of the war, in 1914, on that fateful Sunday when Germany sent her ultimatum to Belgium, Mr. Macdonald came to see Mr. Lloyd George, who was then leading the majority of the cabinet in the principle of "peace at any price." It would be unfair at this moment to record what passed between them. Suffice it to say that on the following day Mr. Ramsay Macdonald attacked with the utmost violence Lord Grey's speech vindicating the Government for entering the war, and that, on the day after, Mr. Lloyd George remained a member of the cabinet which declared war on Germany, with the overwhelming majority of the working people of England supporting him, while the majority of Mr. Macdonald's old colleagues screeched jingoism in even more strident tones than the jingoes themselves.

A growing hatred rapidly passed to actual bodily assault and violence against those who cried peace when there was no peace. Mr. Macdonald's career appeared to have come sharply to a close. I was working with him then on the government committee to deal with social affairs at home, working for the unemployed and the financial support of those, especially the women and children, who had been suddenly reduced to poverty. He did his work well, he was a good companion, he made no complaint; but his attitude was that of a man whose public life was over.

He came gradually to lead the movement, increasing in numbers, which saw, in the gigantic muddle of the war and the futile loss of men, evidence that the war was wrong; and which was protesting against the profiteers who, careless of human life, were raking in great fortunes from the

impoverished people. Especially in his own land, in the great Glasgow upheaval, and as a contributor to the "Forward" newspaper, he was regaining influence which was scarcely recognized by those in the South. But when the general election came, with the claim by Mr. Lloyd George to have won the war, and the "coupon" given by him and Mr. A. Bonar Law to those whom they selected as likely to give them docile support, Mr. Macdonald was hurled out of his seat at Leicester by an overwhelming majority.

The futility of the Labor men in the new House of Commons opposed to Mr. Lloyd George's dictatorship, their unwillingness to attend, their unwillingness to vote, their ignorance of the point at issue, created a demand from all who cared for the new ideals for the return of Mr. Macdonald to the House of Commons. He was put up for a by-election at Woolwich, where it might have been thought that the continual dismissals from the Royal Arsenal, which depended on the continuance of war for its efforts, would have rendered a victory impossible. The Tories put up against him a futile ex-soldier whose sole claim-but it was a great one-was that he had won the Victoria Cross. Mr. Bottomley, now serving seven years' penal servitude for fraud, was brought down to oppose him. Labor meetings were broken up. He was forced to escape out of back doors and climb over garden walls. And in the result, even though by a small majority, he was beaten.

Most of the newspapers of all parties wagged their heads and announced this to be the end of Mr. Macdonald's political career. The English, they said, would never elect a man who had

shown himself so opposed to a war in which the very life and existence of England were involved. Last November, however, Mr. Macdonald was elected by a huge majority for a mining district in South Wales. Within a week, despite the opposition on the part of some of the trades-unionist element in the party who were quite unable to occupy the position, he was chosen leader of the Labor party, which had returned with over 140 members, representing over four million voters. With his return that party ceased to be a mere casual collection of trades-union secretaries of doubtful opinion. It has become a party as secure of permanence, as determined in views, and as resolute in action as either the Conservatives or the Liberals. And it is not too much to say that the future of that party is at the moment the most interesting in all politics, and that, therefore, the future of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, now triumphant after so amazing a career, from a cottage home in the remote Highlands to the leadership of the effective opposition in London, is the most interesting subject of discussion in all political quarters.

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From the first, when we entered Parliament together in 1906, he was accused of ambition and also of a suggestion of intrigue. The intrigue was that combination of Labor intellectuals and trades-union fanatics without which no Labor party could have been created. The ambition was undoubtedly present, and is perhaps present to-day; but it was ambition toward the realization of a personality in the service of a good cause. You may have comparatively

contemptible political ambitions, such as those of Mr. Winston Churchill, which is to be at the top so far as power is concerned without any fastidious taste as to how that position is to be obtained, and with complete indifference to any particular policy so long as that policy can be used for its attainment. In Disraeli's language, it is "a greasy pole," and, as he announced when he became prime minister, "I have climbed to the top of it." But there is legitimate ambition in a man of gifts and character who has set himself toward the attainment of a definite policy, some little advance or change in the improvement of the world, and who is impatient of the foolishness of the crowd who are rendering impossible, as life passes, its realization in actual affairs.

"When that the poor have cried, Cæsar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff."

He

No one can point to any occasion in Mr. Macdonald's life in which he has proved faithless to the welfare of the poor. On the other hand, one can find gaps and even a risking of complete destruction through adherence to an ideal. As a Highlander, with a great gift of reticence, he does not wear his heart upon his sleeve. had anger and even contempt for the mess his party used to make of things in the House of Commons, seeing their progress thrown back by petty jealousies and stupidities and inability to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them by the stupidity of others. And he was sometimes, perhaps, too vocal in his expression of his opinion concerning such incidents to people who were always eager to

convey that expression to the men he condemned.

It is the socialists of Glasgow, and not those trades-unionists who have represented labor for the last ten years, who have flung him upward to the leadership of the Labor party. And with these socialists, all of combined education, unlimited audacity, and a belief in Bolshevism remote from any conviction of Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, he has really very little in common. The Labor party as it stands to-day represents a gigantic coalition, including men whose convictions are undistinguishable from the left wing of the Liberal party, and who definitely repudiate socialistic ideals, through all various creeds, to those whose belief borders upon the communism which it has expelled, and which take the Russian Revolution as their ideal. Over all these opinions, in which perhaps no one man holds the same as another, Mr. Macdonald rules, and he has to fuse all into something like a consistent opposition, and in future, perhaps, something like a consistent government party. It is a task which might appall the most courageous, which may quite possibly lead to failure and confusion, but which, if he can successfully steer it to a triumphant conclusion, will place his name among the great politicians of the century.

But as for pure personal ambition, he has expressed his opinion in his little private memoir of his wife. "The Buckingham woods are now yellow; the blackberries are spotting the hedges: but she whom they call to come out for happy hours in lane and field path is dead to their allurements, and her yearning for domestic peace is soothed by eternal rest. Some of her obituary notices, I observe, speak of

her political ambitions. How little we know and how thoughtlessly we chatter about each other!"

He was the handsomest man in the House of Commons when he entered it, and though illnesses have made their impression upon his appearance, to visitors he is notable as a man marked out from his fellows. The white hair and black mustache, sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes, the indefinable sense of distinction which comes, no doubt, from Highland blood, all sharply separate him from the variety of stout or commonplace persons who make up the bulk of that assembly. There is the stamp of the idealist upon his very appearance, and also the stamp of determination that will fight without giving or receiving quarter till the end. It is doubtful how far he can be called a socialist, for it is doubtful how far any one to-day can be called a socialist or what, indeed, the term socialism means. In his little book on socialism, published some years ago, he repudiates many of the planks in the platform of the Marxian socialists; and he has always maintained a kind of warfare with the bureaucratic ideas of the Sidney Webbs. He came back from a tour of observation in Australia bitterly hostile to the trade boards that regulated wages by the state, and which most of the progressives of his time thought would prove the first step toward the creation of a socialist kingdom. He was compelled to abandon opposition to this Liberal act of regulating wages by state intervention only owing to the fact that in such opposition he was alone in his party, and if he had persisted in it, would have been compelled to break with his fellow-members.

He was called a few months ago to organize the people of Georgia as a socialist state. I have no information as to how this constitution was effected. But in any case, its life was precarious and brief, as Bolshevism swept in from the North and destroyed the whole affair. Like his friend Philip Snowden, the orator of the Labor party, he is bitterly opposed to Bolshevism as exhibited in practice in Russia or in theory by many of those who call themselves his followers; and it is a curious fact that the most moderate, statesmanlike, and in many ways cautious prominent man in the Labor movement has been elected as leader entirely by the votes of the advanced section. Whether they will drive him forward into a position he has hitherto not taken, or whether he may moderate their ardor into practical reform instead of the upsetting of the state, is one of the interesting questions of the hour.

In the greater part of Europe, including virtually all the territories in which industry dominates agriculture, the governments now term themselves socialist states, although, as a matter of fact, there appears to be no attempt in any of them to carry out the ideals of the Socialist Democratic federations which frightened men of possessions in the eighties and nineties of last century. The countries in which all such advance seems impossible are those in which a peasant civilization confronts the towns with ever increasing disgust and dismay-a France in which the socialists are incapable, an Italy in which the first experiments in socialism have been destroyed by the most astonishing counter-revolution of modern times. Mr. Macdonald is above all things a

parliamentarian. He will never have anything to say to "direct action." If socialistic changes come, they will come by laws legally passed by the British Parliament and enforced by measures adopted by a party having a government majority elected by British electors.

It is possible that, if he had been given an opportunity, as, for instance, Mr. Lloyd George was given an opportunity, of entering Parliament in early years as an advanced radical, instead of being choked up among the intellectual proletariats with no seeming career before him, he would now have been the leader of the advanced radical section, or have been a cabinet minister in the last Liberal administration. He has always been occupied in practical and immediate advance rather than in stern and unbending principles. He has always been willing to take the second best if the first best is impossible, with that pliancy and compromise which are denounced by the strong upholders of theory, but which are the only ways in practical affairs through which any advance can be made.

To a certain extent he possesses that capacity for exciting distrust that has been brought to perfection by Mr. Lloyd George. But he has excited also great affection, and those who have the honor to number him among their friends recognize that they have a man in character as well as in energy and knowledge far superior to the normal standard. This distrust has in part been excited by the fact that through his marriage he attained a small fortune, that he has always been able to make money by his books and journalistic contributions, and that therefore he has lived all through on a

different standard from that of the ordinary Labor member. He has possessed a little house at Lossiemouth (his birthplace in the Highlands), a pleasant flat in London, for a time another country cottage in the Chilterns in which he passed the happiest hours of his life with his wife and children. He has never been stunted for books or bread or the capacity for the entertainment of friends, or those severe disabilities through which, as a rule, "Labor members" climbed only with difficulty through factory or mine into the high position of membership in the House of Commons. In consequence, there has always been a certain suggestion, represented by the slang title "Gentleman Mac," that he is despising the "comrades" who make inarticulate noises of protest, or that he may have been easily bought over by the offer of high office by one of the other political parties. I am sure that suggestion was always unfounded. He passed through years of progress and ambition, filled with "laughter and the love of friends." He passed through years when he could have protested with Heine, “The hand of the Almighty is heavy upon me," and of which he could say, "I have no pleasure in them."

like going into a sheltered haven where waters were at rest, and smiling up into the face of Heaven. Weary and worn, buffeted and discouraged, thinking of giving up the thankless strife and returning to my own house and children and household shrines, I would flee with her to my Buckinghamshire home, and my lady would heal and soothe me with her cheery faith and steady conviction, and send me forth to smite and be smitten. No one, not even I, can tell with accuracy how much of the steadiness there is in the Labor movement in this country is due to her."

At the end, the memory of those days and his determination to be worthy of so unclouded a vision sustained him in the world of failure and bitter purposes in all the later years, when the whole nation seemed to have gone insane, all the ideals for which he had fought had collapsed, and humanity was tearing itself to pieces in madness and futile war. "I am finishing," so he ends, "this little tribute to her, in that place, as I began it, in that home where we first went together. I have just returned from a walk she loved to take at nightfall. The black expanse of sky was glittering with stars as when she and I walked together and she talked of it like a gem sparkling upon the background of despair; the sea was moaning as it did when she said: 'Do not let us speak; let us walk silently because then we speak most truly.' The weird cry of the curlew flying into the night came out of the darkness, as it did when I first brought her here, and she shuddered, and said it made her wonder and wonder and wonder what was in the heart of the Unknown and the Infinite."