Labour Party, with Hardie as chairman. With this body and its work his name will always be principally connected. In parliament he rapidly made his name as ‘the member for the unemployed’, adopting from the first a militant attitude on this question. In 1895 he lost his seat owing to the withdrawal of support by the liberals. He then visited America and, on his return, fought an unsuccessful by-election at Bradford in 1896. He incurred much odium by taking up a strong attitude against the South African War; but in 1900, after being defeated at Preston, he was elected for Merthyr Burghs with D. A. Thomas (afterwards Viscount Rhondda) [q.v.]. This seat he held continuously until his death. He took an active part in forming the labour representation committee in 1900. When this became the Labour Party, and a strong labour group was for the first time returned to parliament in 1906, Hardie became its first leader in the House of Commons; but he resigned the leadership, owing to illness, in the following year. In 1913 he again became chairman of the Independent Labour Party, a position which he had held from 1893 to 1900, and presided at its ‘coming-of-age’ conference in 1914. He was chairman of the British section of the International Socialist bureau at the outbreak of war in 1914, having taken from 1888 onwards an active part in international labour conferences and in stimulating international labour organization. The powerlessness of the working-class organizations to prevent war, to which he was strongly opposed, came to him as a severe shock, and from August 1914 his health broke down. After seeming for a while to regain his strength, he suffered a further breakdown. Pneumonia followed, and he died 2 September 1915. He left two sons and a daughter, a second daughter having died in childhood.
Hardie was, in his day, perhaps the best-hated and the best-loved man in Great Britain. To his opponents he was uncompromising and hard-hitting in his language, and he was commonly regarded as much more of an extremist than he really was. His speeches in parliament and still more, during his visit to India in 1907–1908, when his utterances were seriously misrepresented, roused furious anger. In the socialist movement, on the other hand, he was regarded with feelings almost of veneration, and his personal popularity was immense. He was an excellent speaker, relying on homely phrases and simple appeals, with some tendency to sentimentalism. Never an original thinker or theorist, he had a firm grip of practical affairs, which enabled him to carry out effectively his task of drawing the British trade union and labour movement into independent political action on semi-socialist lines. He wrote well, and his journalism had always that personal touch which is essential to popular political writing. At his best, he was not unlike William Cobbett in the manner of his appeal. Like Cobbett, too, he was an excellent companion, with an extraordinary faculty for making and keeping loyal friends. By his example and the force of his personal appeal, he certainly did far more than any other man to create the political labour movement in Great Britain, and to give to it the distinctive character of an alliance of socialist and trade union forces. His London home, in Nevill's Court, off Fleet Street, was the resort of all manner of British and foreign leaders of advanced thought and action. But, though Hardie's life was spent largely in London, he always retained both his home at Cumnock, where his wife and family remained, and his essential character as a Scottish miner. He was acutely class-conscious and clan-proud, obtruding in parliament and in private life his working-class origin and attitude. His cloth cap and tweed suit, which so scandalized parliament and the newspapers when he took his seat in 1892, were worn, partly at least, in order to help him in sustaining this character. In this he was perfectly sincere, and his egoism, like Cobbett's, arose rather from his sense of symbolizing his class than from any personal vanity. Time is already enabling even his opponents to take a more objective view of Hardie. His opportunist and even sentimental socialism exactly suited the mood of the more advanced groups of workers who, escaping from Victorian liberalism, sought a new gospel as the political expression of their economic condition.
[Apart from pamphlets, of which there are many, the only life of Hardie is William Stewart's J. Keir Hardie: A Biography, 1921, which contains a full account of the events of his life (with portraits). David Lowe's From Pit to Parliament, 1923, deals more fully with his early career. For his influence, see also volume ii of Max Beer's History of British Socialism, 1919–1920, and the somewhat malicious references in H. M. Hyndman's Further Reminiscences, 1912. Hardie's own works, in addition to a good many pamphlets and much journalism, include From Serfdom to Socialism, 1907, a simple piece of socialist propaganda, and India: Impressions and Suggestions, 1909.]
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