On yet another motion of Fawcett's the Radicals found themselves in collision with the head of the Liberal Government. This advocated open competition for the Civil Service, and Dilke supported Fawcett by speech as well as vote. Mr. Gladstone, following Dilke in the debate, suggested that he had spoken without examining his facts, a charge specially calculated to excite this conscientious worker's resentment. 'I recorded a strong opinion as to the crushing of independent members by Mr. Gladstone.' Charles Dilke was already displaying that blend of opinions which made him always a trial to the party Whips. He notes that, 'taking as I did an independent line, I supported on the Navy Estimates the Conservative ex- chief First Lord of the Admiralty' (Mr. Corry) 'on a motion which deprecated the building of further turret ships till those already built had been tested.' [Illustration: SIR C. WENTWORTH DILKE, BART. From the painting by Arthur Hughes.] These outbreaks of independence led to remonstrance from his father, and remonstrance to this reply: "I don't mean to let either you or Glyn" (the Chief Whip, afterwards Lord Wolverton) "frighten me into supporting the Government when I think they are wrong, but I vote for them when I am at all doubtful." This letter was written to Sir Wentworth Dilke, then on a tour through the north of Europe with his son Ashton, by this time a Cambridge undergraduate, and inclined to regard his elder brother as a very timid politician. 'My father and my brother went to Berlin, and saw the Crown Prince, afterwards the Emperor Frederick, and Prince Bismarck, who many years later described to me the impression which they--the Whig and the Republican--had made on him.' From Germany they passed into Russia, where Wentworth Dilke was commissioned to represent England at the Horticultural Congress. In May a sudden telegram called Charles Dilke to St. Petersburg. His father had been attacked with 'that deadly form of Russian influenza, a local degeneration of the tissues, which kills a man in three days, without his being able to tell you that he feels anything except weakness.' Before Charles Dilke could reach the Russian capital, his father had been already 'embalmed and temporarily buried,' with a view to interment in England.