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strike that followed, refused to grant their leaders plenary powers for almost the whole period of the strike. The refusal is a significant parallel with the miners' rejection of the principle of leadership in the syndicalist years after 1910. The relative calm in industrial relations which followed the 1898 strike furnished the workmen with the opportunity to reorganize, and the work of building the SWMF gave them an immediate goal. But, despite Ben Pickard's attempts to suffuse the Federation with the accepted Lib.-Lab. affiliations, the entry of a powerful union into the sphere of parliamentary politics could easily have developed into a scheme for a guild system of representation. With the collapse of Liberalism after 1906, the increasing insularity of SWMF parliamentary ambitions combined with the growth of syndicalist dogmas may have produced a more durable threat of political revolution than actually occurred. It was Hardie's return for Merthyr which provided the guide for a more positive kind of labour representation than Lib.-Labism and which could replace the latter without any attendant demolition of the established parliamentary structure. Within four years after the Khaki election, the South Wales miners were petitioning the MFGB to join the Labour Representation Committee, and, in the homes of the working men of the Merthyr constituency, the restyled hopes of labour were being epitomized with the substitution for the picture of the dead Liberal leader, Gladstone, of the picture of Keir Hardie.102 'This man, Keir Hardie, wrote an Aberdare miner over fifty years later, 'came into the midst of our confusion and showed us a way out of it'.103 KENNETH O. FOX. Aberystwyth. 108 W. J. Edwards, op. cit., p. 110. 108 Ibid., pp. 91-2.