To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [37]
Instead of the usual ceremonial garb of parliamentarians—starched wing collar, black tailcoat, and black silk top hat—he wore Scottish tweed and a Sherlock Holmes—style deerstalker cap. Once, entering the House of Commons, he was stopped by a policeman who did not recognize him but knew the building's roof was under repair. "Are you working here, mate?" he asked.
"Yes," Hardie replied.
"On the roof?" asked the policeman.
"No," said Hardie. "On the floor."
On that floor, Hardie voted against the usual extravagant appropriations for the royal family. He rose, outraged, to protest when MPs spent hours making speeches celebrating a royal birth while ignoring the 251 Welsh miners killed in an accident the same day. After fiercely criticizing an exchange of visits between King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II—whose absolute rule was the epitome of tyranny for the European left—he was not asked to the King's annual summer garden party, to which the entire House of Commons was routinely invited.
Hardie's wife, Lillie, cared for and made all the clothes for their four children—one of whom died in childhood—remaining in Scotland when for parliamentary sessions he went to London. In the capital he lived frugally in a one-room apartment, decorated with busts of Walt Whitman and Robert Burns and a photograph of Karl Marx. At one point he was forced to auction off his beloved library to keep the Labour Leader publishing. When he was stricken with appendicitis, family and friends had to raise funds for his operation and convalescence. He used the same pocket watch he had had as a boy in the mines, which bore the teeth marks of his pit pony, and he often stopped in the street to talk to horses. In Parliament, Hardie never ceased demanding support for those who had little, whether this meant free meals for schoolchildren, help for the poor who were suffering through a winter so bitter that the Thames froze over, or better pay and conditions for the waiters and messengers at the House of Commons itself. He worked hard to ensure that the beneficiaries of workmen's compensation insurance included illegitimate children.
Although his own marriage was quite traditional, the breadth of Hardie's sense of justice made him, far more than most male radicals, an ardent backer of votes for women. For years he had been a regular visitor to the dinner table of Emmeline Pankhurst, who became his comrade in opposing the Boer War, and her crusade for suffrage resonated with all he had seen of the difficult lives of his own mother and the mothers and wives of other Scottish miners. He supported suffrage in Parliament, raised money for the WSPU, and repeatedly intervened on behalf of imprisoned suffragettes. After one of Christabel's arrests, he telegraphed, "Can I do anything?"
Above all else, ever since he had seen the raw face of British jingoism whipped up over the conflict with the Boers, Hardie feared war—its frightening atavism, its destructiveness, the way it could make people forget the fight for social justice. His hope, always, was that organized working people would simply not let their nations go to war. Attending the 1904 congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, while the Russo-Japanese War was under way, he was profoundly moved when the Russian and Japanese delegates spied each other on the platform and rushed to embrace, to fervent applause. This, he felt, was a moment "worth having lived to see."
At a later congress of the group, in Copenhagen, Hardie, supported by Jaurès, proposed that in the event of war, workers in all countries immediately declare a general strike. His anxiety only grew as he watched Parliament funnel money that might have gone for social welfare programs into the naval arms race with Germany, centered on the powerful new Dreadnought-class battleships, whose high-speed steam turbines and long-range 12-inch guns made previous warships obsolete. When an American journalist asked him what he thought would be the twentieth century's major danger, his one-word answer was "militarism."
The British public