[7] London Education, Nineteenth Century, October 1903, p. 563.
CHAPTER XIX JOHN BURNS AND THE MAN FARTHEST DOWN IN LONDON
I had heard a good deal, from time to time, about John Burns before I went to Europe, and when I reached London I took advantage of the first opportunity that offered to make my acquaintance with him a personal one. This meeting was a special good fortune to me at the time because, as I already knew, there is, in all probability, no one in England who better understands the hopes, ambitions, and the prospects of the labouring classes than the Rt. Hon. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, himself the first labouring man to become a member of the British Cabinet.
John Burns was born in poverty and went to work at the age of ten. He had known what it is to wander the streets of London for weeks and months looking for work. He had an experience of that kind once after he had lost his job because he made a Socialistic speech. Having learned by experience the life of that industrial outcast, the casual labourer, he organized in 1889 the great dock labourers' strike, which brought together into the labour unions 100,000 starving and disorganized labourers who had previously been shut out from the protection of organized labour. Besides that, he has been an agitator; was for years a marked man, and at one time gained for himself the name of the "man with the red flag." He has been several times arrested for making speeches, and has once been imprisoned for three months on the charge of rioting.
Meanwhile he had become the idol of the working masses and even won the admiration and respect of the leaders of public opinion. He was elected in 1889 to the first London County Council, where he worked side by side with such distinguished men as Frederic Harrison and Lord Rosebery. He was chosen a member of parliament in 1890, where he became distinguished for the store of practical information which he accumulated during his eighteen years of practical experience in the London County Council.
When he was twenty-one years of age Mr. Burns went as an engineer to Africa, where he spent a year among the swamps of the Lower Niger, occasionally fighting alligators and devoting his leisure to the study of political economy. When he returned he spent the money he had saved in Africa in six months of travel and study in Europe.
Speaking of what he learned in Africa, Mr. Burns once said: "You talk of savagery and misery in heathen lands, but from my own experience I can tell you that there is more of all these, and more degradation of women, in the slums of London than you will see on the West Coast of Africa."
He has had a wider experience than most men with mobs, for he has not only led them, but in 1900 he defended himself with a cricket bat for two days in his home on Lavender Hill, Battersea, against a mob said to number 10,000 which hurled stones through the windows and tried to batter down the door of his house because he had denounced the Boer War in parliament.