a single word uttered by a ringing,
bell-like voice that came from within myself. That last word was:

"Why?"

[Illustration]

The British Elections and the Labor Parties

By H. KELLY

"We 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.

The British workman, true to his traditions, has consistently demanded
compromise before electing anyone, and where that has been refused, the
candidates have gone down to defeat. Hyndman, founder of the Social
Democratic Federation and the ablest Socialist in public life; Quelch,
editor of "Justice," the official organ of that party, for more than a
decade, and Geo. Lansbury, one of their oldest, ablest and most
respected members, refused to compromise in the recent election, and
paid the inevitable penalty. Hyndman's case was really remarkable, he is
a man of exceptional ability, has devoted himse