British Political Leaders

by Justin McCarthy

JOHN BURNS

JOHN BURNS

John Burns stands out a distinct and peculiar figure in the House of Commons. He is the foremost representative of that working class which is becoming so great a power in the organization of English political and industrial life. "Be not like dumb driven cattle," says Longfellow in his often-quoted lines—"Be a hero in the strife." The British workingmen were until very lately little better than dumb driven cattle; in our days and under such leadership as that of John Burns they have proved themselves capable of bearing heroic part in the struggle for great reforms. I can remember the time when the House of Commons had not in it any member actually belonging to the working classes. At that time the working classes had no means of obtaining Parliamentary representation, for it may be said with almost literal exactness that no workingman had a vote, or the means of obtaining a vote, at a Parliamentary election. The conditions of the franchise were too limited in the constituencies to enable men who worked for small daily or weekly wages to become voters at elections. In order to become a voter a man must occupy a house rated at a certain yearly amount, and he must have occupied it for a specified and considerable space of time, and there were very few indeed of the working class who could hope to obtain such legal qualifications. In more recent days the great reformers of these islands have succeeded in establishing what may be fairly described as manhood suffrage in these countries, and have also secured a lodger franchise; have established the secret ballot as the process of voting; and by these and other reforms have put the workingman on a level with his fellow-citizens as a voter at Parliamentary elections. My own recollection goes back to the time when the law in Great Britain and Ireland insisted on what was called a "property qualification" as an indispensable condition to a candidate's obtaining a seat in the House of Commons. I have known scores of instances in which clever and popular candidates got over this difficulty by prevailing on some wealthy relative or friend to settle legally on them an amount of landed property necessary to qualify them for a seat in the House. It was perfectly well known to every one that this settlement was purely a formal arrangement, and that the new and nominal possessor of the property was no more its real owner than the child who is allowed for a moment to hold his father's watch in his hand becomes thereby the legal owner of the valuable timepiece. In our days no property qualification of any kind is needed either for a vote at a Parliamentary election or for a seat in the House of Commons, and therefore the workingmen form an important proportion of the voters at Parliamentary elections and are enabled in certain constituencies to choose men of their own class to represent them in the House of Commons.

I have thought it well to make the short explanation of the changes which have taken place in the condition of the British workingmen during recent years as a prelude to what I have to say concerning that foremost of British workingmen, John Burns. It is only fair to say that the workingmen of these countries have made judicious and praiseworthy use of the new political powers confided to them, and have almost invariably sent into Parliament as the representatives of their class men of undoubted ability and of the highest character, men who win the respect of all parties in the House of Commons. Of these men John Burns is the most conspicuous. He has never, indeed, held a place in an administration, as two, I think, of his order have already done; but then John Burns is a man of resolutely independent character, and it would not be easy thus far to form even a Liberal Government which should be quite up to the level of his views on many questions of domestic and foreign policy.

John Burns would hardly be taken personally as a typical representative of the British workingman. He is short in stature, very dark in complexion and in the color of his hair, and a stranger seeing him for the first time might take him for an Italian or a Spaniard. His physical strength is something enormous, and I have seen him perform with the greatest apparent ease some feats of athletic vigor which might have seemed to demand the proportions of a giant. His whole frame is made up of bone and muscle, and although he is broadly and stoutly built, he does not appear to have any superfluous flesh. If I had to make my way through a furious opposing crowd, I do not know of any leader whom I should be more glad to follow than John Burns. But although Burns is physically made for a fighting man, there is nothing pugnacious or aggressive in his temperament. He is by nature kind, conciliatory, and generous, tolerant of other men's opinions, and only anxious to advance his own by fair argument and manly appeals to men's sense of humanity and justice. I have seen him carry a great big elderly man who had fainted at a public meeting and take him to a quiet spot with all the ease and tenderness of a mother carrying her child. But if I were an overbearing giant who was trying his strength upon a weaker mortal, I should take good care not to make the experiment while John Burns was anywhere within reach. He is an adept at all sorts of athletic sports and games, skating, rowing, foot-racing, boxing, cricket, and I know not what else. He is essentially a man of the working class, and has, I believe, some Scottish blood in his veins, but he is a Londoner by birth, and passed all his early life in a London district. He was born to poverty, and received such education as he had to begin with at a humble school in the Battersea region on the south side of London.

Now, I should think that a boy born in humble life who had in him any gift of imagination and any faculty for self-improvement could hardly have begun life in a better place than Battersea. The Battersea region lies south of the Thames, and is a strange combination of modern squalidness and picturesque historical associations and memorials. The homes of the working class poor stand under the very shadow of that famous church in Old Battersea where Bolingbroke, the high-born, one of the most eloquent orators known to English Parliamentary life, and one of the most brilliant writers who adorn English literature, lies buried, and where strangers from all parts of the world go to gaze upon his tombstone. Everywhere throughout the little town or village one comes upon places associated with the memory of Bolingbroke and of other men famous in history. Cross the bridge that spans the Thames and you are in the Chelsea region, which is suffused with historical and literary associations from far-off days to those recent times when Thomas Carlyle had his home in one of its quiet streets. To a boy with any turn for reading and any taste for history and literature, all that quarter of London on both sides of the Thames must have been filled with inspiration. John Burns had always a love of reading, and I can easily fancy that the memories of the place must have been a constant stimulant and inspiration to his honorable ambition for self-culture. His school days finished when he was hardly ten years old, and then he was set to earn a living, first in a candle factory and afterwards in the works of an engineer. Thus he toiled away until he had reached manhood's age, and all the time he was steadily devoting his spare hours or moments to the task of self-education. He read every book that came within his reach, and studied with especial interest the works of men who set themselves to the consideration of great social problems.

Burns naturally became very soon impressed with the conviction that all could not be quite right under a political and social system which made the workingman a mere piece of living mechanism and gave him no share whatever in the constitutional government of the country. At that time there was no system of national education in England, and the child of poor parents had to get his teaching through some charitable institution, or to go without any teaching whatever. So far as the education of the poorest classes was concerned, England was at that time far below Scotland, below Germany and Holland, and below the United States.

As regards the political system, a man of the class to which John Burns was born had little chance indeed of obtaining the right to vote at a Parliamentary election, which was given only to men who had certain qualifications of income and of residence not often to be found among the working classes. The English system of national education is little more than thirty years old, and the extension of the voting power which makes it now practically a manhood suffrage is likewise of very modern date. It was natural that an intelligent and thoughtful boy like John Burns should, under such conditions, become filled with socialistic doctrines and should find himself growing into a mood of impatience and hostility towards the rule of aristocrats, landlords, and capitalists, by which the country was then dominated. Soon after he had reached his twenty-first year he obtained employment as a foreman engineer on the Niger in Africa, and there he had his first experience of a climate and a life totally unlike to anything that could be found in the Battersea regions. I have often heard it said that during his employment in English steamers on the Niger he was known among his British companions as "Coffee-pot Burns," in jocular recognition of his devotion to total abstinence principles. He spent about a year in his African occupation, and during that time he had managed to save up a considerable amount of his pay, a saving which we may be sure was in great measure due to his practice of total abstinence from any drinks stronger than that which was properly contained in the coffee-pot. When he left Africa, he invested his savings in a manner which I cannot but regard as peculiarly characteristic of him, and which must have given to such a man a profitable return for his investment—he spent his savings, in fact, on a tour of several months throughout Europe. Thus he acquired an invaluable addition to his stock of practical observation and a fresh impulse to his studies of life and of books. He settled down in England as a working engineer, and he soon began to take a deep interest and an active share in every movement which had for its object the welfare of the classes who live by daily labor.

Obviously, there are many improvements in the condition of such men which could only be brought about by legislation, and John Burns therefore became a political agitator. His voice was heard from the platforms of great popular meetings held in and around London and in many other parts of the country, and he was one of the leaders of the great agitation which secured for the public the right of holding open-air meetings in Trafalgar Square. John Burns was meant by nature to be a popular orator. He has a physical frame which can stand any amount of exertion, and his voice, at once powerful and musical, can make itself heard to the farthest limit of the largest outdoor meeting in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. But he is in no sense whatever a mere declaimer. He argues every question out in a practical and reasonable way, and although he has some views on political and industrial subjects which many of his opponents would condemn as socialistic, there is nothing in him of the revolutionist or the anarchist. His object is to bring about by free and lawful public debate those reforms in the political and industrial systems which he regards as essential to the well-being of the whole community. The Conservative party in this country used to have for a long time one particular phrase which was understood to embody the heaviest accusation that could be brought against a public man. To say that this or that public speaker was endeavoring to "set class against class" was understood to mean his utter condemnation in the minds of all well-behaved citizens. We do not hear so much of this accusation in later days, partly because some of the very measures demanded by those setters of class against class have been adopted by Conservative Governments and carried into law by Conservative votes. But there was a period in the life of John Burns when he must have found himself denounced almost every day in speech or newspaper article as one whose main endeavor was to set class against class. John Burns does not seem to have troubled himself much about the accusation. Perhaps he reasoned within himself that if the endeavor to obtain for workingmen the right of voting at elections and the right to form themselves into trades-unions for the purpose of bettering their lives were the endeavor to set class against class, then there is nothing for it but to go on setting class against class until the beneficent result be obtained. So John Burns went on setting class against class, with the result that he became recognized all over the country as one of the most eloquent, capable, and judicious leaders whom the workingmen could show, and his unselfishness and integrity were never disparaged even by his most extreme political opponents.