THE LEADERSHIP OF KEIR HARDIE

...And yet already the pain has gone and almost rejoicing has taken its place...

...Hardie singing for us his "Auld Scots Songs," bobbing round the room in a polka, or facing up in a Scottish reel...

...In England before Keir Hardie came, more than you free Americans can ever realize— workingmen were ashamed, and consciously bore themselves servilely...

...But he never cared to meet rich or titled people...

...Nothing in modern democratic politics is more noble than his unbroken affection and respect for the working class, his untarnished loyalty to them, his championship of them, his enduring faith in their cause...

...For that Keir Hardie, dead, broken-hearted (though never in faith) by this awful war seems suddenly to have been given back to us gloriously living, with no longer the least fear that any human weakness or failure can dim his wonderful work...

...Comrades, rally round...

...For it is only the workers who can save the world and bring lasting, living Peace...

...Rarely in his speeches or writings did he indulge in vulgar diatribe against landlords or Capitalists, and I know that in anything relating to personal suffering and sorrow his feelings towards them were wholly brotherly...

...On one occasion, for instance, he took the chair for a titled lady at a Socialist meeting...

...Glasier said: "A man like Keir Hardie could not have lived through this war, for he loved the workers as they went forth to die...

...But before the workers can fulfill their destiny they must be proud of being workers...

...a year before that Bebel...

...when money and support poured in upon them...

...Even then he was never at his ease, and the Scottish thistle part of him came uppermost...

...Upon the day of his funeral in Glasgow, Katherine Bruce Glasier, prominent in the English labor movement, wrote to me— "You will have heard,—you will have known what it means to us all, Keir Hardie is dead...

...And how splendidly he did fight...

...He was the first working man who, having entered Parliament, never deserted them, never turned his back on a single principle which he had professed, never drifted away from his class in thought, in feeling, or in faith...

...A year ago Jaures was taken away...

...yoke fellow with his wife in the cause, wrote in the La-bour Leader under the title of "The Last Visit": "Keir Hardie has been to the common people, even to those who have never understood him or agreed with him, as one sent as a sign of justification and deliverance for the working class and all who suffer oppression...

...They have brought the world to ruin...

...But as soon as a cause became popular and successful, and could "Gang its lanes," or fend for itself, he, like a mother bird, when her brood takes to the wing, lost interest in it...

...More than ever I see now why Jesus was born a carpenter's son...

...He was the first man from the midst of the working class who completely understood them, completely sympathized with them, completely realized their plight, and completely champi oned them...

...My Jeannie has many boy friends at the front,—one special one...

...No attempt to organize the working class as a separate political force in the country was leally ever made until the Independent Labour Party, or, at any rate, its precursor, the Scottish Labour Party, came upon the scene...

...He was neither a strategist nor a tactician, and when occasionally circumstances (as during his chairmanship of the Parliamentary Labour Party) forced or tempted him to opportunist methods, he usually came to grief...

...None ever saw him bend or bow, cringe or scrape...

...When they were weak, despised and rejected he fought for them night and day...

...He was the greatest agitator of his day...

...Always the open Capitalist foe charging us in front, always the dissentients cleaving in upon our flank, always the renegades pelting us with mud, spearing us with their pens from behind...

...He was not, in fact, a Parliamentarian or a politician (either in the best or worst sense of the word) at all...

...These, the three greatest working class leaders of our day, whose names were world-familiar in the Socialist movement, have been taken from us...

...Then the camp fires, our gatherings together after victory, after temporary defeat...

...I remember once his telling me about a bereavement suffered by a rich member of the House, then perhaps the most implacable and, as we thought, the most unjust and harsh opponent of Trade Unionism, and saying, "When I saw the grief in his face today I wanted to go up to him and put my arms round his neck...

...tweed changed all that at a blow...

...He was not unerring in his judgment of political situations...

...he never went to their houses unless in the rare instances when they were known to be genuinely in sympathy with our cause...

...Nay, not so...

...Only when pleading with his audiences did he ever supplicate...

...No man I have known, no man of whom I have any knowledge in modern politics, had so deeply in him the capacity to stand alone, to fight alone, to win alone, to bear defeat alone...

...Then with arms outstretched and in clear, warm voice would come the familiar appeal—"Come now, Men and Women, I plead with you, for your own sake and that of your poor, the weary, sore-hearted mothers, the outcast unemployed fathers—for their sakes, and for the sake of our beloved Socialism, the hope of peace and humanity throughout the world—Men and Women, I appeal to you, come and join us and fight with us in the fight wherein none shall fail...

...Parliament was no more theirs than was the workshop of their factory...

...His splendid leap to their head in his miner's cap and...

...He stands in many respeots unprecedented as a working-class leader in our country...

...Never did he insult them, or speak harshly or scornfully of them...

...It is true—'Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord'—and the Lord comes in so many forms to find his own...

...He gave us our Independent Labour Party flag, he led our first march forward...

...Hardie's own Candidature for Mid-Lanark in 18S8, was the first distinctively Independent Labour candidature In British politics...

...He more than any other man of his day has changed the shame to the rich idler—the exploiter —the waster...

...The working class had no political mind of their own...

...I can see him as I write...

...AT A memorial meeting held in London the day following the funeral, Mrs...

...The only-times I have known him to be positively rude to people was towards very rich and exalted personages...

...There had been one or two earlier Radical Trade Union, Land Restoration, and Social Democratic candidatures, but none of them had appealed to the workers simply as workers...

...There was something curiously, mystically, biological in his feelings...

...For we are so eaten up with lice that some of us have got to praying for a clean bomb to end it all!' A university lad that—our wide and prudent cultured folk have truly led their sons into the ditch...

...And a letter came yesterday asking that only insecticide be sent...

...He was the first working man who fought his way to Parliament for them with no badge but that of Labour and Socialism on his shield...

...none of them had formulated the idea of a Labour Party consisting of the workers, and fighting for the interests of the workers...

...Nothing daunted him...

...Always making headway nevertheless, forcing them all to follow...

...In similar strain another comrade, Bruce Glasier...

...And now Hardie is gone...

...Wl|?.n he came there was no Labour representation in our country...

...This was noticeably the case in regard to the Labour Party and the Women's Suffrage agitation...

...Their masters ruled them in both...

...He loved the workers of the world, and he realized that the rich and the powerful who have wronged the workers through the ages, have never wronged them so terribly as when they brought them to slay each other who had done each other no wrong...

...He was an agitator, a champion, a pioneer, an apostle...

...The greater the odds against him the sturdier he stood...

...No political change in British history is more important and portentous than that which has been wrought in the politics of the working class since the Independent Labour Party was started, and the Independent Labour Party has been the chief means, visible and invisible, of it all, and Hardie has been head and front of the Independent Labour Party...

...This was indefensible, as were his personal references once or twice to royalty—references which quite misrepresented his own better self, for on my challenging him about them he freely admitted his fault and even spoke with sympathetic understanding of their position...

...Always in the wrong and ever in the right...

...He never sulked, never left us...

...His interest was immediately aroused, and his sympathies warmly attracted towards any downtrodden or forlorn cause, any weak or helpless thing...

...he loved the lads, not only of this land, but he loved the German lads...

...it will be found that Keir Hardie has left a deeper mark on it than has any other public man of our day...

...When the cloud and din of present-day politics have subsided, and the real state of mind of the people is discernible...

...The Trade Union movement was held in feudal Knights' Fee to the Liberal Party...

...What days and nights of campaigning it has been buffeted about in all the great political storms, all the parties of the State arrayed against us...

...his ardour for them began to cool, but he did not desert them...

...And now the destroyers he arraigned have proved the truth of his stern denunciations...

...He had in that respect a mother's heart...

...But 'these things shall he: a nobler race'—Keir Hardie is dead and is alive again,—radiant...

...He taught them not as a teacher but as an elder brother, he led them not as a tribune but as an apostle...

...And always Hardie in the thickest of the fray...

...The joy, the clutch at the heart that these memories bring...

...Their souls march with us, and the bugles blow...

...But when all men began to speak well of the Labour Party and the Suffragists...

...A similar feeling governed him towards the rich classes...

...But lo!—do we not see him as he walked along the street, as he passed to and fro in the lobby of the House, as he stood on the platform outdoor and indoor, as he greeted comrades after the meetings...

...He has already become a symbol with mystic power to call all the workers of the world forth to a full realization of their destiny...

...He astonished us all by coming on the platform in a heathery cycle suit, and spent the greater part of his chairman's address in warning people against the influence of the aristocracy...

...we must face the awful wreckage of our work and hopes without their counsel, their courage, and their strength to help us...

...Always his head erect, always his back sturdily straight, always firm of foot...

...He headed all our campaigns...

...The Leadership of Keir Hardie By ELIZABETH GLENDOWER EVANS FEW in this country have an adequate realization of the greatness of Keir Hardie, of his pre-eminence as a leader and a prophet of the working class...