er, Hugh
Matthie, started a line of small sailing ships which ran between Glasgow
and Liverpool. As business increased the vessels were also sailed to
Belfast, and steamers afterwards replaced the sailing ships. In 1830 a
partnership was entered into with the McIvers of Liverpool, in which George
Burns devoted himself specially to the management of the ships. In 1838
with Samuel Cunard, Robert Napier and other capitalists, the partners
(McIver and Burns) started the "Cunard" Atlantic line of steamships. They
secured the British government's contract for the carrying of the mails to
North America. The sailings were begun with four steamers of about 1000
tons each, which made the passage in 15 days at some 81/2 knots per hour.
George Burns retired from the Glasgow management of the line in 1860. He
was made a baronet in 1889, but died on the 2nd of June 1890 at Castle
Wemyss, where he had spent the latter years of his life.

John Burns (1829-1901), his eldest son, who succeeded him in the baronetcy,
and became head of the Cunard Company, was created a peer, under the title
of Baron Inverclyde, in 1897; he was the first to suggest to the government
the use of merchant vessels for war purposes. George Arbuthnot Burns
(1861-1905) succeeded his father in the peerage, as 2nd baron Inverclyde,
and became chairman of the Cunard Company in 1902. He conducted the
negotiations which resulted in the refusal of the Cunard Company to enter
the shipping combination, the International Mercantile Marine Company,
formed by Messrs J.P. Morgan & Co., and took a leading part in the
application of turbine engines to ocean liners.

BURNS, JOHN (1858- ), English politician, was born at Vauxhall, London, in
October 1858, the second son of Alexander Burns, an engineer, of Ayrshire
extraction. He attended a national school in Battersea until he was ten
years old, when he was sent to work in Price's candle factory. He worked
for a short time as a page-boy, then in some engine works, and at fourteen
was apprenticed for seven years to a Millbank engineer. He continued his
education at the night-schools, and read extensively, especially the works
of Robert Owen, J.S. Mill, Paine and Cobbett. He ascribed his conversion to
the principles of socialism to his sense of the insufficiency of the
arguments advanced against it by J.S. Mill, but he had learnt socialistic
doctrine from a French fellow-workman, Victor Delahaye, who had witnessed
the Commune. Afte