When he was twenty-one years of age Mr. Burns went as an engineer to Africa, where he spent a year among the swamps of the Lower Niger, occasionally fighting alligators and devoting his leisure to the study of political economy. When he returned he spent the money he had saved in Africa in six months of travel and study in Europe. Speaking of what he learned in Africa, Mr. Burns once said: "You talk of savagery and misery in heathen lands, but from my own experience I can tell you that there is more of all these, and more degradation of women, in the slums of London than you will see on the West Coast of Africa." He has had a wider experience than most men with mobs, for he has not only led them, but in 1900 he defended himself with a cricket bat for two days in his home on Lavender Hill, Battersea, against a mob said to number 10,000 which hurled stones through the windows and tried to batter down the door of his house because he had denounced the Boer War in parliament. In 1906, after he had been successful in writing something like one hundred labour laws into the acts of parliament, he accepted the position of President of Local Government and then became, as I have said, the first labouring man to accept a place in the British Cabinet. In reply to the criticisms which were offered when he accepted this high and responsible position in the government, Mr. Burns said: "I had to choose whether, for the next ten years, I should indulge, perhaps, in the futility of faction, possibly in the impotence of intrigue, or whether I should accept an office which in our day and generation I can make useful of good works." I have noted this statement because this is a choice which most reformers and agitators have to make sooner or later. He recognized, as he said, that "the day of the agitator was declining and that of the administrator had begun," and he did not shrink from accepting a position where he became responsible for administering laws he had helped to make. In his present position as the head of the Local Government Board Mr. Burns is probably doing more than any other man to improve the situation of the poor man in London and in the other large cities of England.