeat had been partly owing to the determined opposition of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's friends, who could not forgive his attacks on the direct veto, I succeeded in securing him an invitation to contest Hackney, where there was an early vacancy. Fitzmaurice and I became respectively Chairman and Treasurer of a fund, and we raised more money than was needed for paying the whole of Fawcett's expenses, and were able to bank a fund in the name of trustees, of whom I was one, for his next election.
'Fitzmaurice, in accepting my invitation to co-operate with me in this matter, said that he had succeeded in discovering a place to which posts took two days, "wherein I can moralize at leisure on the folly of the leaders of the Liberal party."