ent 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 acknowledg