The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

What John Burns is doing, and the spirit in which he is doing it, will, perhaps, appear in the course of my description of a trip which I took with him through his own district of Battersea and the region adjoining it in order to see what the London County Council is doing there to make the life of the poor man better. I am sorry that I will not be able to describe in detail all that I saw on that trip, because we covered in a short time so much ground, and saw so many different things, that it was not until I had returned to my hotel, and had an opportunity to study out the route of that journey, that I was able to get any definite idea of the direction in which we had gone or of the connection and general plan which underlay the whole scheme of the improvements we had seen.

I think it was about two o'clock in the afternoon when we left the offices of the Local Government Board. Mr. Burns insisted that, before we started, I should see something of the Parliament Buildings, and he promised to act as my guide. This hasty trip through the Parliament Buildings served to show me that John Burns, although he had entered political life as a Socialist, has a profound reverence for all the historic traditions and a very intimate knowledge of English history. I shall not soon forget the eloquent and vivid manner in which he summoned up for me, as we passed through Westminster Hall, on the way to the House of Commons, some of the great historical scenes and events which had taken place in that ancient and splendid room. I was impressed not only by the familiarity which he showed with all the associations of the place, but I was thrilled by the enthusiasm with which he spoke of and described them. It struck me as very strange that the same John Burns once known as "the man with the red flag," who had been imprisoned for leading a mob of workmen against the police, should be quoting history with all the enthusiasm of a student and a scholar.

In the course of our journey we passed through a small strip of Chelsea. I remember that among the other places we passed he pointed out the home of Thomas Carlyle. I found that he was just as familiar with names and deeds of all the great literary persons who had lived in that quarter of London as he was with the political history.

When he afterward told me that he had had very little education in school, because he had been compelled to go to work when he was ten years of age, I asked him how he had since found time, in the course of his busy life, to gain the wide knowledge of history and literature which he evidently possessed.

"You see," he replied, with a quiet smile, "I earned my living for a time as a candle maker and I have burned a good many candles at night ever since."

Mr. Burns had promised to show me, within the space of a few hours, examples of the sort of work which is now going on in every part of London. A few years ago, on the site of an ancient prison, the London County Council erected several blocks of workingmen's tenements. These were, I believe, the first, or nearly the first, of the tenements erected by the city in the work of clearing away unsanitary areas and providing decent homes for the working classes.

It was to these buildings, in which a population of about 4,000 persons live, that we went first. The buildings are handsome brick structures, well lighted, with wide, open, brick-paved courts between the rows of houses, so that each block looked like a gigantic letter H with the horizontal connecting line left out.

Of course, these buildings were, as some one said, little more than barracks compared with the houses that are now being erected for labouring people in some of the London suburbs, but they are clean and wholesome and, to any one familiar with the narrow, grimy streets in the East End of London, it was hard to believe that they stood in the midst of a region which a few years ago had been a typical London slum.

A little farther on we crossed the river and entered what Mr. Burns referred to as "my own district," Battersea, where he was born and where he has lived and worked all his life, except for one year spent as an engineer in Nigeria, Africa.

The great breathing place for the people of this region is Battersea Park, and as we sped along the edge of this beautiful green space, stopping to look for a moment at the refreshment booths on the cricket grounds, or to speak to a group of well-dressed boys going from school to the playgrounds, Mr. Burns interspersed his information about workmen's wages, the price of rents, and the general improvement of the labouring classes with comment on the historic associations of the places we passed. Where Battersea Park now stands there was formerly a foul and unwholesome swamp. Near here the Duke of Wellington had fought a duel with the Earl of Winchelsea, and a little farther up Julius Cæsar, nearly two thousand years ago, forded the river with one of his legions.