Welsh Journals

largely frittered away in showy buildings erected to give a mine an illusory facade of prosperity or in the enrichment of unscrupulous company promoters. The evidence that now remains of past activity is the scarified countryside and bleak decaying buildings which first aroused the interest of Mr. Lewis in this history. All is not debit however, as the miniature beauty spot of Pen-dam lake originated as a reservoir constructed to supply lead miners with the water they needed. JOHN MORRIS Aberystwyth KEIR HARDIE (The Clarendon Biographies, 15). By Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford University Press, 1967. Illus. Pp. 64. 9s. 6d. net boards, 5s. net paper. 'Better second-class brains than second-class characters.' Stanley Baldwin's dictum for the long haul in British politics is amply borne out by this record of the life of James Keir Hardie. Certainly Hardie was not the most intellectually gifted socialist in Britain in the late nineteenth century; and he was not in any way a profound or original thinker in social and economic matters. But he had a political flair that no con- temporary working-class politician could equal and he used it to found the Labour Party. This first-rate little book, designed for sixth formers and the general reader, tells superbly how he did it. Initially, Hardie was a reluctant architect. For years, along with most other working-class leaders, he pinned his hopes on the Liberal Party. But personal experience of the social myopia of the local Liberal caucuses and growing despair at the sheer irrelevance to the 'condition of the people' question of the official policy of the Gladstonian Liberals ulti- mately convinced him of the need for a separate Labour party. Thereafter, he worked patiently and unswervingly to this end. The Liberals were to have good cause to rue their contemptuous rejection of his proffered candidacy at Mid-Lanark in 1888. For years it seemed an unpromising venture: the strongest elements in the trade-union movement-the craft unions-were traditionally Liberal in politics and conservative in social attitudes; the non-union socialists revelled happily in quasi-theological doctrinal disputes oblivious of the need for unity. In the 1890s Hardie, heartened by the formation in 1893 of the Independent Labour Party, year by year fought a war of attrition at the T.U.C. conferences against those who clung stubbornly to the Liberals,