Democracy; Great Britain -- Politics and government
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.
The third distinguished working-class leader in Parliament is Mr. J. Ramsay
MacDonald, the elected leader of the Labour Party, and its secretary since
its formation. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald is for the working class, but, though
born of labouring people, and educated in a Scotch board school, has long
ceased to be of them. Never a workman, and never associated with the
workman's trade union, Mr. MacDonald went from school teaching to
journalism and to a political private secretaryship, and so settled down
quickly into the habits and customs of the ruling middle class. Marriage
united him still more closely with the middle class, and strengthened his
position by removing all fear of poverty, and providing opportunities for
travel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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