To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [36]
When he became an organizer for the miners' union, the role seemed to him fully of a piece with his work as a lay preacher in the Evangelical Union, a working-class Protestant sect that was one of the "dissenting," or non-Anglican, churches from which so many English and Scottish radicals sprang. "The rich and comfortable classes have annexed Jesus and perverted His Gospel," Hardie declared. "And yet He belongs to us." Hardie rallied miners to press for better pay and safer conditions, and for this he and two of his brothers were fired. An elevator in which they were descending underground was recalled to the surface by the mine manager, who told them, "We'll hae nae damned Hardies in this pit."
Soon he became secretary of the Scottish Miners' Federation, began to think of himself a socialist, and found that he was as persuasive with his pen as with his voice. Although he turned 30 before he left Scotland for the first time, his horizons rapidly broadened beyond the mines and the Glasgow slums. A founder of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, he became the editor of its paper, the Labour Leader, whose office windows were smashed by an angry crowd when Hardie denounced the Boer War as an imperialist land grab. More jeering mobs dogged his steps as he toured the country speaking against the war, sometimes from a lecture platform, sometimes from the back of a wagon in a muddy field.
For congresses of the Second International, Hardie began crossing the English Channel. For him, as for many other delegates, socialism was less a matter of workers owning the means of production—although he firmly believed in that—than a moral crusade for a society that put workers before profits, public good before private wealth, and, above all, peace before war. Like the spirit of the times, it was an optimistic creed. Sylvia Pankhurst once wrote of "a longing, profound and constant, for a Golden Age when plenty and joy should be the gift of all." And at this point in history, before the bloody battlefields of 1914–1918, the Golden Age seemed within reach. If journeys that once took weeks had shrunk to hours through the miracle of steam power, why could not all injustice be eradicated by the miracle of socialism? If determined campaigners a half century earlier had managed to abolish British Empire slavery, why not abolish poverty too? Socialism, said Jean Jaurès of France, should allow people, however they chose, to "walk and sing and meditate under the sky." Hardie became fast friends with the plump, unkempt Jaurès, leader of the French socialist party, with whom he shared a dread of a future war in Europe that could set working people against each other.
The final goals of the socialist revolution to come might be hazy, but the world's wrongs were pressingly real, and Hardie's passion for justice knew no national boundaries. He barnstormed the United States for two months in one of the presidential campaigns of his socialist friend Eugene V. Debs, speaking at 44 rallies and meetings, including one at a mining camp in Colorado. Visiting India, he spoke out forcefully for self-government and refused to enter any building if Indian friends with him were barred. After the Boer War, he traveled to South Africa to demand political rights and decent farmland for the territory's voteless majority, declaring that to allow no Africans to sit in the new country's legislature was like inscribing, above the portals of the British Empire, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." His hotel was stoned, and a meeting he addressed in Johannesburg was broken up by a white mob.
When Hardie arrived to take a seat in Parliament for the first time, a hired trumpeter played the tune of the socialist anthem, "The Internationale":
Arise ye workers from your slumbers,
Arise ye prisoners of want...