vatives,[237] and to this day the Liberal party
contains but a small proportion of the rank and wealth of the kingdom.
It is pre-eminently an organization of the middle and popular classes.

[Footnote 236: At the election of 1906, 21,505 of
the 25,771 votes recorded in the university
constituencies were cast for Unionist candidates.
Since 1885 not a Liberal member has been returned
from any one of the universities.]

[Footnote 237: The defection was largest at the
time of the Liberal Unionist secession in 1886.]

*172. The Independent Labor Party.*--The Labor party of the present day
is the product largely of the twin agencies of socialism and
trade-unionism. As early as 1868 two persons sought seats in
Parliament as representatives of labor, and at the elections of 1874
there were no fewer than thirteen labor candidates, two of whom were
successful. Great industrial upheavals of succeeding years, notably
the strike of the London dock laborers in 1889, together with the rise
of new organizations composed of unskilled labor and pronouncedly
infected with socialism, created demand for the interference of the
state for the improvement of labor conditions and led eventually to
the organization of the Independent Labor Party in 1893. The aim of
this party as set forth in its constitution and rules is essentially
socialistic, namely, "the establishment of collective ownership and
control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange"; and
the working programme as originally announced includes (1) a universal
eight-hour day, (2) the abolition of over-time, piece-work, and the
employment of children under fourteen, (3) state provision for the
ill, the invalid, and the aged, (4) free, non-sectarian education of
all grades, (5) the extinction by taxation of unearned incomes, and
(6) universal disarmament. To this programme has been added woman's
suffrage, a second ballot in parliamentary elections, municipal
control of the liquor traffic and of hospitals, and a number of other
proposed innovations. At the elections of 1895 the party named
twenty-eight candidates, but no one of them was successful and Keir
Hardie, founder and president, lost the seat which he had occupied
since 1892. In 1900 it attained, in the re-election of Hardie, its
first parliamentary victory, and in 1906 when the ti