"And mind you, there is no public house," said Mr. Burns. Instead he showed us a brand-new temperance billiard hall which had been erected to compete with, and take the place of, the bar-rooms which have disappeared.
At Lower Tooting, an estate of some thirty-eight acres, the London County Council is building outright a city of something like 5,000 inhabitants, laying out the streets, building the houses, even putting a tidy little flower garden in each separate front door yard. It was as if the London County Council had gone to playing dolls, so completely planned and perfectly carried out in every detail is this little garden city.
Mr. Burns, who has all his life been an advocate of temperance, although he had once served as pot-boy in a public house, pointed out here, as he did elsewhere, that there was no public house.
In the building of this little paradise all the architectural and engineering problems had indeed been solved. There remained, however, the problem of human nature, and the question that I asked myself was: Will these people be able to live up to their surroundings?
It is fortunate, in this connection, that in Mr. Burns the inhabitants have a leader who dares to speak plainly to them of their faults as well as their virtues and who is able, at the same time, to inspire them with an ambition and enthusiasm for the better life which is opened to them. Engineering and architecture cannot do everything, but education, leadership of the right sort, may complete what these have begun.
At Warden Street and Lydden Road, on our way back to the city, we stopped to look for a moment at what Mr. Burns said was the most wretched part of the population in that quarter of the city. The houses were two-story dwellings, with the sills flush with the pavement, in front of which groups of lounging idle men and women stood or squatted on the pavement. A portion of the street was given up to gypsy vans, and the whole population was made up, as I learned, of pedlers and pushcart venders, a class of people who, in the very centre of civilization, manage somehow to maintain a nomadic and half-barbarous existence, wandering from one place to another with the seasons, living from hand to mouth, working irregularly and not more than half the time.
A little farther on we passed by the Price candle factory, "where I began work at a dollar a week," said Mr. Burns in passing. A group of workmen were just coming from the factory as we passed, and the men recognized Mr. Burns and shouted to him as he passed.
Then we drove on back across the Chelsea Bridge and along the river to the Parliament Buildings again. "Now," said Mr. Burns at the end of our journey, "you have seen a sample of what London is doing for its labouring population. If you went further you would see more, but little that is new or different."