The Chautauquan Volume 45 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 Excerpt: ...to public hands and indeed innumerable activities hitherto in control of private persons and private corporations. It is with this socialistic policy that we instinctively connect the name of John Burns. When he was elected to Parliament in 1892, he straightway began to urge the same policy upon the general government. He was as instantly a recognized power in Parliament as he was in the County Council. It was noted that he spoke but rarely and never without such care in preparation of his matter as to win the ear and respect of the entire house. He is to be sharply distinguished from the mere orator in this, that he always has in hand specific practical proposals for which he takes his full share of responsibility. When first in Parliament his penetrating study of evils in the War Office at once won the respect of his present chief, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. "Burns talks with the best of them, but he also acts with the best of them," was the praise he won. At this point we find him absorbed in the full active program of patient, step-by-step reforms, sanitation, decent tenements, changes in the prisons, employers' liability for accidents, dangerous trades, which the impatient and undisciplined socialist scornfully writes down as "plasters for wooden legs." It is at this time, too, that one hears many of the old followers (sound a critical and even contemptuous note against the "Idol of Tower Hill." I was in London at the end of Burns' first year in Parliament. Asking one of Burns' socialistic co-workers, I was amazed to hear him say, "Oh, John is sold out. He has become a fakir with the worst of them." I hasten to say that this was as unjust as it was untrue. I record it because it marks a tragic element insepara...