We passed on the streets groups of neatly dressed, well-bred looking boys, with their books slung over their arms, going home from school or making their way to the park. Mr. Burns was delighted at the sight of these clean-cut, manly looking fellows.
"Look at those boys, Mr. Washington," he would exclaim, as he pointed proudly to one or another of these groups. "Isn't that doing pretty well for the proletariat?"
Then he would leap out of the automobile, before the driver could stop, put his arm around the boy nearest him and, in a moment, come back triumphant with the confirmation of his statement that the boy's father was, as he had said, only a small clerk or a letter carrier, or, perhaps, the son of a common labourer, a navvy.
When I contrasted the appearance of these well-dressed and well-behaved boys with some of those I had seen elsewhere, with the children who attend the so-called "ragged" schools, for example, I understood and shared his enthusiasm.
From Battersea Park we went to Clapham Common and, as we were speeding along through what appeared to be a quarter of well-to-do artisans' homes, Mr. Burns nodded casually in the direction of a little vine-clad cottage and said:
"That is where I live."
Although Mr. Burns now occupies one of the highest positions in the British Government, in which he has a salary of $10,000 a year, he has not yet assumed the high hat and the long-tailed coat which are the recognized uniform in London of a gentleman. On the contrary, he wears the same blue reefer coat and soft felt hat, speaks the same language, lives in the same style, and is apparently in every respect the same man that he was when he was living on the $25 a week guaranteed him by the Battersea Labour League when he entered parliament. He is still a labouring man and proud of the class to which he belongs.
It was at Clapham Common, although Mr. Burns did not mention this fact, that he was arrested for the first time, away back in 1878, for making a public speech. It was somewhere in this region also, if I remember rightly, that Mr. Burns pointed out to us a private estate on which 3,000 houses of the cheaper class had been erected.