The Rise of the Democracy

by Joseph Clayton

Three representative working-class leaders in the House of Commons stand out pre-eminently in contemporary politics—the Right Hon. John Burns, Mr. J. Keir Hardie, and Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald. The Right Hon. D. Lloyd George is conspicuous rather as the representative of the industrious Nonconformist middle class, but the success of his career is no less significant of the advance of democracy. The very Cabinet is now no longer an aristocratic committee, and the highest offices of executive government are held by men who are neither wealthy nor of distinguished family.

Two working-class leaders of an earlier generation—the Right Hon. T. Burt, M.P., and Mr. H. Broadhurst—held office as Under-Secretaries in the Liberal Government of 1892-5; but Mr. John Burns is the first trade unionist to sit in the Cabinet. He, too, might have been an Under-Secretary in the days of that short-lived Ministry, but decided, with characteristic vigour, that if he was fit to be an Under-Secretary he was fit for the Cabinet. At the close of 1905 the opportunity came, and the offer of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman to preside over the Local Government Board was promptly accepted. The workman first took his place in the Cabinet when Mr. John Burns, at the age of forty-seven, went to the Local Government Board—to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Burns. For the robust egoism of Mr. Burns is largely a class pride. His invincible belief in himself is part of an equally invincible belief in the working class. His ambitions thrive on the conviction that whatever Mr. John Burns does, that the working class does in the person of their representative. Always does he identify himself with the mechanics and labourers with whom his earlier years were spent, and by whose support he has risen to office. The more honours for Mr. John Burns, the more does it seem to this stalwart optimist that the working class is honoured. He arrays himself in court dress at the palaces of kings, receives honorary degrees at Universities, and is kept before the public by the newspaper paragraphist, without wincing or pretending to dislike it. Why should the workman not be esteemed by kings and universities? Mr. Burns asks. So great is his self-respect that the respect of others is taken as a matter of course. Much of the criticism that has been directed against Mr. John Burns misses the mark, because it does not recognise that the motive power at work all the time in his career is the triumph of his class. It is the triumph of a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, of a London workman, that Mr. John Burns beholds with unconcealed pleasure in his own success.

There are drawbacks, of course, to this complete self-satisfaction. Since the workman has triumphed in the person of Mr. John Burns, the working class would do well to follow his example, and heed his advice on all matters affecting its welfare, Mr. Burns argues. The failures of working-class life and the misery of the poor are due to the lack of those virtues that he possesses, he is apt to maintain. Hence Mr. Burns is hated as a Pharisee in certain quarters when he extols self-reliance and total abstinence as essential to working-class prosperity, and points to gambling and strong drink as the root of all evil in the State. It is sometimes urged that Mr. Burns over-praises his own merits; but the fault is really in the opposite direction; he does not appreciate sufficiently that the gifts he possesses—the gifts he has used so fully and so freely—are exceptional. These gifts are a powerful physique, a great voice, a tremendous energy, and a love of literature; and they are not the common equipment of the skilled mechanic and the labourer. True, they are often wasted and destroyed when they do exist; and in the case of Mr. Burns a strongly disciplined will has made them abundantly fruitful. But from the first the physique, the voice, and the untiring energy were far above those that fall to the lot of the average workman; and the love of books stored the mind with rich supplies of language to be drawn upon when speeches were to be made. Not as an administrator at the Local Government Board has Mr. Burns become famous. His fame as a champion of the working class was established by popular ovations in Hyde Park and at dock gates. Battersea has been won and held by the speeches of its member. It is not the mighty voice alone, silencing interruption often enough by sheer volume of sound, but the plainly pointed epigram, the ready jest and the quick repartee that endear Mr. John Burns' speeches to the multitude. His sayings and phrases are quoted. His wit is the wit of the Londoner—the wit that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by his arguments. And Mr. Burns is so obviously alive. He warms the shrunken, anæmic vitality of followers, and overpowers the protests of enemies by sheer force of character.

Mr. John Burns is at his real vocation when addressing a great multitude. His energy finds an outlet in speech on those occasions, an outlet it can never find in the necessary routine of office administration. He was made for a life of action, and when once, in youth, he had thrown himself into the active study of political and industrial questions, every opportunity was seized for stating the results of that study. As a Social Democratic candidate for Parliament, Mr. Burns polled 598 votes at West Nottingham in 1885. In 1886 he was charged (with Messrs. Hyndman, Champion, and Williams) with seditious conspiracy—after an unemployed riot in the West End—and acquitted. In 1887 he suffered six weeks imprisonment (with Mr. R.B. Cunninghame Graham) for contesting the right of free speech in Trafalgar Square. In 1889 came the great London dock strike, and, with Messrs. Mann and Tillett, Mr. Burns was a chief leader of the dockers. Battersea returned him to the London County Council in 1889 and to the House of Commons in 1892. The Liberal Party promised a wider sphere of work than the Socialists could offer; political isolation was a barren business; and Mr. Burns gradually passed from the councils of the trade union movement to the Treasury Bench of a Liberal Ministry. But the Socialist convictions of early manhood had a lasting influence on their owner. These convictions have been mellowed by work; responsibility has checked and placed under subjection the old revolutionary ardour; experience finds the road to a co-operative commonwealth by no means a quick or easy route, and admits the necessity of compromise. But there is still a consciousness of the working class as a class in the speeches of Mr. Burns; and there is still the belief expressed that the working class must work out their own salvation, and that it is better the people should have the power to manage their own national and municipal affairs, and the wisdom to use that power aright, rather than that a benevolent bureaucracy should manage things for them. Mr. John Burns is an older man by twenty-five years than he was in the stormy days of the Trafalgar Square riots, and he is now a Privy Councillor and Cabinet Minister, but his character is little changed. His speeches on the settlement of the great Dock Strike of August, 1911, are the speeches of the man of 1889. Parliamentary life made sharper changes in the minds of Gladstone and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain than it has made in the mind of the Right Hon. John Burns. But Mr. Burns never admits that he possesses health and vigour beyond the average.

A working class leader of vastly different qualities is Mr. J. Keir Hardie, M.P. He, too, no less significant of democracy, stands as the representative of his class, claims always to be identified with it, to be accepted as its spokesman. A Lanarkshire miner and active trade unionist, Mr. Hardie has striven to create a working-class party in politics independent of Liberals and Conservatives; to him, more than to any other man, the existence of the Independent Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party—the latter consisting of the Independent Labour Party and the trade unions—may justly be said to be due. The political independence of an organised working class has been the one great idea of Mr. Hardie's public life. Not by any means his only idea, for Mr. Hardie has been the ever-ready supporter of all democratic causes and the faithful advocate of social reforms; but the great idea, the political pearl of great price, for which, if necessary, all else must be sacrificed. Only by this independence can democracy be achieved, and a more equal state of society be accomplished—so Mr. Hardie has preached to the working people for the last twenty-five years at public meetings and trade union congresses, travelling the length and breadth of Great Britain in his mission.

There is something of the poet in Mr. Keir Hardie but much more of the prophet, and withal a good deal of shrewd political common sense. Where Mr. John Burns wants, humanly, the approval and goodwill of his friends and neighbours for his work, Mr. Keir Hardie is content with the assurance of his own conscience; and in times of difficulty he chooses rather to walk alone, communing with his own heart, than to seek the consolations of social intercourse.

Mr. Burns is a citizen of London, a lover of its streets, at home in all its noise, a reveller in its festivities. Mr. Hardie belongs to his native land; he is happier on the hills of Lanarkshire than in the Parliament of Westminster; solitude has no terrors for him. Both men entered the House in 1892. Personal integrity, blameless private life, and a doggedness that will not acknowledge defeat, have had much to do with the success that both have won. For if Mr. Hardie remains a private member of the House of Commons while Mr. Burns is a Cabinet Minister, Mr. Hardie has lived to see an independent Labour Party of forty members in Parliament, and has himself been its accredited leader.

Again, exceptional gifts may be noted. An eloquence of speech, a rugged sincerity that carries conviction, a love of nature and of literature—all these things, controlled and tempered by will and refined by use, have won for Mr. Hardie a high regard and an affection for the cause he champions. For years Mr. Hardie was misrepresented in the Press, abused by political opponents and misunderstood by many of the working class. From 1895 to 1900 he was out of Parliament, rejected by the working-class electorate of South West Ham. But nothing turned Mr. Hardie from his policy of independence, or shook his faith in the belief that only by forming a political party of their own could the working people establish a social democracy. Merthyr Tydvil re-elected him to the House of Commons in 1900 at the very time when he was braving a strong public opinion by denouncing the South African War; and for Merthyr Mr. Hardie will sit as long as he is in Parliament.

It may safely be said that Mr. Hardie will never take office in a Liberal Ministry. The sturdy republicanism that keeps him from court functions and from the dinner parties of the rich and the great, and the strong conviction that Labour members do well to retain simple habits of life, are not qualities that impel men to join Governments.

Visionary as he is—and no less a visionary because he has seen some fulfilment of his hopes—so indifferent to public opinion that many have exclaimed at his indiscretions, with a religious temperament that makes him treat his political work as a solemn calling of God and gives prophetic fire to his public utterances, Mr. Keir Hardie may remain a private member of Parliament; but he also remains an outstanding figure in democratic politics, conspicuous in an age that has seen the working class rising cautiously to power. Mr. Hardie's influence with the politically minded of the working class has contributed in no small degree to the changes that are now at work. The ideal of a working class, educated and organised, taking up the reins of government and using its power in sober righteousness, has been preached by Mr. Hardie with a fervour that commands respect. He has made an appeal that has moved the hearts of men and women by its religious note, and hence it is very considerably from the ranks of Nonconformists with Puritan traditions that the Independent Labour Party has been recruited. Mr. Hardie is now fifty-five years of age. He has never been afraid of making mistakes, and he has never sought the applause of men. He has succeeded in arousing large numbers of people from a passive allegiance to the party governments of Liberals and Conservatives, and constrained them to march under a Labour banner at political contests. Whether the Labour Party in Parliament will remain a separate organisation or will steadily become merged in the Liberal Party, forming perhaps a definite left wing of that party: whether a sufficiently large number of voters will ever be found to make the Labour Party anything more than a group in Parliament: and whether the Independent Labour movement is not passing as Robert Owen's socialist movement and as the Chartist movement passed away in the middle of the nineteenth century, are questions that are yet to be answered. Democracy will go its own way in spite of the prophets. In any case, the work of Mr. Keir Hardie has been fruitful and valuable. For it has made for a quickened intelligence, and a more exalted view of human life amongst the working people; and it has increased the sense of personal and civic responsibility. It has made for civilisation, in fact, and it has insisted on the importance of things that democracy can only forget to its own destruction.