The British politician James Keir Hardie (1856-1915) helped to initiate the 20th-century labor movement in Britain.

Keir Hardie was born on Aug. 15, 1856, at Legbrannock, Lanarkshire, the illegitimate son of Mary Keir, domestic, and William Aitken, miner. He took the name of his stepfather, David Hardie, a ship's carpenter. He worked as a messenger boy when he was 8; from 1867 to 1879 he worked in or around the coal mines. Self-educated, he especially enjoyed what he read of Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry George. A convinced socialist at 21, he was converted to Christianity at 23, to the astonishment of his firmly atheistic mother.

Fired and blacklisted for union activity, Hardie was undismayed, and he married Lily Wilson, a publican's daughter, Aug. 3, 1879. After local union service he became secretary to the Scottish Miners' Federation in 1886. Hardie clashed with old-line "Lib-Lab" members of Parliament, whom he thought overly conservative about state intervention on...