He stands to-day born of these people and part of them--the very child of the crowd. Most of his life has been spent there. He has plumbed the height and depth of human experience in this smoky and bewildering universe. As a child he has known hunger and the unsatisfied demand for bread. He has been an inmate of the workhouse, and the ruler of it; a forlorn waif in a Barrack School with unforgettable memories of its polished impersonal cruelty; and again the great man who comes down as visitor to the Barrack School of a later generation. He has tramped its streets in the vain search for work, and been glad to accept twopence from a friend. He has travelled on the upper half of a boot, tied on to the foot with string; and he has organised schemes for the unemployed which have been stimulated by that adventure into hell. He has obtained education as so many quick and intelligent East End boys are still obtaining it: from the riotous revel of the “penny dreadful,” through the _British Workman_, and the _Sunday at Home_, and similar literature which good people scatter gratuitously amongst the working classes; to the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and Shakespeare “Recitations,” and those social appeals of John Ruskin which have become the sacred writings of the new Labour revival. He hates charity organisation, the adventurous slum chronicler, officialdom, and institutions, just as the poor hate them to-day. He loves a joke, born of extravagance and a kind of boisterous humour, the salt which keeps this starved life from putrefaction. He understands his own people, amongst whom he has lived all his days. He is a living example--one of the few living examples--which offer hope that Democracy may still become a real thing.