by Roy Jenkins
In the Forest of Dean a new Liberal member had been elected; but Dilke continued to receive pressing invitations, at least to pay a visit and make some speeches. He replied saying that he would address no meetings outside Chelsea during 1888. Nevertheless in March, 1889, he was elected (with some opposition and in his absence) to the presidency of the body known in the Forest as the Liberal Four Hundred. Then, in May, he and Lady Dilke at last paid their long-awaited visit to the area, and were received with enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was not diminished by the fact that the sitting member, Samuelson, even though it was only two years since he had been first elected, was already unpopular.
The Forest of Dean, which politically had been carved out of the old West Gloucestershire division in 1885, was primarily a mining constituency. There was an electoral roll of just over 10,000, and there were more than 5,000 miners in the area—although some of these would have been excluded from the franchise. But it was not a typical mining seat. It was cut off from any other mining district, the collieries were small and scattered, and it possessed unusual scenic beauty. It was a wooded plateau, bounded by the Wye on the west and the Severn on the east. The principal towns were Cinderford, Coleford, Lydney and Newnham. It offered the prospect of being an ideal seat for Dilke. The miners were strong enough to insist on a member who would support their principal demands. Legislation to restrict the working day in the mines to eight hours was becoming the most important of these, and unwillingness to support this proposal was the main cause of Samuelson’s unpopularity.
At the same time the Gloucestershire rural tradition which persisted in the area made a candidature from the Miners’ Federation seem less attractive than in South Wales or Northumberland. The Forest of Dean throughout its whole independent existence as a parliamentary division (which lasted until 1950) never had a member who had himself worked in the mines, and was in this respect unique amongst coal constituencies. What the Foresters wanted was a radical of some outside distinction; and if he could be rich as well this would be an added advantage, for their Liberal Association was con-stantly short of funds. They did not much care about the divorce scandal, not because they themselves were loose-living, but because the sense of independence and apartness which has always been a characteristic of mining communities gave them a certain indifference to the opinion of the outside world.
Dilke found the atmosphere there sufficiently encouraging for him to return to London with a more urgent desire to secure Gladstone’s approval of his candidature. In June he wrote to James asking him to approach Gladstone and see if his views had changed. Gladstone responded by calling on Dilke at Sloane Street, but he did not find him at home. In consequence, and after a delay of several weeks, he wrote to Dilke and set out his views at length. His letter is given in full, not only because of its significance in Dilke’s attempted rehabilitation, but because of the light it throws on the working of Gladstone’s mind:
Hawarden Castle,
Chester
August 10th, ’89
My dear Dilke,
I was very sorry to find that my call in Sloane Street on July I was premature, I suppose by a few hours. Not indeed that I could have added much, or perhaps anything, to what you have stated in your letter to Sir Henry James. But I should have been glad of an opportunity which would at least have sufficed to show friendly intention.
There is nothing, according to my belief, in which human beings either individually or collectively seem, and are, so small as in their judgments upon one another. The profound wisdom of the laconic precept “Judge not” comes home more and more every day: as does the prudence and necessity of arresting the mind on its course towards conclusions, and adopting the rational as well as Christian alternative of suspending judgment unless when we know facts and persons sufficiently well to go forward.
But you will perceive that the judgments of the world are in certain cases irresistible as well as inexorable, and must be treated as if they were infallible. It was in this view that I felt what, judging from your letter, you have felt still more strongly, namely that according to the dictates of prudence your abstention, whether a longer or a shorter one, should be absolute; and that (I should think) each year when the abstention is visibly absolute is worth several of any course of proceeding in which an acutely hostile criticism professes to detect any sign of resistance or impatience.
I deeply feel the loss we sustain in your absence from public life after you had given such varied and conclusive proofs of high capacity to serve your country. And I have almost taken for granted that with the end of this Parliament, after anything approaching the usual full term, the ostracism would die a kind of natural death. And I heartily wish and hope that you may have lying before you in the future a long and happy time of public usefulness.
And I now ask you to forgive my writing this letter (for it may wear an appearance I should hate) and to believe that it springs from the friendly feeling which is in every way your due from me. . . . I know myself to be totally unfit to advise anything to anybody by virtue of moral qualification. I found myself only on that long experience of the world which often makes the social sight get keener, even when the natural eye is growing dim.
And I will close by saying from my heart May God bless and guide you.
Believe me sincerely yours,
W. E. Gladstone3
In so far as anything was clear from this remarkable letter it was that Dilke might reasonably come forward as a candidate at the next general election, but that he should postpone his adoption until the latest possible moment. He was prepared for the time being to take this advice. The Forest of Dean, where the sitting member was still in the field, was not for the moment available; and he found it comparatively easy to decline offers from Dundee and Fulham which arrived during the autumn.
In the following summer—that of 1890—the situation in the Forest took a decisive turn in Dilke’s favour. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, in conference at Bristol, passed a resolution instructing their members to support only those candidates who would commit themselves in favour of a Miners’ Eight Hour Day Bill. This sealed Samuelson’s fate. He was in trouble not only at the Miners’ annual demonstration at Speech House,[4] but also at meetings of the executive committee of the Liberal Four Hundred. He stated his view fairly and courageously. He agreed with Bradlaugh, Morley, Labouchere, Broadhurst, Burt and Fenwick in believing that the eight-hour day should not be secured by legislation. He was prepared not to vote against the Bill, but he could not vote in its favour. This was not enough. In the following February he announced that he would not again contest the division.
Dilke was in no difficulty about the new policy of the Miners’ Federation. He said that he had been converted to the legislative restriction of the hours of men workers by the proceedings of the Industrial Remuneration Conference in 1885, over which he had presided; and he had published his views, on this and a wide variety of other subjects, in a pamphlet “entitled A Radical Programme, which had appeared earlier in the year 1890. He did not believe that the hours of all workers could be limited, but he thought that there were many trades in which this was both feasible and desirable, and that the mining industry was in the forefront of them. The pamphlet also showed that on all home policy questions his radicalism had become still more pronounced. He was in favour of a wide extension of municipal socialism, into the trading and industrial as well as the social service fields. He saw great significance in the sharp decline in the rate of interest which had reached its nadir under Goschen’s Chancellorship.
“While the interest on the capital of the rich, the rents of land, trade profits, and returns from manufacturing, on the whole, decrease, and while the rich save less, the poor will become more and more educated and more able to make use of every advantage they obtain. Great fortunes will be divided, new ones will become more hard to found, and only a few who personally minister to the wants of the democracy—inventors, engineers, newspaper proprietors,
and journalists, highly-skilled surgeons, actors, singers and so forth—will grow very rich; a handful as compared with the numbers of human beings living in an organised society. British law, moreover, will not only cease to bolster up great fortunes by primogeniture, but may begin to imitate British colonial legislation, and, by progressive taxation, discourage their existence. There is reason to expect, then, that the worker will become king in Britain as he is king already in the British countries of Australasia.”4
The prospect caused Dilke no dismay. The view that the rich were intelligent and the poor ignorant was a grossly exaggerated one:
“In a first-class carriage on many lines of railway men often find themselves among those of their fellows who are utterly incapable of following a close argument, or of reading with enjoyment any literature except that supplied by comic papers of an inferior kind. In a third-class compartment they will sometimes discover that, on the whole, the literature is of a nature better suited for general consumption.”5
The poor still had a long way to go so far as education was concerned, but their rate of advance was remarkable. He could not see the distant form which it was desirable that society should take, or the extent to which he wanted it to be socialistic. But he was certain that early progress should be in that direction; and he believed all experience to show that there was far more danger of the advance being too slow than of its being too rapid.
“Order, and not chaos,” he concluded, “lies before us, except, indeed, in the event of unsuccessful war, against which we should guard by all means in our power. As regards domestic change there is reason to expect a gradual evolution of society from an individualist to a collective state, and one accomplished without danger.”6
With these views, Dilke found it easy to move into a position of close alliance with the Miners’ Federation. In August, 1890, he addressed his first miners’ meeting—at Cannock Chase; and in the course of the next twelve months he spoke to the miners of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Somerset, Fife, Ayrshire, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan. Many of these meetings were in strong Nonconformist districts, and it was remarkable that their inhabitants gave such a warm welcome to Dilke. In the Rhondda Valley the local “Lib.-Lab.” member—William Abraham (or Mabon as he was better known)—organised a huge torchlight procession to greet Sir Charles and Lady Dilke; and Tom Ellis, the Liberal Whip who sat for Merioneth, the very heart of religious Wales, took them to his constituency to address a large meeting of quarrymcn at Blacnau Festiniog. Everyone was not equally enthusiastic. Stead was at work in the Welsh valleys, and when Dilke addressed a Liberal rally at Cardiff in the following year it was noticeable that the meeting had been boycotted by most of the local Gladstonian members.
In the Forest of Dean, however, opposition to Dilke was very much a minority view. At the meeting of the Liberal Four Hundred to which Samuelson’s resignation was announced, it was proposed by a Coleford business man and seconded by a Cinderford clergyman that the nomination should be offered to Dilke. After what a local newspaper described as “considerable and sometimes heated discussion,” this resolution was carried by a big majority. A deputation which included five Nonconformist ministers was appointed to wait upon Dilke in London. He received them at Sloane Street a week later and promised to make a statement about his position when he visited Cinderford in the following month. Even at this Cinderford meeting, however, he remained noncommittal. “The proceedings were characterised by strong pressure and deep pathos,” the Dean Forest Guardian reported, “but the Right Honourable Baronet, although much moved, was still coy and the final answer was further postponed.”
In fact, Dilke was in no way undecided. He wanted very much to become member for the Forest of Dean. But he feared that a good deal of latent opposition would be called forth by the proposal. He thought it better that this should develop before he was committed to the seat. His supporters, he believed, might counter it more vigorously if they were still trying to obtain his acceptance than if he had given this with obvious alacrity. Furthermore, his hold on the seat for the future was likely to be more secure if he were adopted by a Liberal Association which knew exactly what was involved in their choice. Dilke’s tactics were therefore those of showing the greatest possible interest short of giving a definite answer. He and his wife remained in the Forest for most of the three months following the Cinderford meeting. They both spoke at a number of meetings, and they secured a wide distribution of the pamphlet based on the work of the Chesson-Stcavenson committee which was published at this time.
These tactics were brilliantly successful. The whole area was seized with a premature election fever. Would Dilke stand or would he not? This became the burning question throughout the Forest. Stead, who had announced as soon as Dilke’s candidature was mooted that he would resist it to the utmost, was decisively routed. He flooded the constituency with anti-Dilke pamphlets, but the Foresters made bonfires at which they were publicly burned. He allowed his chagrin to lead him into denouncing the local inhabitants as “only ignorant miners,” and thus did a great deal to help Dilke’s cause. Many who had been hostile at an earlier stage, like the Rector of Newent, became enthusiastic supporters. By the beginning of June, 1891, Dilke judged that he had the Liberals of the Forest overwhelmingly on his side, and on the ninth of the month he gave his definite acceptance at a meeting in Lydney. “This announcement,” the Dean Forest Guardian wrote, “. . . was received with wild and tumultuous cheering (and) the singing of ‘Auld Lang Sync.’” Mabon was present at the meeting, and referred to Dilke as “not only a political leader, but a real Labour leader.”
The announcement was not received with equal enthusiasm outside the Forest. The Times was displeased, and so, more importantly, was Gladstone. His attitude had hardened since his call at Sloane Street and his letter to Dilke two summers previously. When he was asked publicly to state his view he replied on several occasions that it was a matter exclusively for the constituency, but he had written a private memorandum on March 13th, 1891,7 which he arranged to be brought to Dilke’s notice, and which made it clear that he was against the latter’s acceptance of the candidature. He argued that it would weaken the position of the Irish Parliamentary party and make it more difficult for him to bring the Home Rule struggle to a successful conclusion.
The event which had made Gladstone adopt this more austere view was the Parnell divorce suit. This had been heard in November, 1890, and had substantially damaged the prospects of the Liberal party for the next election. After it, Gladstone wanted no more adulterers (or alleged adulterers) on his hands. And he assumed that his own view about the relative importance of Irish Home Rule and the resumption of the political career of Sir Charles Dilke would be shared by Dilke himself. It was a false assumption. Dilke had never cared much about Ireland, but he cared a great deal about his own political role. Gladstone’s attempt at private pressure did nothing to deflect him. But it must have made it plain that, at least under a Gladstone premiership, his return to the House of Commons was unlikely to lead to his return to the Cabinet.
Chamberlain had also given Dilke a somewhat discouraging forecast.
“The comments of The Times and other papers are only what we had to expect,” he had written on June 22nd, 1891. “They represent the general feeling in the House and in Society which is undoubtedly hostile to your candidature. The question is can you live it down. I think you can but I do not conceal from you that it will be a mauvais quart d’heure.”8
Six months later Chamberlain was writing in a similar vein and adding advice which, while apparently well-intentioned, was a little tainted because so obviously in accordance with his own prejudices:
“It is not to your interest to arouse the prejudices of the society in which you hope one day again to take your place. I do not mean fashionable society—but political society or the great majority of cultivated politicians. I think you go out of your way to offend them when you advocate evacuation of Egypt, and I ask you to consider
if it is worth while. . . . Therefore my advice is: Be as Radical as you like. Be Home Ruler if you must—but be a little Jingo if you can.”9
Unlike Gladstone, however, Chamberlain was prepared to be of some use and not merely to offer rather unwelcome advice. When Dilke wrote in the spring of 1891 to complain of the personal attacks which The Scotsman—a Liberal Unionist paper—was making upon him, Chamberlain took moderately effective action. A month or two later he obtained a county court judgeship for Steavenson. Then in June Dilke wrote with another complaint—he had heard a rumour that he was to be opposed by a Liberal Unionist in the Forest of Dean. He did not fear the electoral consequences of this, but, “for political reasons connected with the future of the Irish Question,” he would not like it. Chamberlain replied the same day: “I do not believe a word of it—but I will make enquiries. If by any chance in the world such an act of folly were contemplated, I will stop it. But it is not true.”10
It was not true. When the election came, in the summer of 1892, Dilke was opposed neither by a Liberal Unionist, nor by Stead, who had threatened to appear as an independent radical, but by a local Tory country gentleman named Colchester Wemyss. Wemyss himself eschewed the divorce issue and attempted to wage a purely political fight, but many of his supporters declined to follow his example. They were aided by the flood of Stead publications which poured into the constituency up to polling day. There is no evidence that these publications, or the platform innuendos, had any appreciable effect on the result.
Dilke had campaigned hard—he had been in the Forest for the greater part of the three or four months preceding the election—and his wife had proved a vote-winner at least as effective as he was himself. An election song was written for the campaign and was enthusiastically sung at all his meetings, and at some of the Tory ones as well. The words showed a somewhat misplaced trust in the welcome which Dilke would receive when he returned to Westminster, but they also indicated the faith which he had already aroused in his future constituents:
