My frown only increased the mirth of that grinning multitude. I shook my clenched, up-stretched fists against them. And when at last their ghastly merriment ceased, I raised my voice once more in defiance.
"Why?"
As when on a bleak winter day the black snow clouds suddenly begin to darken the sky, so hatred and rage spread over their faces. Crooked, bony fingers were pointed at me. Men leaned recklessly from their narrow ledges to shout abuse at me. Stones and mud were flung at me. A hundred arms seized me and tossed my body in a wide curve from the hillside out over the river. For one long minute I struggled to keep myself above the yawning waters. Then I sank. All grew dark about me. A strange fullness in my chest seemed to rise up toward my head. There was a last moment of consciousness in which I heard a single word uttered by a ringing, bell-like voice that came from within myself. That last word was:
"Why?"
The British Elections and the Labor Parties
By H. Kelly
E are a left-center country; we live by compromise."
The above statement was made by an aged member of Parliament to Kropotkin some years ago, and the present elections testify strongly to the truth of that remark. For a country which produced the father of political economy, Adam Smith—for Scotland is included in our generalization—Robert Owen, the father of libertarian Socialism, which in the forties stood almost at the head of the Socialist movement in Europe, which has been the scene of so many Socialist and workingmen's congresses and has furnished a refuge for so many distinguished exiles, it is passing strange, to say the least, that up to the present no one has been elected to Parliament on a purely Socialist platform; this notwithstanding that, in the elections just past, of forty-three labor members elected nineteen are members of the Independent Labor Party and one of the Social Democratic Federation. John Burns was elected to Parliament just after the great Dock Strike on his trade-union record and has been elected regularly ever since, although he has long since ceased to be a Socialist. Keir Hardie was elected for West Ham as a Radical, and when he stood for re-election as a Socialist was defeated. In 1900 he was elected again as member for Merthyr Tydfill, a radical mining district in Wales, on a trade union-Socialist platform, and undoubtedly received a large number of votes on the ground of having been a miner once himself. R. B. Cunningham-Graham, probably the ablest Socialist who has yet sat in the British Parliament, was elected as a Radical, announcing himself a Socialist some time after his election.
