Dilke (54 page)

Before Lady Dilke's death her hopes had fastened on the possibility of her husband becoming Secretary of State for War in the next Government. Both she and Dilke himself had informal discussions with Morley—their best contact in the Liberal Shadow Cabinet—on the point. But it is doubtful whether Morley was able to give them much encouragement. Captain Cecil Norton, a Liberal Whip and a friend of Dilke's, had advocated the appointment in a speech in his South London constituency; but the reaction, if not among the audience at least among a wider public, was unfavourable. Stead moved into action again, and, more importantly, there were letters of protest from the Bishop of Southwark, in whose diocese Norton's speech had been delivered, and from other church leaders. The way the Nonconformist wind still blew—always a matter of great importance in the Liberal party—was shown by the Lloyd George reaction to a proposal for radical collaboration which Dilke had put forward earlier in 1904. “Lloyd George was at first inclined to assent,” Dilke wrote, “but on second thoughts asked for time, which I think meant to see Dr. Clifford.
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Dr. Clifford was never friendly to Dilke, and his influence, joined to that of a part of the Church of England, was quite enough to be decisive with Campbell-Bannerman. The Liberal leader had no wish to be brave on Dilke's behalf.

By the end of the year it had become clear to Dilke that he was most unlikely to get the War Office. On December 9th he wrote to Alfred Deakin in terms which indicated a desire to make the best of his disappointment:

“I was in the inner ring of the Cabinet before I was either a Cabinet Minister or a Privy Councillor, 1880-1882, and I am not likely to have the offer of a place the work of which could tempt me. The W(ar) O(ffice) would kill me, but I could not refuse it. I have been told on ‘authority' that it will not come to me.”
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In fact no offer of any sort came to Dilke. He had no need to consider the problem of whether or not he should accept.

Throughout the first week of December, 1905, when Campbell-Bannerman was forming his Government, there was no communication from him to Dilke. Dilke was given no apology or direct explanation of the reasons for his exclusion. The nearest approach to such an explanation came in a letter from John Morley which began by telling of his own appointment to the India Office, and continued:

“For yourself, of course, I well remember one at any rate of my conversations in Sloane Street, though I forget the exact date. When I opened the matter to C.-B. on his return from Marienbad the other day I found him adverse. I resumed it last Monday when things became actual. He was by that time still more adverse, and even disinclined to listen or to discuss. There was no pressure on him in the adverse direction from any quarter. I mean from either colleagues or other persons of importance. There may have been from the Noncons. or other people of that connection but he did not say so. It was a
chose jugée
, I think, from the first in his own mind. . . .

Good-bye, my dear Dilke. To nobody is your absence more truly painful than to your

John Morley”
⁴

Others wrote letters which were equally distressed if less informative. “I am sick at heart at not being able to write a different account of the nominations to the War Office or Colonies,”
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came from Reginald McKenna. And Dilke's oldest remaining political friend, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who had not himself been entirely passed over, but who had
been reluctantly elevated to the House of Lords and appointed to the same under-secretaryship which he had first held no less than twenty-three years previously, wrote in terms which were half apologetic and half complaining. Had his health been as good as Dilke's he would have remained a private member of the House of Commons, “and we would have ended together where we began together.” As it was they had both been badly treated as a result of “the wiles of the ‘Lowland clans,' and very low indeed too.”
⁶

Dilke himself attributed the decisive role in his exclusion to the Prime Minister's memory of the cordite vote of 1895. In a letter to Labouchere of January 6th, 1906, he revealed at least a part of his thoughts and expressed a high degree of philosophical detachment:

“I did not expect him (Campbell-Bannerman) to offer me any place,” he wrote. “Had my wife lived that would have hurt her, and through her, me. As it is I prefer to be outside—a thing which, though often true, no one ever believes of others. . . .

“The only pleasant thing about office would have been the money. I always want more than I have, and I hate to ride broken-down horses, and can't afford the new horses I want to ride. £5,000 a year for a year or two would have been most welcome.

“But when in office—April, 1880, to June, 1885—I was exceptionally powerful and nearly always got my own way in every department. That could never have been repeated—a strong reason why I have all along preferred the pleasant front seat in the house to a less commanding position on the stage.”
⁷

The last paragraph of this letter was perhaps the most significant. Henceforward Dilke's thoughts were to be concentrated to a growing extent upon the past. He was only sixty-two-—seven years younger than the Prime Minister—but he had no future and his present existence was unexciting. The great days of the 'seventies and early 'eighties therefore came increasingly to occupy his thoughts, although not to distort
his values. He showed no bitterness with his current lot, he did not elevate the past, and his radicalism never wavered. But the arrangement of his old papers occupied much of his time and recollections of Gladstone or Gordon or Gambetta much of his conversation.

Nevertheless, he did not contract out of his day-to-day activities. He remained in the House of Commons; and one of his first duties after the formation of the Government was to go to the Forest of Dean and fight the “landslide” election of 1906. The result was an overwhelming majority in his favour, but the obvious disappointment of his supporters at his final exclusion from power was a source of some embarrassment to him. He remained a diligent constituency member, however. He paid no visits to the Forest while the House was sitting, except for his annual appearance at the local miners' rally in July, but he continued to spend there the greater part of a month each autumn and to pay a January visit as well. These visits, combined with his natural habits of mind, meant that he had acquired an immensely detailed knowledge of the constituency and its problems; and he was as familiar to most of its inhabitants as the statistics of their living conditions were to him.

The new Parliament, with its vast Liberal majority and its sizeable Labour party, earned Dilke's full approbation but left him with a less obvious role than that which he had previously filled. In part this was simply a function of his move to the Government side of the House. There is much more opportunity to be an effective back-bencher on the Opposition side. But in part too it was a function of the new strength of the Labour party. The election of thirty Labour members and twenty-four “Lib.-Labs.” gave Dilke almost unqualified satisfaction. “The triumph of the principles to which I have devoted my life are now bound up with the future of the Labour Party,” he wrote. But he added: “To join it or lead it was never my thought.”
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And this being so, its emergence as a party of strength left much less place for an outside “sponsor” than had previously been the case. After 1906 the trades union members in no way cold-shouldered Dilke,
but they certainly needed him less than in the preceding Parliaments. He did not allow these considerations to prejudice him against the new House of Commons. On the contrary, he wrote of its members in eulogistic terms: “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.”
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Furthermore, he avoided the old parliamentarians' disease of regretting the “giants” who had disappeared from the scene. He discounted heavily the view that House of Commons oratory or the stature of leading members was in decline. Campbell-Bannerman he could not admire, but for Asquith his respect was almost unqualified. Both as statesman and as parliamentarian he considered him far superior to Gladstone. He also perceived that Winston Churchill was a greater man than Lord Randolph, and, more surprisingly, believed “Lulu” Harcourt to be equally superior to Sir William.

These charitable judgments on his juniors did not prevent Dilke from expressing some suspicion about the keenness of the Government's radicalism. “The really weak point,” he had written to Labouchere as early as January, 1906, “is that the Government is damned unless it fights the Lords in 1907, and that the promise of “five years in power “will prevent the hacks from fighting.”
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He therefore endeavoured to recreate the old radical group which had existed in the previous Parliament. Almost all those with whom he had then worked had been dispersed. Labouchere had retired, Stanhope had gone to the Lords, and Harcourt and Norton had taken office. Nevertheless, he assembled a new band and attempted to lay down for it a series of radical objectives. The first was given as a close working understanding with the Irish Nationalists and the Labour party. The second was adult suffrage and the single vote. Third came the payment of members of Parliament. Fourth was the problem of the House of Lords. This should be solved either by single chamber government or by a restriction of the power of the Lords, but on no account by a reform of the Upper House. Fifth was fiscal reform, to be
based on a suffer graduation of death duties and the local taxation of land values. Sixth came the granting to local authorities of full power to acquire land and to indulge in all forms of “municipal socialism.”

When Dilke was present at the meetings of this group he automatically presided, but he was not always very assiduous in his attendance. In part this was because he soon became deeply embroiled in the work of a Select Committee on the Income Tax. In the spring of 1906 Asquith as Chancellor pressed Dilke to accept the chairmanship of this enquiry. With some reluctance, for the field was entirely new to him, Dilke accepted, and having accepted, devoted himself to the work with characteristic thoroughness. He accumulated a vast range of evidence upon foreign and colonial practice and he launched the first powerful endeavour to make the Treasury produce statistics of the United Kingdom distribution of income. But on the whole his chairmanship was not a success. The two main practical recommendations of the committee—the differentiation of earned and unearned incomes and the introduction of a super-tax—were both adopted against Dilke's opposition. It was not that he objected to the degree of progression involved in these proposals, but that their logical untidiness oppressed him. He would have preferred an entirely separate system of property taxation, as in Prussia or Holland, and he saw little point in introducing a super-tax while the possibilities of a graduated income tax were still so little exploited. But he failed to carry his colleagues with him, and there emerges unavoidably the impression that his method of thought, on a new subject at any rate, was becoming a little arid and theoretical.

Apart from this short-lived activity and from occasional radical forays against the Government, his interventions outside his specialised fields became increasingly rare. Labour legislation, defence and some aspects of foreign affairs continued to hold his attention, but the great controversies of education, licensing, the Lloyd George budget, and even the constitutional struggle itself drew forth few pronouncements from him. Soon after the first 1910 election he led a deputation
of thirty advanced radicals to the Prime Minister in order to protest against a suspected tendency to mix up the reform of the House of Lords with the much more important question of the curtailment of its powers. But this was an exceptional activity.

In 1908 his health showed the first signs of serious decline. His heart was no longer strong, and he spent much of the year as a semi-invalid. But the following year showed a great improvement and he resumed his habits of fencing, riding and even sculling. He also reverted to foreign travel. From 1892 until the death of his second wife he had scarcely left England other than to pay an annual month's Christmas visit to Paris. After 1906, while he continued his Paris habit, he again began to go farther afield, principally to Italy and to Provence, travelling now not for information as in his younger days but for recollection and for pleasure. His companions were mostly his wife's niece, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, who was later to be the principal author of his standard biography, and a friend of hers, Miss Hinton-Smith. “I hope to see you here with your two young ladies,” Labouchere wrote from Florence in the autumn of 1907.

In these last years Dilke's conversation remained of outstanding quality. It was founded upon his compendious knowledge, and we catch revealing glimpses of his demonstrating it to all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances. He amazed the gardener on the Isola Madre in Lake Maggiore by his ability to differentiate and name every tree and shrub in the collection. In a twenty-minute discourse at the end of a public meeting he taught the landlord of the Victoria Hotel at Newnham-on-Severn more facts about beer than the latter had learnt in forty years as a licensed victualler. When staying at Lyons with Miss Tuckwell he was able to recall to her the nature and position of almost every canvas in the art gallery, although he himself would not visit the collection because of the force with which it would recall memories of Lady Dilke. All points of British parliamentary procedure and almost all details of French history and culture from the structure of the Provençal language to the ramifications of the Imperial family
were at his command. There was no leading European personality of the previous half century of whom he did not have a lively recollection and a store of anecdote. “His amazing knowledge,” an associate wrote, “which occasionally overloaded his speeches and diverted them from their main argument, wove itself naturally into the texture of his talk and gave it a wonderful richness and depth.”
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