The Man Who Wore a Cloth Cap in the House of Commons.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 25, 21 December 1910, Page 2

The Man Who Wore a Cloth Cap in the House of Commons.

KEIR HARDIE: THE PROPHET OF THE COAL MINE.

COAL is the background of the whole life of Keir Hardie. He seems to the London “Mail” the incarnate spirit of the mine. This illustrious member of the House of Commons was barely eight years old, we read, when first he went to work in a eoal pit. For years it was his destiny to see, smell and pound coal. For years he wore a grimy cap that fitted close to his skull, a metal lamp that dangled in his hand or was fitted upon his head and clothes that would have appalled a chrmney sweep. His countenance was coaly from forehead to chin, his lips were

carmine by contrast with his ebony’ face powder, and his eyes glistened stonily. To this day he retains the miner’s characteristic stare and is voice is hoarse from past accumulations of fire damp. Yet in this environment he never- lost his keen sense of independence and of personal dignity, as, with a bottle of oil in one hand and a dinner pail in the other, he sat upon his load of coal and rode up to daylight. Hour after hourlie worked with his pick in pitch darkness through a monotony broken only by the alarm of fire or news that an explosion had killed a score or so near him. The Scotch parents of Keir Hardie belonged to the working elass. He hifd a rigidly pious mother, who brought him up in a very close intimacy with the Bible. The strain of scriptural prophecy that runs through the eloquence of Keir Hardie, the tinge of piety in all his talk, prompting the London “Standard” to compare his (oratory with that of the biblical heroes, is traced to his boyish study of tlje careers of David, Saul. Isaiah and the sister of Aaron and Moses. It is dif-

fieult to our contemporary to account) in any other way for the richness and.' splendour of Keir Hardie’s dietion and! the undefiled purity of his English style. The tinge of gloom in his platform manner could have been caught only in tint coal mine, where, between the ages of eight and twenty-five, he passed long and lonely years in the bowels of thei earth, separated from his fellows by’ the width of a seam. In those depths men learn by uncanny divination how their fellow workers fare. "They can tell 1 what they are doing, whether they are forward with their load or behind with it, whether the coal is working easily;

or hard.” Keir Hardie caught the superstition of the mine in this respect and we are assured that lie has never lost it. He trusts his instincts, his emotion’s, like one honoured with the gift of prophecy. The influence of his mothdr’s Bible, add the biographers of Keir Hardie. brought him visions in the coal mind of all the heroes of Scripture. He conned! their histories by night, and recalled' them in the bosom of the earth while he plied his piek. Caught and imprisoned' in a shaft at twenty, be repeated front memory the whole history of Saul and prayed for the deliverance that cam® as he waited with the Christian’s confidence for it. Keir Hardie is said, t<j be the last surviving example among modern labour leaders of a primitive piety that is rarely associated with the Marxian Socialism for which he hast fought so long. Physically, this praying and believing Scot conforms to a type of labour leader, more familiar in Britain than elsewhere. “Short, spare figure, tightly knit; hair

which turns early gray; model habits of extreme abstemiousness aud ol self-dis-eipl me,'’—these, writes Mr. R. U. K-. Enaor in the London “News,” “are the rules to which Hardie is no exception. ’ Another characteristic of the British labourleaders, "evolved, in part, perhaps, from the constant human testing and straining and buiicring and friction which they undergo,” is a personal charm of courtesy and patience, “a practice of embodying the ideals of brotherhood in their da ly intercourse, which Keir Hardie, born lighter and stern Hebrew prophet though lie is, exemplifies markedly.” tew have in essentials, says* this authority, betters manners than tins most belligerent of Labour leaders. There is the inevitable Scotch “burr ’ in his speech, but it is never uncouth. It lends a richness of meaning to the solemnity of the things he says. Never does he seem relaxed or clever or biting or sarcastic. Ho cannot get upon his feet and reduce an opponent to absurdity, like the pert Socialists who work with him in the Commons. Unlike the parliamentary princes of Britain's Labour movement generally, he employs none of the slang of the hour in his speeches, and not once in his whole career has he been known to make an epigram. He talks always like Saul at gloomy Endor or Macbeth tpon the blasted heath, in raucous accents that dwell upon the suffering of the labouring poor. Keir Hardie is conspicuously -what is known in the vocabulary of radical thought as “an intellectual.” There is nothing “wild and incomprehensible” about him, according to one sympathetic interpreter in the daily already quoted. Ife is a Scotsman of remarkable intellectual power dealing mainly with forces which he has carefully studied.” Time has not tamed him as it has tamed Jo'hn Burns. Keir Hardie would scorn to wear knee breeches and a silk coat and at-