The Government of England

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXXIII THE LABOUR PARTY The Underlying Forces. In tracing the recent efforts to establish a direct representation of Labour in the House of Commons it is needless to go farther back than 1868, when the working-classes first obtained the franchise upon a large scale. Since that time two distinct...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXXIII THE LABOUR PARTY The Underlying Forces. In tracing the recent efforts to establish a direct representation of Labour in the House of Commons it is needless to go farther back than 1868, when the working-classes first obtained the franchise upon a large scale. Since that time two distinct forces, socialism and trade-unions, have been at work to bring Labour members into Parliament, and the history of the movement has turned on the varying political activity and the mutual relations of these two forces. Of the two, socialism has been the more aggressive; but the trade-unions have had a vastly larger membership, with far greater resources in money, and hence success in electing Labour candidates has depended upon securing their cooperation. Nor has this been given freely in support of socialistic plans, for the British workingman is not a theorist. He is little attracted by shadowy dreams of an ideal commonwealth, and is not easily provoked to class hatred. He has a practical, almost conservative, turn of mind, and is stirred to strong political feeling only by a sense of present grievance. When that has been remedied he falls again readily under the lead of those classes that have habitually conducted public affairs. The part played by the trade-unions in parliamentary elections since the Reform Act of 1868 has gone through several phases.1 After a couple of Independent Labour candidates had run in vain at the general election of that year, the Trade-Union Congress took the matter in handand created a Labour Representation League, which brought forward, though without much success, thirteen candidates at the general election of 1874. There was a grievance at that time in the condition of the law relating to trade-unions and conspiracy, and when this was...