Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament. John Morrison Davidson

two private schools which he attended in the ​metropolis, he displayed mathematical talent; and in due course he matriculated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, with the intention of pursuing with assiduity his favorite study, in which he obtained a scholarship. He soon, however, changed his mind, and betook himself to law, as calculated to bear more directly on a parliamentary career, for which he very early determined to qualify himself. He worked hard, and was easily senior in the Law Tripos for 1865.

      In 1866 he was called to the bar by the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple. Shortly afterwards he started on a "round the world" journey of two years' duration. The trip bore excellent fruit in the well-known work "Greater Britain," which, in the first year of its publication, ran through four editions. In 1868 he was returned to Parliament for Chelsea by a majority of nearly two to one; and again in 1874 he headed the poll, notwithstanding an opposition of unexampled violence.

      Sprung from a race of journalists and littérateurs, his pen is never long idle. Since the publication of "Greater Britain" he has found time to publish the "Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco," and to edit, under the title "Papers of a Critic," his grandfather's chief contributions to the pages of "The Athenæum," which paper he owns and occasionally edits.

      Since his former travels he has been "round the world" a second time, his chief object being to acquaint himself with the state and prospects of Japan. He has visited every English-speaking corner of the globe, is thoroughly conversant with the condition of our Indian Empire, and is better acquainted with the language, literature, people, and government of Russia than any man in the House.

      ​He is perhaps the first thoroughly competent Englishman who has ever seen and described the men. manners, and institutions of the United States as they really are, and not as they are wont to appear to the jaundiced e^e of national jealousy and aristocratic aversion. The American Republic is substantially Sir Charles's "Greater Britain," to which he foresees the hegemony of the English-speaking race is ultimately destined to fall. He believes in the possibility of one omnipotent, all-embracing federation of English-speaking men, of which the United States shall at once supply both the nucleus and the model.

      In the study of foreign affairs he has taken nothing for granted. Every thing he has examined on the spot and verified with his own eyes. As Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and mouthpiece of the Government in that department of state in the House of Commons, Sir Charles inspires universal confidence. Like Mr. Gladstone, he is an untiring toiler, and from the first he has worked on the most profitable lines. Whether as law-student, traveller, author, journalist, or politician, whatever he has done, he has done faithfully and well. Every recess he shuns delights, and spends laborious holidays at his romantic provincial retreat at La Sainte Campagne, near Toulon, in digesting materials for a magnum opus, "The History of the Present Century."

      He is personally a total abstainer, though opposed to the Permissive Bill, and is in all things a pattern of method and regularity of habits.

      At Cambridge he was a finished oarsman. He is likewise a vigorous long-distance walker, a good marksman, and a deft fencer.

      ​In nothing has he shown such marked improvement as in his style of public speaking. Though twice president of the Union Debating Society at Cambridge, he was at first a most unimpressive speaker: I hesitate to use his own term, "lugubrious:" But now it is not so. He is fluent, easy, and agreeable—one of the best level business speakers in Parliament. As for the matter, that has at all, times been such as to redeem the worst faults of manner; just a little too much of it at a time, perhaps—more, at least, than can be well digested by a mass meeting even of Chelsea electors—but not one word in bad taste, "nothing extenuated, nothing set down in malice."

      When he has been reviled—and who ever was more villanously overwhelmed by a hurricane of abuse?—he reviled not again. Like the soul of honor that he is, he has never stooped to personal invective. Under the severest provocation he has said nothing to wound the susceptibilities of the most sensitive. In this respect he has set an example to some of our foremost public men. Comes this extraordinary forbearance of grace or of nature? it maybe asked. By nature, I should say. To him opposition from men or things is of exactly the same character. It is something to be overcome by patience and pressure in the line of the least resistance. In other words, the member for Chelsea is lacking in sympathy. He is fitted to become a great parliamentary leader rather than a popular agitator. His political aims, it is true, are much the same as were those of passionate old Peter Wentworth, his ancestor; but it would never for a moment occur to him to wish that the most impudent of royal begging messages should be incontinently buried in ​hell. Indeed, if in insisting on some explanations being given with respect to the monstrous abuses of the civil list, and if in affirming his preference for a constitutional republic based on merit to a monarchy, however limited, founded on birth, he had shown more anger and less reason, sneers would have been regarded as the only weapon necessary to employ against him. It was the very fact that he used arguments which every snob in England knew to be unanswerable that the royalist tempest—what I may call the "white terror"—was evoked.

      It may here be convenient to consider the republican episode in his career. There can be no doubt that royalty was alarmed, that its numerous hangers-on were alarmed, and that the privileged classes generally, whose own existence depends on the maintenance of the monarchical superstition as an article of the popular faith, were thoroughly alarmed.

      "Kings most commonly," says Milton, "though strong in legions, are but weak at argument, as they who have ever been accustomed from their cradle to use their will only as their right hand, their reason always as their left. Whence, unexpectedly constrained to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny adversaries." The Royalists made up for the weakness of their arguments by the weight of their brickbats. At Bolton, while Sir Charles was addressing a large audience admitted by ticket, the place of meeting was assailed by a furious mob of Royalists, who succeeded in murdering one peaceable Radical, William Scofield, a working-man, and wounding several others. The magistrates and the police both scandalously failed in their duty on the occasion, and to this day their conduct has never been adequately explained.

      ​If the blood of an innocent man had been shed by republican hands, what a howl for vengeance would there not have been heard! At Reading, the late Mr. George Odger, than whom a more able and upright politician never lived, was within an ace of meeting the fate of Scofield.

      The leading organ of the "party of order," "The Standard," threatened the representative of Chelsea with physical violence. "The attachment of Englishmen for the royal family," it said, "may take an unpleasantly practical form if Sir Charles Dilke should ever insult a party of gentlemen by repeating in their presence calumnies such as he was permitted to utter with impunity before the 'roughs' of Newcastle." It is here worth putting on record the worst that Sir Charles did say in the famous address alluded to. The meeting was held in November, 1871; Mr. Joseph Cowen in the chair. This was the head and front of his offending: "There is a widespread belief that a republic here is only a matter of education and time.

      It is said that some day a commonwealth will be our form of government. Now, history and experience show that you cannot have a republic without you possess at the same time the republican virtues; but you answer, Have we not public spirit? have we not the practice of self-government? are not we gaining general education? "Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about a monarchy, I say for my part—and I believe that the middle classes in general will say—Let it come."

      The answer should have been. We Englishmen have not public spirit; we have not the practice of ​self-government; we do not possess the republican virtues of independence and self-respect, without which there can be no genuine republic. We love to deceive both ourselves and others. It is the "name" of liberty that we affect: the "thing" itself is unknown to us.

      Is it to be wondered at that Sir Charles Dilke, fresh from brighter countries, like the United States, where self-government is a reality, should have misconstrued the reply of an oracle so ambiguous and untrustworthy? But no harm has been done by his miscalculation—rather much good. The country has been made to know that it has at least one public man of first-rate ability and dauntless courage,