of the book, which was published in the last months of 1868. Large
portions of the work were translated into Russian, its circulation in
America was enormous (under a pirate flag), and in England it rapidly ran
through three editions, and was praised in the newspapers almost without
exception.

In the reviews which appeared there stood out a general acceptance of the
book as fair and friendly to all. In spite of its audacious patriotism, it
was no way limited in sympathy. This fairness of mind received the homage
of Thiers in a great defence of his Protectionist budget. "Un membre du
parlement d'Angleterre, qui est certainement un des hommes les plus
eclaires de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'ecrire un livre des plus
remarquables," he said, and pressed the argument that Charles Dilke's
defence of Protection from the American and Australian point of view
gained authority by the very fact that its author was _libre-echangiste
d'Europe_. Dilke always called himself, more accurately, "a geographical
Free Trader." He accepted, that is to say, the doctrine for Great Britain
unreservedly, only because of Great Britain's geographical conditions.
This was very different from the orthodox English Liberal's view of Free
Trade as a universal maxim to be accepted under penalty of political
excommunication.

On a matter of even wider import for Imperial statesmanship his sympathies
were at once and clearly declared. From this his first entry into the
arena of public debate he was the champion of the dark-skinned peoples--
all the more, perhaps, because he recognized clearly that the Anglo-Saxons
were "the only extirpating race." In lands where white men could rear
their children it seemed to him inevitable that the Anglo-Saxon race
should replace the coloured peoples as, to take his own illustration, the
English fly was superseding all other flies in New Zealand. Yet at least