The ideal of a working class, educated and organised, taking up the reins of government and using its power in sober righteousness, has been preached by Mr.Hardie with a fervour that commands respect.

He has made an appeal that has moved the hearts of men and women by its religious note, and hence it is very considerably from the ranks of Nonconformists with Puritan traditions that the Independent Labour Party has been recruited.

Mr.Hardie is now fifty-five years of age.

He has never been afraid of making mistakes, and he has never sought the applause of men.

He has succeeded in arousing large numbers of people from a passive allegiance to the party governments of Liberals and Conservatives, and constrained them to march under a Labour banner at political contests.
Whether the Labour Party in Parliament will remain a separate organisation or will steadily become merged in the Liberal Party, forming perhaps a definite left wing of that party: whether a sufficiently large number of voters will ever be found to make the Labour Party anything more than a group in Parliament: and whether the Independent Labour movement is not passing as Robert Owen's socialist movement and as the Chartist movement passed away in the middle of the nineteenth century, are questions that are yet to be answered.