Burns

John, a London labor leader. He was born in 1858. His father was an engineer. He began work at the age of ten in a candle factory at the wage of twelve cents a day. Later, he served an apprenticeship in engineering. He became a labor leader and developed ability as an open air speaker. He joined the Socialists in 1883. In 1886 he was arrested for speaking in Hyde Park. On his release he made a speech which was printed under the title, "The Man with the Red Flag." November 13, 1887, Bloody Sunday, he broke through the police lines to speak in Trafalgar Square and was arrested again. In 1889 he became a member of the London Council, and in the same year he organized and led the famous "Dock Strike." In 1892 he was elected to Parliament by a workingmen's district in London. In 1905 he entered the Liberal cabinet organized by Mr. Campbell-Bannermann. Mr. Burns is the first English workingman to hold a cabinet office. He is (1909) president of the Local Government Board. In this position he is known as the Right Honorable John Burns, and receives a salary of $10,000 a year. He still remains a member of the Union of Amalgamated Engineers. He is a total abstainer, a man of unimpeached integrity. Mr. Burns dresses, of course, like any other professional man. When he attends a royal reception he wears the garb prescribed for the occasion and is a man of commanding appearance, but no one could mistake him for an imitation of aristocracy.

To look down from one of the galleries on John Burns sitting on the Treasury bench is to see apparently an old man. The hair is almost snow-white; the forehead pale, spreading, and deeply lined; his movements as he adjusts his eyeglasses and reads over his official papers are leisurely and might even seem fatigued. But wait a moment. Wait till he lifts his face and you catch a glimpse of his great, brown, clear, burning eyes. Or wait till he rises to address the House, electrical alertness speaking from every gesture, from the very poise of the body, power and passion in his voice, his whole bearing eager, defiant, welcoming the combat. Or see him again on the Terrace outside--a thick, square man, in a blue reefer suit, his head thrown massively back, tramping up and down with free and swinging stride. You would not then think him old. Still less would you think so if you walked with him through the streets or parks, among his own people, giving and exchanging salutations, patting a youngster on the head, helping to fish out a ball that has fallen into the Serpentine, showing a boy how to handle a cricket-bat, skipping over the ropes with the girls, congratulating the mothers, jesting with the policemen, the very picture of zest, health, and jollity. The workmen know him and love him. They recognize in him the biggest man that their class in England has yet produced. And John Burns knows them and loves them in return, and uses both his knowledge and his affection to rebuke, chastise them, and make them elevate themselves. Himself a non-smoker and a total abstainer, he never shirks from rubbing in his conviction that there is little the government can do for the workingman compared with what the workingman can do for himself. No man has spoken out more strongly against drink and betting. No man has insisted more trenchantly that social and industrial reform must begin with the individual.

It is here where he parts company with Mr. Keir Hardie and his followers. They are Socialists, look to the state for everything, proclaim it as a natural right of every man to have remunerative work found for him, and are swiftly, as it seems to me, rousing the laboring classes to a very ugly mood. John Burns hates nothing so much as the thought of the English working man becoming a prey to cringing, shirking pauperization. John Burns wishes to see the workingman brave, upright, and above all, independent. From the very first he has had the profoundest contempt for the charity-mongers, vicarious philanthropists whose policy of spoon-feeding the unemployed ends, as he says, "in the demoralization of the donors and the degradation of the recipient."--Sydney Brooks in Harper's Weekly.