On Tuesday, at a meeting of the County Council, Mr.
Burns made a speech which contained two very remarkable passages. London was pleased, he said, that its public bodies, "instead of listening to cranks and utopian schemes put forward by unemployed labour leaders for the establishment of municipal workshops for making boots for which there was no demand,. cigars which no one would smoke, and shovels that labourers would not handle," had determined "to adjust the work they had to do to the exigencies of the Labour market,"—i.e., to give out their work as far as possible at slack times. This denunciation of municipal collectivism sounds curiously from a man who calls himself a Socialist. Apparently Mr. Burns is so much in love with the name of Socialist that he does not trouble about the meaning. Mr. Burns went on to deny that the Council pampered Trade-Unionism at the expense of the rates. If he thought that Trade-Unionism was going to extract that from the rates that it had no right to, he would fight it with all his force. "If he thought that Trade-Unionism meant the beginning even of Tammany, he would leave Trade-Unionism, and fight against the men whc now paid him his salary, for far better would it be that they should have all the forces of the contract and competitive system against them than that they should introduce into municipal life unfair, unjust, or unbusinesslike work to degrade municipal life and public policy as a whole." Possibly Mr. Burns was thinking of the Council elections; but when a man talks such excellent sense as this, we will not bother- about certificates of origin.
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