a federation of trade unions, socialist societies, trades councils and local labour parties, and cooperative societies. It was not until 1903 that the Candidates of the Labour Representation Committee obtained any notable success at the polls. Between the General Elections of 1900 and 1906 three remarkable victories were obtained: Mr. (now Sir David) Shackleton was returned unopposed for Clitheroe; Mr. Will Crooks won Woolwich from the Unionist party; and I had the pleasure of beating both the Tory and Liberal candidates at Barnard Castle. In 1906 the party promoted fifty candidatures at the General Election and twenty-nine of them were successful at the polls; in January, 1910, seventy-eight candidates ran under the auspices of the party, and forty were returned; at the last General Election, in December, 1910, fifty-six candidates were nominated, and forty-two returned. In Parliament these members formed a separate and independent group. But they were not a party, in the accepted sense of the word, and some of them had not shaken off their allegiance to the historic parties. In the country, though we maintained our own electoral machinery and our own staff of organisers, the organisation was essentially a federation of local and national societies. When the war came it was made clear that this form of organisation had ele

ments of weakness which the less serious stresses of peace times had not revealed. As the war wore on, and the democratic will became stronger, we were led to see that if Labour is to take its part in creating the new order of society it must address itself to the task of transforming its political organisation from a federation of societies into a national popular party, rooted in the life of the democracy, and deriving its principles and its policy from the new political consciousness.

CHAPTER II

THE NEW PARTY AND ITS PROGRAMME

WHEN the war ends the Labour Party, like every other, will be confronted with an unprecedented political situation. No comparison can be made between this situation and any that has arisen out of previous wars. The post-Napoleonic period, following the wars in which this country was involved for twenty years, provides the nearest parallel; but in every essential particular Labour stands to-day, both in relation to world-politics and to national affairs, on an altogether different footing from that of a century ago. The Trade Union movement was then strangled by laws which made the combination of workmen, even for purposes of self-protection, illegal. Democracy was rendered abortive by a scandalously restricted franchise which concentrated political power wholly in the hands of the landed aristocracy. Social conditions were atrocious. The people were the prey of the profiteering classes, who waxed rich out of the sufferings and privations of the poor.

A generation of political effort on the part of the people brought an extension of the franchise to the commercial and the middle classes, but added nothing to the power of democracy except the right to combine in Trade Unions for certain limited purposes, and the privilege of "collective bargaining" with the employers. Everywhere the workers were in revolt against the intolerable conditions under which they were compelled to live and labour. Another generation had to pass before the workmen of the boroughs were enfranchised and a beginning could be made with the organisation of political democracy on modern lines. It was said then by an ornament of the aristocratic House of Commons that the privileged classes would have to begin to educate their masters. "Their masters," however, preferred to educate themselves. In the process they also educated the leaders of the class parties, who began reluctantly to move upon the path of social reform which carried them further away decade by decade from the secure privileged position they had once occupied.

In world politics at the same time the democratic movement, which had received an immense impetus from the transitory triumph of revolutionary principles in France, was crushed beneath the weight of

the reactionary "Holy Alliance," formed by the kings for the protection of the monarchical principle and the suppression of every liberal and humanising idea. It is no part of my purpose to describe how the democratic movement shook off this incubus and introduced the epoch of popular government on the continent and at home. It must be enough to say that a backward glance at the history of the nineteenth century will show that the people have been steadily extending the range of their influence in politics and affairs, without any very clear notion of what they were doing or how the final stages in the conquest of political power by the organised democracy were to be surmounted. Democracy had to fight hard for every inch of ground it won. It was in the grip of mighty forces it had not learned how to control. It fought these forces blindly, confounding some that were, if properly used, beneficent, with those that were entirely malignant. It could not see that the mechanical inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, which revolutionised the industrial system at the beginning of the last century, were only bad because they were allowed to fall into the hands of the capitalist classes. It is not surprising if, in its empirical approach to politics, democracy made some mis