izer, preaching his message of Socialism so incessantly and so tellingly that the revised creed of individualism has been said to be, "Every man for himself and the devil take the Hyndman." And yet the Social Democratic Federation is at a standstill. Only one candidate for Parliament was returned at the last election, and Mr. Hyndman himself was defeated in a close contest at Burnley. After spending his life and fortune in the cause, he has to stand aside and see eleventh-hour laborers, men with not a tithe of his wide experience or keen ability, sweep past him into Parliament on the crest of the labor wave. His career is a standing lesson on what's in a name. Practically, his programme differs but little from that of the Fabians or the Labor Socialists. But the label of Marxian Socialism queered it. The Englishman prefers to swallow his dose of collectivism without knowing it. The Social Democratic Federation, it may be noted, has recently gained in the Countess of Warwick a recruit of thoroughgoing sincerity, who will make Socialism fashionable, if she does not first make it ridiculous.

Of the Fabians less is heard to-day than a decade ago. Perhaps, as a French critic put it, they gorged themselves with statistics and went to sleep; or perhaps it is that they have brought the public up to their level and no longer stand forth in splendid isolation. Certainly it would be difficult to find a more able or more successful campaign of education than that instituted by this band of brilliant young men, which includes Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, William Clark, Hubert Bland, H. W. Macrosty. All men of middle-class origin and university training, their Socialism lacked the revolutionary tinge of the millionaire or proletarian varieties. The ory and goal were put into the background. Permeation, not proselytizing, was aimed at. Practical proposals of municipal reform were given stress. In some share the wave of municipal Socialism-now seemingly checked, for a time at least-which has swept over Great Britain for a dozen years must be set down to their skillful and moderated advocacy.

But to-day most interest and vitality attach to the third branch of Socialist activity-the Independent Labor party. The story of how this Socialist organization captured the trades unions, stirred out of their conservatism by the House of Lords decision on the Taff Vale ques tion, and made an alliance whereby the International Labor party furnish the platform and leaders, and the unions the voters and the funds, is fresh in memory. The twenty-nine members who were returned to the present Parliament under this arrangement are not all Socialists, but the most active ones are, and of the rest Keir Hardie says: "Those of my labor colleagues who are trade-unionists simply and not Socialists are prepared to go the length of nationalizing the railways, the coal mines, and the lands. and if they accomplish that in their lifetime may trust their sons to go further." Their immediate programme, though advanced, is not startling. Three de mands, the protection of trades union funds from suit, the extension of the Workmen's Compensation Act to practically all trades, and provision for feeding breakfastless school-children at public expense, have already been carried Secular education, a fourth plank, may possibly, though not probably, result from the present educational muddle Old-age pensions must wait on financia. reform. As for the nationalization preposals, they are not yet seriously pressed

Two men stand out as leaders of this movement-Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald. There was once a third and, oddly, the third was also a Scot claiming descent from the poet. Bur John Burns is too good a Liberal now to suit his labor friends. Years ago, whet the London press was full of denunciation of this arch-agitator, he told his fellow workmen at Battersea. "When the Liberal press begins to praise me, you will know I have betrayed you." To-day there is no politician in England more fulsome! lauded by official Liberal papers, and his straiter brethren do not hesitate to por the moral and wax sarcastic on the cor sistency of the man who once term Albert Edward "the prince of outdoor relief paupers now attending roya functions in full court paraphernalia,

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accepting a government position worth £2,000 a year, when he of yore declared that no man alive was honestly worth more than £500 a year. But the impartial public, while recognizing one source of his conversion in his egotism and susceptibility to flattery, commend his level-headedness in recognizing the limits of possibility and trying in his post at the Local Government Board to accomplish something tangible in improving social conditions without weakening individual stamina.

The youngest man of the trio, Ramsay Macdonald, is whip and secretary of the party. By turn teacher, clerk, and journalist, he found his niche in organizing the party for the recent electoral struggle. His remarkable success stamps him as a leader of the type in which English Socialism has hitherto been lacking hard-headed, practically efficient, not likely himself to care greatly for a point of dogma, and as the more able to restrain the centrifugal tendencies of those who do care. In a recent tour through Canada and the United States he commented severely on the futile revolutionarism of American Socialism. "Darwinism," he declared, "has made it as necessary to revise Marxism as Genesis."

Keir Hardie is a man of a different type. As his kindly eye might witness, there is more sympathy in his Socialism than in Macdonald's, more of the old flush of enthusiasm for humanity. To Macdonald the Socialist programme is a cold business proposition, to be put through as efficiently as skillful organization and bringing out the vote may

accomplish; to Hardie it is a faith to be fulfilled, a vision to dream over and then to act, to bring the dreaming true. The external details of his career are of interest he was a miner till twenty-four, secretary of the Lanarkshire miners' union for a few years, organizer next of the Scotch miners, his Radicalism slowly turning to Socialism; then in 1892 was elected to the Commons, which might have tolerated his proposals to upset the whole industrial organization of the country, but could not forgive his daring. to enter that gentlemen's club without the time-honored silk hat. Note also his work in organizing the Independent Labor party, and his persistence last session in securing from the Cabinet the full price of Labor support. But perhaps the inner man is best revealed in an incident from his early life. After he had taught himself the alphabet down in the dark of the pit by scratching on a blackened stone, the first book he tackled was "Sartor Resartus." "How well I remember," he recalled recently, "sitting up o' nights in my little attic, staring at that wonderful book by the light of my pit-lamp. I could see there was something great in it, but it was far away, beyond my grasp. I longed to understand it. I grasped for the meaning among words of which I had never heard. It was a fearful struggle. Still I went on, and that was how I learned to read." And all through Keir Hardie's after life, however intemperate might be his policy, we see, shining through, the idealism and the doggedness here shadowed forth.

of faithful friends, like him devoted to the interests of the country: Corral, the Vice-President; Mariseal, Mena, and especially Limantour, the Minister of Finances. Diaz has secured peace for Mexico, has given it a firm government, but Limantour has furnished the resources which have allowed it to develop. In the creation of Mexico, in its organization as a modern State, these two names are associated, as they will ever remain, in the public gratitude. By their able and prudent administration

and much more so to stay. It was s. of forty years ago, but under the strong direction of General Diaz's genius the order of things has been transformed Mexico is now strongly constituted, reg ularly organized. Little by little the people, composed of heterogeneous ele ments too long divided by class preja dices, are beginning to understand the benefit of the constitution, and are wiling to follow it to its full extent.

The first occupation of the Gover ment under President Diaz was to pacity