by Roy Jenkins
In his third year Dilke was promoted to the position of stroke, but the boat, under his leadership, did not do so well as in the previous year. On the second night it was bumped by Third Trinity, a strikingly good crew containing five University oars. Trinity Hall had only one—Steavenson—although Dilke himself, both in this year and in 1866, had been offered his “blue” and the place of No. 7. “I declined on the score of constitution,” he wrote. “I was strong, but afraid of the rowing in training over the long course, although perfectly able to stand up to the short course work of Cambridge or of Henley.” Later he added: “I believe that I was unduly frightened by my doctor, and that I might have rowed.”18
The Union, the third of Charles Dilke’s principal Cambridge activities, had its premises in a former Wesleyan chapel in Green Street. They were clearly unsatisfactory, the more so as a few years earlier the Oxford Union, already a more distinguished nursery of politicians and ecclesiastics, had erected its own elaborate gothic structure. A building fund had been in existence in Cambridge since 1857, but it had produced no physical result.[7] Nor did it do so until Dilke had risen to a high place in the Union hierarchy. This he did quite quickly, being elected to the Library and Standing Committees in his first year, and becoming Vice-President for the second term of his second year. At this stage serious negotiations to bring the fund to fruition and to set the builders to work were undertaken. Dilke was the leading figure in these negotiations. He was re-elected to the Vice-Presidency and then, in October, 1864, was elected unopposed to the Presidency. In the following academic year he was re-elected to the office, a most unusual event, and came back to Cambridge for two terms of a fourth year largely in order to fill it. By this time the work was almost complete, but Dilke nominated his successor—Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice[8]—in order to guard against anything going wrong with the final stages.
This was undoubtedly Dilke’s distinctive contribution to Cambridge politics. He made a great number of speeches in the Union. He advocated a Greek republic. He advanced with a wealth of illustration the value of the metric system. He upheld the Federal cause in America. He denounced Mr. Lowe’s views on the franchise. He supported, to the surprise of many of his political friends, the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston, and he was firmly ranged on the Prussian side in her dispute with Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein.[9] Indeed he foreshadowed most of his later political attitudes. He was a thoroughgoing radical, but without the slightest tinge of pacifism or Little Englandism. He respected strength, whether military or political, and there was little place for either sentiment or romanticism in his politics. And the possibility of practical achievement always exercised a strong fascination for him. Despite his disparaging references to the pedestrian nature of his father’s work for the Great Exhibition, his own role in Cambridge politics bore more than a slight resemblance to this work. He would not have been remembered for his. wit, his oratory, or the unusual penetration of his political judgments; but he was the man who got the new Union built.[10]
In the summer of 1864 Mr. Dilke died at Alice Holt. Charles Dilke had hurried from Cambridge to his bedside, but despite affecting scenes of farewell, he was later to write: “I did not greatly feel my grandfather’s death at the moment,” although he went on to add that “the sense of loss has been greater with every year that followed.”19 The immediate effect of Mr. Dilke’s death, however, was emotionally somewhat to reorientate his grandson, and, in Charles Dilke’s own words, to bring him “too close” to H. D. Warr, a fellow-undergraduate at Trinity Hall. Warr was a clergyman’s son and a classical exhibitioner. He later became a barrister of no great note, and was appointed on Dilke’s recommendation the secretary of the Royal Commission on City Companies in 1880. He was a sententious young man, who wrote long, rather pompous letters to Dilke, and maintained a curious love-hate attitude towards him for several years to come. In 1868, for instance, he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette the only really waspish review of Dilke’s first published book which was to appear in any journal. Even in 1864 he was already strongly critical of Dilke, despite being one of his closest friends, and wrapped up in his turgid letters there were some grains of good sense and some judgments of penetration.
“Yours being vastly the wider range of knowledge,” he wrote, “our being frequently alone would put a great burden of conversation upon you and would tax my powers of feigning attention in a formidable degree. . . . Your ponderous and extensive studies have in some degree, especially as they began early in your life and have been continued with an unremitted devotion, tainted your general ways. A manner of analysing books perpetually and amassing information upon all subjects is not good. At least it appears to me a pity that you have got into such a groove of application to study, because it has led you to a formal mapping out of your time and a sort of pipeclay and cross-belt habit, in consequence of which you set about being greater friends with me after a fashion which, though I loved you deeply all the while for your soft fondness for me, seemed almost businesslike.20
Dilke used subsequently to assert that Warr and Henry Fawcett between them cured him at this time of his priggish-ness. In part this may have been so. In middle life he certainly developed a lighter touch than he had in his Cambridge days; but some of the characteristics referred to in Warr’s letter remained with him throughout. He was always addicted to the amassing of information and he was always a little businesslike in his approach to emotional relationships.
These criticisms, however, even if heeded, did little to impair Dilke’s self-confidence. Things were going very well for him. His Cambridge career had been a great success, and the two additional terms for which he remained in residence after completing his tripos formed an agreeable postscript. He lived as a fellow-commoner (dining at the high table) and nominally reading moral science. But, apart from supervising the completion of the Union building, his interests were increasingly outside the University. He was doing some regular weekly journalism, mainly book reviewing, for his grandfather’s paper, the Athenaeum. He sketched out a plan for an ambitious history of radicalism which was to begin with the pre-Christian thinkers, and he spent a lot of time in London reading for the work in the British Museum. He had become a member of the Reform Club, and was looking with increasing certainty towards a career in radical politics. He had made his début as a public speaker during his father’s by-election at Wallingford at the beginning of 1865. But when he finally left Cambridge, more than a year later, he was still only twenty-two. Even for so highly ambitious and talented a young man there was no immediate hurry to find a seat in the House of Commons. First he was anxious to do some serious travel. His mind turned towards Russia, a country in which he had long been and was to remain deeply interested; but he later decided that a journey to North America, with a possible extension to Australia, would provide at least equivalent natural excitements, with more useful material for his work on radicalism and his interest in ideal commonwealths. Early in June, 1866, he sailed from Liverpool, without companions. The ship was the S.S. Saratoga, and the immediate destination was Norfolk, Virginia.
Chapter Two
A Greater Britain
The America in which Dilke arrived was only fourteen months free of the Civil War. In Chesapeake Bay and up the James River, the Saratoga had to thread her way through the wrecks of vessels of both the South and the North. Richmond, which he visited immediately after Norfolk, could only be approached through a maze of rebel forts and earthworks, and when reached, its streets and bars were full of the demobilised and unoccupied troops of the Confederate army, still toasting Jefferson Davis—“the caged eagle”—and complaining bitterly that they had been let down by the weakness of regiments from Mississippi or Alabama.
Even away from such a centre of memories of the conflict as the former Confederate capital, the aftermath of the war lay heavily upon the pattern of life. Washington, of which Dilke’s first view was the glint of the sun on the dome of the Capitol as he steamed up the Potomac in
the early morning of a fierce July day, was still the city in which Lincoln had just been shot and into which the rebel forces had so nearly advanced. New York was still the city and the state which had done least to help the Federal Government. Boston, on the other hand, was still the spiritual centre of the Northern cause. But the support which it gave was not only spiritual. “Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson,” Dilke noted, “whole battalions went forth to war.”1
It was a strangely remote America in many other ways. The population was thirty-five million and immigrants were pouring in at an enormous rate. The Irish were already predominant in New York and Boston, and the Germans had arrived in Philadelphia, but the Italians were yet to come. Large cities, particularly in the Mississippi basin, were still subject to the most frightful waves of disease. “I was unfortunately driven from Cincinnati by the violence of the cholera,”2 Dilke wrote on August 17th. There were eighty to ninety deaths in a day. Later in the same month he was to strike still worse conditions at St. Louis, where a population of 180,000 “much diminished by flight,” were suffering losses at the rate of two hundred a day, and convicted murderers were offered free pardons if they would help bury the dead.
The transcontinental railway line, although advancing rapidly from both ends, was still five years in time and more than 1,500 miles in distance away from completion. Between the middle of Kansas and the Californian slopes of the Sierra Nevada travel had still to be undertaken by mail-coach or in some more primitive wagon. Across the plains the journey was made dangerous by the Indians, and in the mountains and on the great plateau they were replaced by almost equivalent natural hazards. On the Pacific coast, San Francisco, already several times damaged by fire and earthquake in its twenty years of existence, had just emerged from lynch law enforced by a committee of vigilance to some form of settled government.
This was the United States in which Dilke spent the summer and early autumn months of 1866. He began in a less controlled mood than was his habit, and sought, in Virginia, to express his emotions in a long, autobiographical poem, which he later described as “a feeble mutation of Childe Harold.” This poem was intended to express his sense of loss at the death of his grandfather and to explain his special relationship to the old man. This he did principally in terms of the early death of his mother, to which fact also he attributed certain weaknesses of his nature, such as “the fatal gift of facile tears.” The poem was not a success. Dilke had no gift for writing verse, and soon after an opening stanza in which he referred to himself at Cambridge as “a youth of nineteen springs, a hearty rosy laughing English lad,” he wisely abandoned his task. He persisted for some time, however, in the belief that, while travelling, he could do serious work on his history of radicalism. But this, in turn, was soon given up too. For the remainder of the trip he settled down to a less diligent pattern of life than had been his habit at Cambridge. He took in the scenes around him, he experienced physical danger for the first time, he commented on what he saw, and he recorded his impressions in a series of long letters home, either to his brother or his father.
Charles Dilke’s comments were always made within a framework of certain firm beliefs. He was a radical and instinctively favourable not only to the most complete democracy but also to experiment in governmental institutions. He believed in women’s rights, and he was as delighted with Kansas for having introduced female suffrage as he was censorious of the Mormons in Utah. He also believed in the virtue of hard work, and was opposed to slavery far more because it made the whites think labour degrading than because it oppressed the blacks. He had a horror of “soft” climates and of the easy, purposeless living to which he thought they gave rise. The banana, the most typical product of such a climate, he regarded with particular horror, and constructed a whole theory of social decline out of its prevalence in some of the Southern states.
“The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree,” he wrote, “are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coast-lands of Mexico, at Auckland in New Zealand. . . . (It) will make nothing; you can eat it raw or fried, and that is all; you can eat it every day of your life without becoming tired of its taste; without suffering in your health, you can live on it exclusively. In the banana groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurk much trouble and danger to the American free States.”3
Combined with these other views, or prejudices, Dilke had a great pride of race. He believed implicitly that the English were the best stock in the world, and that the spread of their power and influence could hardly fail to be generally beneficial. This belief sometimes made him ruthless in his attitude to “lesser breeds.” He had no doubt that it was right to sweep the Red Indians off the plains as quickly as possible. He could write with pride that “the Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth.”4 And he could sum up his American impressions in the following paragraph, at once arrogant and radical:
“The first thing which strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent latinization of the English in America; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race—the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs fourpence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of the Chinese.”5
Despite these views, Dilke could not have been counted a straightforward imperialist, even if the word had held much meaning in the ’sixties. He was too distrustful of existing English institutions of government, from the Queen to the oligarchic Parliament, for that to be possible. It was the influence of the race rather than of London which he wished to extend. Thus, in Canada, which he visited briefly before proceeding west, he immediately took an extreme position against the maintenance of the British connection. Its severance, he thought, would greatly improve relations between England and the United States, and the result would be well worth the price, Dilke, indeed, was as naturally disposed to be pro-American as it is possible to imagine. To find English energy and to hear the English language without the English Queen or other archaic paraphernalia was for him an exhilarating experience. “. . . America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe,” he wrote, “by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.”6
Even when American institutions did not fit into his framework of beliefs, Dilke was still capable of being a good observer. Here his talent for amassing facts became useful. It carried with it a desire to understand how things worked and how different men defended their different beliefs. Whether confronted by polygamy in Salt Lake City or the mentality of slavery in Richmond, he did not carry his disapproval to the extent of being uninterested in that with which he could not agree. His own views were always firmly implied, but they did not lead him into incomprehension; and he was quickly developing a sharp edge of comment which had been lacking in his writings at Cambridge.
It was notably exercised upon the city of New York, which he thought corrupt, vulgar and, except for its striking physical beauty, generally undesirable. New York drawing-rooms, he was prepared to concede, might already be the most exclusive in the world, but this was no sign of grace, for those who were kept out included the most eminent and the most intellectually distinguished, while those who did the keeping out were marked by none of that special merit which alone could make aristocracy tolerable. The expatriate New Yorkers aroused his especial contempt:
“Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate that has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the
only grossly vulgar class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe ‘to escape democracy,’ and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are supposed to represent.”7
Boston he greatly preferred, on account both of its moral tone and of its intellectual quality.
“. . . I met there,” he wrote, “a group of men undoubtedly, on the whole, the most distinguished then collected at any city in the world. At one party of nine people, at Cambridge, I met Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Lowell, Hosea Biglow, Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and Dr. Hedges the great preacher. It is hard to say by which of them I was the most charmed. Emerson, Longfellow, Asa Gray, and Wendell Holmes seemed to me equal in the perfection of their courtesy, the grace of their manner, and the interest of their conversation, while Hedges and Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and which had a powerful effect on my work of the time.”8
Unfortunately it subsequently appeared that, in matters of moral tone at least, Dilke did not make so favourable an impression upon President Lowell as that which the President’s colleagues, and to a lesser extent the President himself, made upon Dilke.
