n by his arguments. And Mr. Burns is so obviously alive. He
warms the shrunken, anaemic vitality of followers, and overpowers the
protests of enemies by sheer force of character.

Mr. John Burns is at his real vocation when addressing a great multitude.
His energy finds an outlet in speech on those occasions, an outlet it can
never find in the necessary routine of office administration. He was made
for a life of action, and when once, in youth, he had thrown himself into
the active study of political and industrial questions, every opportunity
was seized for stating the results of that study. As a Social Democratic
candidate for Parliament, Mr. Burns polled 598 votes at West Nottingham in
1885. In 1886 he was charged (with Messrs. Hyndman, Champion, and Williams)
with seditious conspiracy--after an unemployed riot in the West End--and
acquitted. In 1887 he suffered six weeks imprisonment (with Mr. R.B.
Cunninghame Graham) for contesting the right of free speech in Trafalgar
Square. In 1889 came the great London dock strike, and, with Messrs. Mann
and Tillett, Mr. Burns was a chief leader of the dockers. Battersea
returned him to the London County Council in 1889 and to the House of
Commons in 1892. The Liberal Party promised a wider sphere of work than the
Socialists could offer; political isolation was a barren business; and Mr.
Burns gradually passed from the councils of the trade union movement to the
Treasury Bench of a Liberal Ministry. But the Socialist convictions of
early manhood had a lasting influence on their owner. These convictions
have been mellowed by work; responsibility has checked and placed under
subjection the old revolutionary ardour; experience finds the road to a
co-operative commonwealth by no means a quick or easy route, and admits the
necessity of compromise. But there is still a consciousness of the working
class as a class in the speeches of Mr. Burns; and there is still the
belief expressed that the working class must work out their own salvation,
and that it is better the people should have the power to manage their own
national and municipal affairs, and the wisdom to use that power aright,
rather than that a benevolent bureaucracy should manage things for them.
Mr. John Burns is an older man by twenty-five years than he was in the
stormy days of the Trafalgar Square riots, and he is now a Privy Councillor
and Cabinet Minister, but his character is little changed. His speeches on
the settlem