He saw that Europe needed peace.  He saw that the outbreak of a general war would strike the laboring man a terrible blow, and would destroy the fruits of his toil.  When he ascended the throne (1901) the contest with the Boers in South Africa was still going on.  General Botha, one of the Boer leaders, publicly stated that the King did everything in his power to secure the establishment of an honorable and permanent peace between the combatants.  More than that, even, he was in favor of granting a large measure of self-government to the very people who had only just laid down the arms with which they had been fighting him.

But the King’s influence for good was not limited to the Old World.  It extended across the Atlantic.  Mr. Choate, who was formerly our ambassador to England, said that Edward VII endeavored to remove every cause of friction between Great Britain and America.  While he lay on a sick bed he signed a treaty relating to the Panama Canal, which made “it possible for the United States to construct the waterway and to protect it forever."[1]

[1] This was the treaty repealing the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850.  See the address of Honorable Joseph H. Choate before the New York Chamber of Commerce, June 2, 1910.

628.  The Politcal Battle in England; Labor gets into Parliament, 1906.

But the King’s success in international politics did not secure peace in the field of home politics.  Organized labor had long been bent on pushing its way into Parliament.  In a few cases, like that of Joseph Arch (S600), it had elected a representative,[2] but these were scattered victories which made no great impression.

[2] Besides Joseph Arch, such men as John Burns and J. Keir Hardie.

The real upheaval came in the General Election of 1906.  That contest wrought a silent revolution.  Up to that date, with very few exceptions, the wealthy class was the only one which had been represented in the House of Commons.  Furthermore, it cost a good deal of money for any candidate to get into the House, and as members drew no pay, it cost a good deal more money to remain there.

In 1906 the Liberal Party and the Labor Party gained a sweeping victory over the Conservative Party, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal Prime Minister, came into power, 1906-1908.  Out of the six hundred and seventy members who had been elected to the House of Commons, fifty-four came from the ranks of the workingmen,—­those to whom life means an unending struggle to live.[3] The combined Labor voters sent these men to represent them in Parliament, and then raised a fund to meet the expense of keeping them there.[4]

[3] John Burns, who was one of the earliest workingmen to enter Parliament as a Labor leader, said of himself, “Came into the world with a struggle, struggling now, with prospects of continuing it.” [4] But later, the Court of Appeal (S588) decided that the Labor Party could not legally compel any member of the Labor Union to contribute to this fund against his will.  Now (1911) Parliament pays all members of the Commons (see S591).