by Roy Jenkins
Another group with whom Dilke was particularly concerned were the shop assistants. They were a depressed and comparatively unorganised group, afflicted even more by long hours than by low wages. Dilke’s association with this movement began in 1896. Thereafter he frequently addressed meetings on their behalf; he introduced into the House of Commons a bill limiting their hours of work; he inspired its introduction into the Lords; and he helped to persuade the Liberal Government of 1905 to take action in this respect which led on to an act reaching the statute book a few months after his death. When the National Union of Shop Assistants built a new London office in 1914 they called it Dilke House.
A feature characteristic of Dilke’s advocacy of labour legislation, but one unusual amongst other advocates of the same cause, was the extent to which he drew for both his knowledge and his inspiration upon what was happening in other parts of the Empire, notably the white colonies. Some of these—and particularly the Australian states—were far ahead of England in the legislative protection which they gave to the working class. Dilke’s habit of amassing information gave him an unsurpassed familiarity with the provisions which existed. Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister of Australia on several occasions after 1903, was one of his most fervent admirers and frequent correspondents.[4]
Dilke believed firmly that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to any other, and that white men in general had a capacity for effective social and economic organisation which the other races were unlikely ever to equal. But he did not consider that this entitled them to exploit those whose qualities were inferior to their own. He believed in the protection of those who could not protect themselves. Indeed, J. E. B. Seely,[5] who worked closely with him on a number of issues during these later years, reached the conclusion that “the master-key to Dilke’s actions “in the post-1892 period was his determination to protect “the under-dog.”10 In Seely’s view this alone kept Dilke going when it had become obvious that his career could never again prosper.
A large part of Dilke’s colonial activities was therefore concerned with the protection of native rights. Vestiges of slavery roused him deeply, for he regarded the institution in any form as equally damaging to the white exploiters and to the coloured victims. In 1907 a long period of agitation, in which Dilke had played a central part, culminated in a Colonial Office decision against the Zanzibar practice of restoring runaway slaves to their owners. The Bishop of Uganda wrote that this result would not have been secured until many years later had it not been for the participation of Dilke.11
A similar but still longer extended activity of Dilke’s was his work for the Congo Reform Association. The Congo Free State, under the personal suzerainty of the King of the Belgians, had been created at the Berlin Conference of 1884. England had been a party to the agreement and shared some international responsibility for what went on in the new territory, the government of which was intended to be a spearhead of civilisation in Central Africa. By the middle of the ’nineties, however, the spear looked somewhat blunted. Slave dealing persisted and the army of the Free State, it was revealed, although commanded by European officers, had been fed for long periods by means of a system of organised cannibalism. Dilke first raised these matters in the House of Commons in April, 1897. He called for the reassembly of the Berlin Conference, but the Government view, as expressed by Curzon, was hostile to this proposal and cool towards the subject as a whole. This coolness did not infect Dilke. Thereafter he pursued the issue for the remainder of his life. He initiated parliamentary debates in session after session. In 1903 these efforts mobilised House of Commons opinion to such an extent that Balfour was forced to accept a motion committing the Government to a diplomatic re-opening of the case. In 1908, when a new constitution and more direct Belgian responsibility were being evolved, the issue was forced sufficiently to the forefront of British politics that it achieved a mention in the King’s Speech; and a strong memorandum was despatched to Brussels by the Foreign Office. In the spring of 1910, in one of his last House of Commons interventions, Dilke was still speaking on the issue. But great progress had been made, and in 1913, with Dilke no longer amongst them, the sponsors of the Congo Reform Association felt able to wind up the organisation. His work appeared to have been completed.
This work brought Dilke into contact with E. D. Morel, a reforming journalist of distinction and an outstanding example of the English liberal conscience in action. Thereafter Dilke co-operated freely with him on all questions touching Africa and the rights of native peoples. In 1902 Morel published his book Affairs of West Africa, and asked Dilke to write a preface. Dilke declined this suggestion on the characteristically precise ground that he could not agree with a statement made by Morel on page 286, but he offered to write a friendly review and to arrange for others in papers which he could influence. This refusal did not impair their good relations, and they each remained a considerable influence upon the other until the date of Dilke’s death.
Dilke’s interest in native rights, combined with his jingo streak, made him reserved about the South African war. It is possible that he was also influenced towards silence by the remaining traces of his friendship with Chamberlain, although by 1899 the effect of this was probably not very strong. Whatever the reasons, South Africa, like Ireland, became for Dilke a subject on which he did not see his way clearly. And just as, when the second Home Rule Bill had been before the House, he had confined his speeches to the peripheral subject of the electoral arrangements, so, in the case of the war in South Africa, he directed himself not to the merits of the struggle but to the appalling British military inefficiency which it demonstrated. He was more stirred by the damage that had been done to the reputation of the British Army than by the wrongs of the Boers. “But can any member of this House deny that the net result of these proceedings has been disastrous to the belief of the world in our ability to conduct a war?”12 he demanded on February 1st, 1900, after the early setbacks. It was a pertinent question, but it was not one which most left-wing Liberal members would have chosen to ask.
The debate in which Dilke asked this question was on an amendment to the Address moved by Lord Edmond Fitz-maurice. It was sufficiently loose for the whole Liberal party to be able to unite behind it. This was an unusual event at the time. A more common end to a debate on the South African situation was for the party to split into two if not three factions. This occurred most signally six months later, on July 25th, when an amendment moved by Sir Wilfred Lawson led to violent “pro-Boer” speeches from Labouchere, Sir Robert Reid and Lloyd George; to an announcement from the leader of the party that he would abstain; and to a counter-announcement from Sir Edward Grey that he would vote with the Governmerit. When the division came 40 Liberals voted with the Unionists, 35 abstained with Campbell-Bannerman, and 31, including Morley and Bryce, voted for the amendment. Dilke abstained, and as his action cannot possibly be attributed to loyalty to Bannerman,[6] it gives a clear indication of where he stood. He was not a natural compromiser, particularly when without responsibility, but he could go neither with the right of the party nor, on this issue, with the left.
Later, when the issue became one not of conquest but of reconciliation, Dilke remained cautious of giving too free a hand to the Boers in their dealings with the native population. “South Africa,” he gloomily prognosticated, “is to become the home of a great proletariat, forbidden by law to rise above the present situation.”13 He fought hard against any constitutional recognition of the colour bar, against discriminatory franchise proposals, and against infringement of native rights in Basutoland, Bechuanaland and other tribal territories. In 1906 he drafted a motion incorporating these points which was accepted by the House of Commons; and in 1909 he worked in close association with W. P. Schreiner for suitable amendments to the South Africa Bill.
Dilke’s other major political interest during; his second period in the House of Commons was imperial defence. His little book on The British Army had appeared as early as 1888. The message of
this was that England was less prepared for war than any other major power. This conviction dominated an important part of Dilke’s mind for the remainder of his life. He saw this military weakness as a drag on our diplomacy as well as a threat to our national security. He saw it, too, as an issue which transcended party difference, and he set himself to collaborate with any who would collaborate with him and to exercise the strongest possible pressure upon whichever government was in at the time. “I am one of those,” he declared in 1898, “who are in favour of large armaments for this country, and believe in increasing the strength of our defences for the sake of peace; and one of the very reasons why I desire that is because I repudiate the idea of making our policy depend upon the policy of others.”14 Holding these views he was naturally often in conflict with the instinctive reactions of many Liberals, and sometimes expressed with some acerbity his impatience with these reactions. “Liberals should give up thinking of this question of national defence as a hateful one,” he said in 1893, “and as one against which they should close their eyes and ears.”15
In 1891 he published, jointly with Spenser Wilkinson,[7] a civilian military expert, a wider-ranging work entitled Imperial Defence. In the course of writing this book Dilke had been slowly converted by Wilkinson to a belief in the primacy of the navy. Britain’s best means of defending her scattered imperial possessions was to possess and concentrate a naval force capable of destroying the enemy’s own sea-power. Thereafter he never deviated from this view, and in the controversies of the next century he became one of the best-informed supporters of the “blue-water” school.
Imperial Defence also advocated—and here the idea was Dilke’s own—a much closer co-ordination of the two services at home and of the various military resources which were scattered throughout the Empire. Dilke wanted a General Staff and he wanted it to operate on an imperial and not merely a United Kingdom level. “The very existence of a General Staff,” he wrote, “would constitute a form of Imperial military federation.” One aspect of these ideas was pressed by Dilke soon after he returned to the House of Commons. At the beginning of 1894 he organised the writing of a public letter signed by himself, General Sir George Chesney (a backbench Unionist), H. O. Arnold-Forster (later to be Secretary of State for War under Balfour) and Spenser Wilkinson. It was addressed to Gladstone as Prime Minister, to Salisbury and Balfour as the leaders of the Conservatives in the two houses, and to the Duke of Devonshire (as Hartington had become) and Chamberlain as the leaders of the Liberal Unionists. Two striking proposals were made in the letter. The first was the uniting of the two services under a single political head. Either a convention should be established by which the man who was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty should also be made Secretary of State for War, or, still more drastically, there should be a formal legislative union of the two offices. The second was that a chief of the staff should be appointed in each service, who would be the adviser of the “defence minister” and the Cabinet, and who would be responsible in the sense that he would hold office only so long as his advice was accepted.
This letter was received with uneven enthusiasm by those to whom it was addressed. It reached Gladstone when he was on the point of resignation, and it did nothing to make him wish to change his mind. He replied cryptically (for his resignation had not then been announced. “. . . I fear I ought to confine myself to assuring you that I have taken care . . . it should come to the notice of my colleagues.”16 This was the last letter which Dilke received from his former chief, and the last which was heard of his memorandum from the Liberal side.
From the Unionist leaders the response was more encouraging. It was upon Balfour that Dilke had placed his greatest reliance.
“I had sooner discuss this matter first with you,” he had written to him a few weeks before, “. . . than with Chamberlain, because he is, oddly enough, a much stronger party man than you are, and would be less inclined (on account of national objects which to him are predominant) to keep party out of his mind in connection with it.”17
Dilke’s faith was not misplaced. Balfour argued against some of the details of the plan—he thought, for instance, that the concentration of naval and military advice through two individuals would weaken civilian authority but he showed an eager interest in the problems with which it sought to deal. In a debate which followed the publication of the letter he committed himself sufficiently for Dilke to withdraw the motion which had initiated the discussion. In the next period of Unionist Government a loose form of Committee of Imperial Defence was brought into existence. And in 1903, under Balfour’s own premiership, the Committee was given a much more closely defined and important form. The Prime Minister became its chairman, the professional (as well as the political) chiefs of the Admiralty and War Office were made permanent members, minutes were kept and a secretariat was established.
Most of Dilke’s work in the field of national defence was conducted on an equally non-party basis. Apart from Wilkinson, Arnold-Forster remained his closest civilian collaborator; and he carried on a large and friendly correspondence with a wide range of scarcely radical generals and admirals. These service chiefs often wrote in insistent terms about the quality of Dilke’s knowledge and the value of his work. “I am always delighted to answer any question you may ask me,” Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wrote in 1897, “as I consider that you are the only member of Cabinet rank in either party who really understands the question of Imperial Defence in all its requirements or indeed in any particular.”18 “You cannot think how grateful I am to anyone who takes an intelligent interest in the Army,”19 came from General Sir Evelyn Wood in the following year.
From the moment of his return to Parliament Dilke acted independently of his party on defence questions. Sometimes his independence wore a radical appearance, as when, in 1893, he voted against the appointment of the Duke of Connaught to the command at Aldershot. More frequently, however, it led him into a temporary Conservative alliance. The most notable of these latter occasions was the “cordite vote “in June, 1895. This, the last occasion upon which a government was forced into resignation by defeat in the House of Commons, was a vote of censure upon Campbell-Bannerman for not having been quick enough to procure supplies of cordite for the army. There was a short debate and a small vote, but the Government was defeated by seven. Dilke made no speech, but he voted with the Opposition, and was the most prominent of the handful of Liberals who took this course. “For this vote,” Dilke’s official biographers baldly state, “Campbell-Bannerman never forgave him.”20 Such a judgment is necessarily something of a surmise, but it is supported, as has been already seen, by the disparaging and bitter terms in which Campbell-Bannerman wrote about Dilke in 1900; and it is in no way contradicted, as will be shown later, by the events associated with the formation of the Liberal Government of 1905.
Outside politics, Dilke’s life during the ’nineties and over the turn of the century pursued a mixed course. He was popular in the Forest of Dean, respected throughout the Labour movement, and a major social figure in Paris. In English politics and society, however, he was not allowed to strike more than a minor key. By the end of the ’nineties when his friendship with Chamberlain was dead, there was no political figure of the front rank, with the doubtful exception of Morley, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice would occasionally suggest a week-end and G. O. Trevelyan would accompany him for Sunday afternoon walks in London. This was the nearest to the centre of political power that his friendships took him. Life at Sloane Street and still less at Dockett Eddy and Pyrford was not solitary, however. Particularly at Dockett during the summer there was a stream of visitors—oarsmen, Balkan diplomats, French actors, and collaborators of Dilke’s in particular enterprises like Spenser Wilkinson and D. F. Steavenson. There was a wide periphery of acquaintances but little to put in the centre. There was no core of all-purpose friends such as had existed at Sloane Street in the late ’seventies and early ’eighties.
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p; In part this was due to the piecemeal, rather unco-ordinated pattern which Dilke’s political interests had assumed. In part too it was due to the social ostracism which continued to operate against him. The Court, at least until the death of the Queen, never wavered in its hostility, despite a series of attempts by the old republican to circumnavigate the excluding barriers. In 1896 he wrote to the Prince of Wales to ask if he might recommence his attendance at levées. Knollys replied rather negatively—“You are doubtless aware that the matter is not one in which (the Prince) can officially interfere, as he only represents the Queen at Levées and co.”—but saying that he had sent Dilke’s letter on to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Latham. Latham referred it to the Prime Minister, who spoke to the Queen, and then wrote to Latham for forwarding to Dilke an elliptical but firm refusal:
20 Arlington Street,
February 27
My dear Latham,
Sir C. D.’s Letter
The Queen has intimated to me that in her judgment it is not desirable that Sir C. D. should pursue in respect to the matter to which he refers a course different from that which he has followed up to this time.
