"The limited franchise, if it is ever carried, will be carried as a party Conservative measure intended to aid Conservative opinions and to rest the franchise upon an unassailable limited base, and it will be carried in that case against the counter-proposal of the suffrage of all grown men and women, made by those representing the advanced thought of the country." [Footnote: Memorandum by Sir Charles Dilke on "Suffrage of All Grown Men and Women," issued by the People's Suffrage Federation.]
It is unnecessary to emphasize the completeness with which political evolution has followed the lines here marked out by him. Others reaped the harvest. But no man then living had done more to sow the seed.
The Parliament in which he found himself was one of singular interest.
He wrote:
"The old form of party divisions is, in the great majority of constituencies, not yet much affected by recent events. In the House of Commons it is almost dead for the present year….
"The future cannot be foreseen, and in politics it is always foolish to attempt to prophesy. I have frequently myself made or quoted the remark that in politics a year is equivalent to eternity. I have now limited myself to 1906. Whether the party system, in which British statesmen of our time and of past generations have been nurtured, will ever be restored is another matter. Whether the birth of a definite Labour party, in addition to a definite Irish Nationalist party, will be followed by any further division, or whether, as I expect, it will not, yet the division into four parties—of which three will compete actively for the favour of the British electorate—will, I think, continue, and we follow here the line of political development in which first the Australian Colonies, and now the Commonwealth, have led the way." [Footnote: Potentia, 1906.]
Writing in the Financial Review of Reviews for April, 1906, he spoke of the "extraordinarily interesting nature of the debates," of which example had already been given, and he foreshadowed no less interesting action. The changes which he had in view, mainly financial, were "not likely to be popular in the City, with solicitors, with the organized representatives of the employing class," but none the less they would probably be carried into law. The old assumption that democratic movements would be carried into legislation "by capitalist members steeped in Radical pledges" had ceased to correspond with the facts. A new type of member of Parliament had appeared, and Sir Charles welcomed the change.
"It is possible that the members are more Radical than the constituencies. This is an arguable question; but that they are convinced upon such questions, not by pressure, but by training and by thought, is a conclusion which no one who knows the present House of Commons can resist.
"There has probably never sat so interesting a House of Commons in the history of this country. With a good deal of experience of Parliaments and of their inner life and thought, and with the opportunity of frequent discussion with those who, like Mr. Gladstone, remembered all the Parliaments back to the early thirties, and those, like Mr. Vernon Harcourt, [Footnote: George Granville Vernon Harcourt, elected to the House of Commons as member for Oxford in 1831. He held his seat till 1859.] who remembered much earlier Parliaments, I am certain that there has never met at Westminster an assembly so able and at the same time so widely different in intellectual composition from its predecessors as that which is now there gathered. The development of opinion, however, is less of a surprise to those who have watched Australia and New Zealand than to those who have confined their studies to the United Kingdom and the Continent." [Footnote: In 1911, when Lord Hugh Cecil described with violent rhetoric the alleged degradation of the House of Commons, Mr. Balfour was moved to protest, and cited in support of his own view "a man whose authority had always been admitted." "I remember," he said, "talking over with Sir Charles Dilke the question of general Parliamentary practice, and he said, and I agree, that there has been no deterioration either in his or in my Parliamentary experience.">[
Payment of members he did not live to see, but he always regarded it as "an extraordinary anomaly that payment should have been discontinued in this country."
"Members are paid in every other country in the world, and in every British colony (I believe without exception). Non-payment means deliberate preference for moneyed oligarchy, as only rare exceptions can produce a democratic member under such a system. It excludes all poor men of genius unless they can get themselves paid by parties like the Irish, which makes them slaves. It throws undue power into the hands of the capital as the seat of the legislature, and it leads to poor members selling their souls to rotten compromises."