Joe Burt had been born at Rochdale of a mother whose favourite saying was:

"With a rocking-chair and a piece o celery a Lancasheer lass is aw reet."

At eight, she had entered the mill, doffing. Joe had entered the same mill at about the same age, doffing too. He worked bare-footed in the ring-room in the days when overlookers and jobbers carried straps and used them.

When he was fifteen his mother died, and his father married again.

"Thoo can fend for self," his step-mother told him straightway, with the fine directness of the North.

Joe packed his worldly possessions in a chequered handkerchief, especially his greatest treasure—a sixpenny book bought off a second-hand bookstall at infinite cost to the buyer and called The Hundred Best Thoughts. Then he crossed the common at night, falling into a ditch on the way, to find the lodging-house woman who was to be his mother for the next ten years drinking her Friday pint o beer. He was earning six shillings a week at the time in a bicycle-shop. Later he entered a big engineering firm and, picking up knowledge as he went along, was a first-class fitter when he was through his time.

Those were the days when George Barnes was Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and leading the great engineers\' strike of the early nineties. Labour was still under the heel of Capital, but squealing freely. Socialism, apart from a few thinkers, was the gospel of noisy and innocuous cranks; and advanced working-men still called themselves Radicals.

Young Joe woke up sooner than most to the fact that he was the slave of an environment that was slowly throttling him because it denied him opportunity to be himself—which is to say to grow. He discarded chapel for ever on finding that his step-mother was a regular worshipper at Little Bethel, and held in high esteem amongst the congregation. He read Robert Blatchford in the Clarion, went to hear Keir Hardie, who with Joey Arch was dodging in and out of Parliament during those years, heralds of the advancing storm, and took some part in founding the local branch of the newly-formed Independent Labour Party. When his meditative spirit tired of the furious ragings of the Labour Movement of those early days, he would retire to the Friends\' Meeting-house on the hill and ruminate there over the plain tablet set in the turf which marks appropriately the resting place of the greatest of modern Quakers.

The eyes of the intelligent young fitter were opening fast now; and the death of the head of his firm completed the process and gave him sight.

"Started from nothing. Left ￡200,000. Bequeathed each of his servants ￡2 for every year of service; but nothing for us as had made the money."

Joe was now a leading man in the local A.S.E. His Society recognised his work and sent him in the early years of our century to Ruskin College, Oxford. The enemies of that institution are in the habit of saying that it spoils good mechanics to make bad Labour leaders. The original aim of the College was to take men from the pit, the mill, the shop, pour into them light and learning in the rich atmosphere of the most ancient of our Universities, and then return them whence they came to act amongst their fellows as lamps in the darkness and living witnesses of the redeeming power of education. The ideal, noble in itself, appealed to the public; but like many such ideals, it foundered on the invincible rock of human nature. The miners, weavers, and engineers, who were the students, after their year amid the towers and courts of Oxford, showed little desire to return whence they came. Rather they made their newly-acquired power an instrument to enable them to evade the suffocating conditions under which they were born; and who shall blame them? They became officials in Labour Bureaux, Trade union leaders, Secretaries of Clubs, and sometimes the hangers-on of the wealthy supporters of the Movement.

Burt was a shining exception to the rule. At the end of his academic year he returned to the very bench in the very shop he had left a year before, with enlarged vision, ordered mind, increased conviction; determined from that position to act as Apostle to the Gentiles of the Old Gospel in its new form.

He was the not uncommon type of intellectual artisan of that day who held as the first article of his creed that no wo............