The constitution of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 was as follows: 41 Trade Unions, with a membership of 353,070 members; 7 Trades Councils; 3 Socialist Societies, adding a further membership of 22,861, making a total of 375,931. At bye-elections between the General Elections of 1900 and 1906, three prominent candidates of the Labour Representation Committee were elected: Mr. (now Sir) David Shackleton for Clitheroe, the late Mr. Will Crooks for Woolwich, and Mr. (now the Right Hon.) Arthur Henderson for Barnard Castle. The Newcastle Trades Union Congress of 1903 passed a strong resolution enjoining political independence, and instituted a parliamentary fund. At the General Election in 1906, out of 50 candidates sponsored by the Labour Representation Committee, which in that year re-christened itself “the Labour Party,” 29 were elected. Under the chairmanship of Mr. Keir Hardie, the Parliamentary Labour Party was immediately established with all the paraphernalia of a separate political party in the House of Commons. At the General Election of January 1910, out of 78 candidates, 40 were elected; at that of December 1910, out of 56 candidates, 42 were elected; at that of December 1918, out of 392 candidates, 59 were elected. At the last election in 1918, with a total vote in Great Britain of 9,690,109, 2,375,202 were polled by Labour. Reconstitution in 1918 At the Labour Party Conference at Nottingham in January 1918, a revised constitution was proposed, which was ultimately adopted in London at the Party Conference on February 26 of the same year. The case for the new constitution was put before the Nottingham Conference by the Secretary to the Executive Committee, the Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, in these words: “It was no use the Executive using anything in the nature of a social programme or talking about building up a new social order and reconstructing society until they had taken into very careful consideration their present position as an organized political force. They had done so, and came to the unanimous conclusion that Labour, as politically organized in the existing circumstances, was altogether inadequate to the great task that lay immediately before it. They had never in the proper sense claimed to be a national political party. This limitation was inherited from the resolution carried at the Trades Union Congress in Plymouth in 1899. They were a political federation consisting of Trade Unions, Socialist bodies and Co-operative Societies, but in recent years they had developed what were called Local Labour Parties.” Mr. Henderson said the real question to be decided was whether, for the purposes of best attaining political power and of so advancing its party programme, the Labour Party should scrap the whole of its existing political machinery and build up a political organization from a new foundation depending only upon individual membership. “Speaking as an old