wise good and honest men who thought the labourers had no citizen
rights and that it was the height of conscious daring for anybody to
lift either hand or voice on their behalf. But those of us who had
taken up the labourer's cause were well aware of all the difficulties
and obstacles that would confront us; and we knew that worst of all we
had to battle with the deadly torpor of the labourers themselves, who
were trained to shout all right for "the Land for the People" but who
had possibly no conception of their own divine right to an inheritance
in that selfsame land. Furthermore, since the Land and Labour
Association was an organisation entirely apart from the Trade and
Labour movement of the cities and larger corporate towns we received
little support or assistance from what I may term, without offence,
the aristocracy of labour. We nevertheless simply went our way,
building up our branches, extending knowledge of the labourers'
claims, educating these humble folk into a sense of their civic rights
and citizen responsibilities and making thinking men out of what were
previously little better than soulless serfs. It was all desperately
hard, uphill work, with little to encourage and no reward beyond the
consciousness that one was reaching out a helping hand to the most
neglected, despised, and unregarded class in the community. The
passage of the Local Government Act of 1898 was that which gave power
and importance to our movement. The labourers were granted votes for
the new County and District Councils and Poor Law Guardians as well as
for Members of parliament. They were no longer a people to be kicked
and cuffed and ordered about by the shoneens and squireens of the
district: they became a very worthy class, indeed, to be courted and
flattered at election times and wheedled with all sorts of fair
promises of what would be done for them. The grant of Local Government
enabled the labourers to take a mighty stride in the assertion of
their independent claims to a better social position and more constant
and remunerative employment. The programme that we put forward on
their behalf was a modest one. It was our aim to keep within the
immediately practical and attainable and the plainly justifiable and
reasonable. In the towns and in the country they had to live in hovels
and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease and all the woeful
miseries of mankind. One would not kennel a dog or house any of the
lower animals