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.