I saw the Brigadier in charge of the Men's Social Work in Glasgow at a great central Institution where hundreds of poor people sleep every night. The inscriptions painted on the windows give a good idea of its character. Here are some of them: 'Cheap beds.' 'Cheap food.' 'Waste paper collected.' 'Missing friends found.' 'Salvation for all.'
In addition to this Refuge there is an 'Elevator' of the usual type, in which about eighty men were at work, and an establishment called the Dale House Home, a very beautiful Adams' house, let to the Army at a small rent by an Eye Hospital that no longer requires it. This house accommodates ninety-seven of the men who work in the Elevator.
The Brigadier informed me that the distress at Glasgow was very great last year. Indeed, during that year of 1909 the Army fed about 35,000 men at the docks, and 65,000 at the Refuge, a charity which caused them to be officially recognized for the first time by the Corporation, that sent them a cheque in aid of their work. Now, however, things have much improved, owing to the building of men-of-war and the forging of great guns for the Navy. At Parkhead Forge alone 8,000 men are being employed upon a vessel of the Dreadnought class, which will occupy them for a year and a half. So it would seem that these monsters of destruction have their peaceful uses.
Glasgow, he said, 'is a terrible place for drink, especially of methylated spirits and whisky.' Drink at the beginning, I need hardly remark, means destitution at the end, so doubtless this failing accounts for a large proportion of its poverty.
The Men's Social Work of the Army in Glasgow, which is its Headquarters in Scotland, is spreading in every direction, not only in that city itself, but beyond it to Paisley, Greenock, and Edinburgh. Indeed, the Brigadier has orders 'to get into Dundee and Aberdeen as soon as possible.' I asked him how he would provide the money. He answered, 'Well, by trusting in God and keeping our powder dry.'
As regards the Army's local finance the trouble is that owing to the national thriftiness it is harder to make commercial ventures pay in Scotland than in England. Thus I was informed that in Glasgow the Corporation collects and sells its own waste paper, which means that there is less of that material left for the Salvation Army to deal with. In England, so far as I am aware, the waste-paper business is not a form of municipal trading that the Corporations of great cities undertake.
Another leading branch of the Salvation Army effort in Scotland is its Prison work. It is registered in that country as a Prisoners' Aid Society, and the doors of every jail in the land are open to its Officers. I saw the Army's prison book, in which are entered the details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough some of them were.
I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.
My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there were notes in his book to this effect.
I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at £7; but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as he said, 'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.'
Another was a Glasgow silk merchant, who made a bad debt of £3,000 that swamped him. Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered. He had been three years cashier of this Shelter.
Another arrived at the Shelter in such a state that the Officer in charge told me he was obliged to throw his macintosh round him to hide his nakedness. He was an engineer who took a public-house, and helped himself freely to his stock-in-trade, with the result that he became a frightful drunkard, and lost £1,700. He informed me that he used to consume no less than four bottles of whisky a day, and suffered from delirium tremens several times. In the Shelter—I quote his own words—'I gave my heart to God, and after that all desire for drink and wrongdoing' (he had not been immaculate in other ways) 'gradually left me. From 1892 I had been a drunkard. After my conversion, in less than three weeks I ceased to have any desire for drink.'
This man became night-watchman in the Shelter, a position which he held for twelve months. He said: 'I was promoted to be Sergeant; when I put on my uniform and stripes, I reckoned myself a man again. Then I was made foreman of the works at Greendyke Street. Then I was sent to pioneer our work in Paisley, and when that was nicely started, I was sent on to Greenock, where I am now trying to work up a (Salvation Army) business.'
Here, for a reason to be explained presently, I will quote a very similar case which I saw at the Army Colony at Hadleigh, in Essex. This man, also a Scotsman (no Englishman, I think, could have survived such experiences), is a person of fine and imposing appearance, great bodily strength, and good address. He is about fifty years of age, and has been a soldier, and after leaving the Service, a gardener. Indeed, he is now, or was recently, foreman market-gardener at Hadleigh. He married a hospital nurse, and found out some years after marriage that she was in the habit of using drugs. This habit he contracted also, either during her life or after her death, and with it that of drink.
His custom was to drink till he was a wreck, and then take drugs, either by the mouth or subcutaneously, to steady himself. Chloroform and ether he mixed together and drank, strychnine he injected. At the beginning of this course, threepennyworth of laudanum would suffice him for three doses. At the end, three years later (not to mention ether, chloroform, and strychnine), he took of laudanum alone nearly a tablespoonful ten or twelve times a day, a quantity, I understand, which is enough to kill five or six horses. One of the results was that when he had to be operated on for some malady, it was found impossible to bring him under the influence of the anaesthetic. All that could be done was to deprive him of his power of movement, in which state he had to bear the dreadful pain of the operation. Afterwards the surgeon asked him if he were a drug-taker, and he told me that he answered:—
'Why, sir, I could have drunk all the lot you have been trying to give me, without ever knowing the difference.'
In this condition, when he was such a wreck that he trembled from head to foot and was contemplating suicide, he came into the hands of the Army, and was sent down to the Hadleigh Farm.
Now comes the point of the story. At Hadleigh he 'got converted,' and from that hour has never touched either drink or drugs. Moreover, he assured me solemnly that he could go into a chemist's shop or a bar with money in his pocket without feeling the slightest desire to indulge in such stimulants. He said that after his conversion, he had a 'terrible fight' with his old habits, the physical results of their discontinuance being most painful. Subsequently, however, and by degrees, the craving left him entirely, I asked him to what he attributed this extraordinary cure. He replied:—
'To the power of God. If I trusted in my own strength I should certainly fail, but the power of God keeps me from being overcome.'
Now these are only two out of a number of cases that I have seen myself, in which a similar explanation of his cure has been given to me by the person cured, and I would like to ask the unprejudiced and open-minded reader how he explains them. Personally I cannot explain them except upon an hypothesis which, as a practical person, I confess I hesitate to adopt. I mean that of a direct interposition from above, or of the working of something so unrecognized or so undefined in the nature of man (which it will be remembered the old Egyptians, a very wise people, divided into many component parts, whereof we have now lost count), that it may be designated an innate superior power or principle, brought into action by faith or 'suggestion.'
That these people who have been the slaves of, or possessed by certain gross and palpable vices, of which drink is only one, are truly and totally changed, there can be no question. To that I am able to bear witness. The demoniacs of New Testament history cannot have been more transformed; and I know of no stranger experience than to listen to such men, as I have times and again, speaking of their past selves as entities cast off and gone, and of their present selves as new creatures. It is, indeed, one that throws a fresh light upon certain difficult passages in the Epistles of St. Paul, and even upon the darker sayings of the Master of mankind Himself. They do, in truth, seem to have been 'born again.' But this is a line of thought that I will not attempt to follow; it lies outside my sphere and the scope of these pages.
After the Officer who used to consume four bottles of whisky a day, and is now in charge of the Salvation Army work in Greenock, had left the room, I propounded these problems to Lieut.-Colonel Jolliffe and the Brigadier, as I had done previously to Commissioner Sturgess. I pointed out that religious conversion seemed to me to be a spiritual process, whereas the craving for drink or any other carnal satisfaction was, or appeared to be, a physical weakness of the body. Therefore, I did not understand how the spiritual conversion could suddenly and permanently affect or remove the physical desire, unless it were by the action of the phenomenon called miracle, which mankind admits doubtfully to have been possible in the dim period of the birth of a religion, but for the most part denies to be possible in these latter days.
'Quite so,' answered the Colonel, calmly, in almost the same words that Commissioner Sturgess had used, 'itismiracle; that is our belief. These men cannot change and purify themselves, their vices are instantaneously, permanently, and miraculously removed by the power and the Grace of God. This is the truth, and nothing more wonderful can be conceived.'
Here, without further comment, I leave this deeply interesting matter to the consideration of abler and better instructed persons than myself.
To come to something more mundane, which also deserves consideration, I was informed that in Glasgow, with a population of about 900,000, there exists a floating class of 80,000 people, who live in lodging-houses of the same sort as, and mostly inferior to the Salvation Army Shelter of which I am now writing. In other words, out of every twelve inhabitants of this great city, one is driven to that method of obtaining a place to sleep in at night.
In this particular Refuge there is what is called a free shelter room, where people are accommodated in winter who have not even the few coppers necessary to pay for a bed. During the month before my visit, which took place in the summer-time, the Brigadier had allotted free beds in this room to destitute persons to the value of £13. I may add that twice a week this particular place is washed with a carbolic mixture!
I visited two of the Salvation Army's Women's Institutions in Glasgow. The first of these was a Women's Rescue Home known as Ardenshaw. This is a very good house, substantially built and well fitted up, that before it was bought by the Army was the residence of a Glasgow merchant. It has accommodation for thirty-six, and is always full. The inmates are of all kinds, prison cases, preventive cases, fallen cases, drink cases. The very worst of all these classes, however, are not taken in here, but sent to the Refuge in High Street. Ardenshaw resembles other Homes of the same sort that I have already dealt with in various cities, so I need not describe it here.
Its Officers visit the prisons at Duke Street, Glasgow, Ayr, and Greenock, and I saw a letter which had just arrived from the chaplain of one of these jails, asking the Matron to interest herself in the case of a girl coming up for trial, and to take her into a Home if she were discharged as a first offender.
While I was eating some lunch in this house I noticed a young woman in Salvation Army dress coming up the steps with a child of particularly charming appearance. At my request she was brought into the room, where I extracted from her a story which seems to be worth repeating as an illustration of the spirit which animates so many members of the Army.
The young woman herself had once been an invalid who was taken into the Home and nursed till she recovered, after which she was sent to a situation in a large town. Here she came in contact with a poor family in which the mother is a drunkard and the father a respectable, hardworking man, and took a great fancy to one of the children, the little girl I have mentioned. This child, who is about five years of age, it is her habit to supply with clothes and more or less to feed. Unfortunately, however, when the mother is on the drink she pawns the clothes which my Salvation Army friend is obliged to redeem, since if she does not, little Bessie is left almost naked. Indeed, before Bessie was brought away upon this particular visit her protectress had to pay 14s. to recover her garments from the pawnshop, a considerable sum out of a wage of about £18 a year.
I asked her why she did not take away this very fascinating child altogether, and arrange for her to enter one of the Army Homes. She answered because, although the mother would be glad enough to let her go, the father, who is naturally fond of his children, objected.
'Of which the result may be,' remarked Lieut.-Colonel Jolliffe grimly, 'that about a dozen years hence that sweet little girl will become a street-walking drunkard.'
'Not while I live,' broke in her foster-mother, indignantly.
This kind-hearted little woman told me she had been six years in service as sole maid-of-all-work in a large house. I inquired whether it was a hard place. She replied that it would be easier if her four mistresses, who are sisters and old maiden ladies, did not all take their meals at four different times, have four different teapots, insist upon their washing being sent to four different laundries, employ four different doctors, and sleep in four different rooms. 'However,' she added, 'it is not so difficult as it was as there used to be five, but one has died. Also, they are kind to me in other ways and about Bessie. They like me to come here for my holiday, as then they know I shall return on the right day and at the right hour.'
When she had left the room, having in mind the capacities of the average servant, and the outcry she is apt to make about her particular 'work,' I said that it seemed strange that one young woman could fulfil all these multifarious duties satisfactorily.
'Oh,' said the matter-of-fact Colonel, 'you see, she belongs to the Salvation Army, and looks at things from the point of view of her duty, and not from that of her comfort.'
It is curious at what a tender age children learn to note the habits of those about them. When this little Bessie was given2d. she lisped out in her pretty Scotch accent, 'Mother winna have this for beer!'
The last place that I visited in Glasgow was the Shelter for women, an Institution of the same sort as the Shelter for men. It is a Lodging-house in which women can have a bed at the price of 4d. per night; but if that sum is not forthcoming, they are not, as a rule, turned away if they are known to be destitute.
The class of people who frequent this Home is a very low one; for the most part they are drunkards. They must leave the Shelter before ten o'clock in the morning, when the majority of them go out hawking, selling laces, or other odds and ends. Some of them earn as much as 2s. a day; but, as a rule, they spend a good deal of what they earn, only saving enough to pay for their night's lodging. This place has been open for sixteen years, and contains 133 beds, which are almost always full.
The women whom I saw at this Shelter were a very rough-looking set, nearly all elderly, and, as their filthy garments and marred countenances showed, often the victims of drink. Still, they have good in them, for the lady in charge assured me that they are generous to each other. If one of the company has nothing they will collect the price of her bed or her food between them, and even pay her debts, if these are not too large. There were several children in the place, for each woman is allowed to bring in one. When I was there many of the inmates were cooking their meals on the common stove, and very curious and unappetizing these were.
Among them I noted a dark-eyed lassie of about sixteen who was crying. Drawing her aside, I questioned her. It seemed that her father, a drunken fellow, had turned her out of her home that afternoon because she had forgotten to give him a message. Having nowhere to go she wandered about the streets until she met a woman who told her of this Lodging-house. She added, touchingly enough, that it was not her mother's fault.
Imagine a girl of sixteen thrown out to spend the night upon the streets of Glasgow!
On the walls of one of the rooms I saw a notice that read oddly in a Shelter for women. It ran:—
Smoking is strictly prohibited after retiring.
The Hadleigh Colony, of which Lieut.-Colonel Laurie is the Officer in charge, is an estate of about 3,000 acres which was purchased by the Salvation Army in the year 1891 at a cost of about £20 the acre, the land being stiff clay of the usual Essex type. As it has chanced, owing to the amount of building which is going on in the neighbourhood of Southend, and to its proximity to London, that is within forty miles, the investment has proved a very good one. I imagine that if ever it should come to the hammer the Hadleigh Colony would fetch a great deal more than £20 the acre, independently of its cultural improvements. These, of course, are very great. For instance, more than 100 acres are now planted with fruit-trees in full bearing. Also, there are brickfields which are furnished with the best machinery and plant, ranges of tomato and salad houses, and a large French garden where early vegetables are grown for market. A portion of the land, however, still remains in the hands of tenants, with whom the Army does not like to interfere.
The total turn-over of the land 'in hand' amounts to the large sum of over £30,000 per annum, and the total capital invested is in the neighbourhood of £110,000. Of this great sum about £78,000 is the cost of the land and the buildings; the brickworks and other industries account for £12,000, while the remaining £20,000 represents the value of the live and dead stock. I believe that the mortgage remaining on the place, which the Army had not funds to pay for outright, is now less than £50,000, borrowed at about 4 per cent, and, needless to say, it is well secured.
Lieut.-Colonel Laurie informed me on the occasion of my last visit to Hadleigh, in July, 1910, that taken as a whole even now the farm does not pay its way.6This result is entirely owing to the character of the labour employed. At first sight, as the men are paid but a trifling sum in cash, it would appear that this labour must be extremely cheap. Investigation, however, gives the story another colour.
It costs the Army 10s. a week to keep a man at Hadleigh in food and lodgings, and in addition he receives a cash grant of from 6dto 5s. a week.
Careful observation shows that the labour of three of these men, of whom 92 per cent, be it remembered, come to the Colony through their drinking habits, is about equal to that of one good agricultural hand who, in Norfolk, reckoning in his harvest and sundries, would earn—let us say, 18s. a week. Therefore, in practice where I, as a farmer, pay about 18s., or in the case of carters and milkmen nearly £1, the Army pays £2, circumstances under which it is indeed difficult to farm remuneratively in England.
The object of the Hadleigh Colony is to supply a place where broken men of bad habits, who chance in most cases to have had some connexion with or liking for the land, can be reformed, and ultimately sent out to situations, or as emigrants to Canada. About 400 of such men pass through the Colony each year. Of these men, Lieut.-Colonel Laurie estimates that 7-1/2 per cent prove absolute failures, although, he added that, 'it is very, very difficult to determine as to when a man should be labelled an absolute failure. He may leave us an apparent failure, and still come all right in the end.'
The rest, namely 91 per cent or so, regain their place as decent and useful members of society, a wonderful result which is brought about by the pressure of discipline, tempered with kindness, and the influence of steady and healthful work.
Persons of every class drift to this Colony. Thus, among the 230 Colonists who were training there when I visited it in July, 1910, were two chemists and a journalist, while a Church of England clergyman had just left it for Canada.
As a specimen of the ruck, however, I will mention the first individual to whom I happened to speak—a strong young man, who was weeding a bed of onions. He told me that he had been a farm labourer in early life, and, subsequently, for six years a coachman in a private livery stables in London. He lost his place through drink, became a wanderer on the Embankment, was picked up by the Salvation Army and sent to one of its Elevator paper-works. Afterwards, he volunteered to work on the land at Hadleigh, where he had then been employed for nine months. His ambition was to emigrate to Canada, which, doubtless, he has now done, or is about to do. Such cases might be duplicated by the dozen, but for this there is no need.Ex uno disce omnes.
All the labour employed, however, is not of this class. For instance, the next man to whom I spoke, who was engaged in ploughing up old cabbage land with a pair of very useful four-year-olds, bred on the farm, was not a Colonist but an agricultural hand, paid at the rate of wages usual in the district. Another, who managed the tomato-houses, was a skilled professional tomato-grower from the Channel Islands. The experience of the managers of the Colony is that it is necessary to employ a certain number of expert agriculturalists on the place, in order that they may train the raw hands who come from London and elsewhere.
To a farmer, such as the present writer, a visit to Hadleigh is an extremely interesting event, showing him, as it does, what can be done upon cold and unkindly land by the aid of capital, intelligence, and labour. Still I doubt whether a detailed description of all these agricultural operations falls within the scope of a book such as that upon which I am engaged.
Therefore, I will content myself with saying that this business, like everything else that the Army undertakes, is carried out with great thoroughness and considerable success. The extensive orchards are admirably managed, and were fruitful even in the bad season of 1910. The tomato-houses, which have recently been increased at a capital cost of about £1,000, produce many tons of tomatoes, and the French garden is excellent of its kind. The breed of Middle-white pigs is to be commended; so much so in my judgment, and I can give no better testimonial, that at the moment of writing I am trying to obtain from it a pedigree boar for my own use. The Hadleigh poultry farm, too, is famous all over the world, and the Officer who manages it was the President for 1910 of the Wyandotte Society, fowls for which Hadleigh is famous, having taken the championship prizes for this breed and others all over the kingdom. The cattle and horses are also good of their class, and the crops in a trying year looked extremely well.
All these things, however, are but a means to an end, which end is the redemption of our fallen fellow-creatures, or such of them as come within the reach of the work of the Salvation Army at this particular place.
I should add, perhaps, that there is a Citadel or gathering hall, which will seat 400, where religious services are held and concerts are given on Saturday nights for the amusement of the Colonists. I may mention that no pressure is brought to bear to force any man in its charge to conform to the religious principles of the Army. Indeed, many of these attend the services at the neighbouring parish church. Notwithstanding the past characters of those who live there, disturbances of any sort are unknown at Hadleigh. Indeed, it is extremely rare for a case originating on the Colony to come before the local magistrates.
General Booth and his Officers are, as I know from various conversations with them, firmly convinced that many of the great and patent evils of our civilization result from the desertion of the land by its inhabitants, and that crowding into cities which is one of the most marked phenomena of our time. Indeed, it was an identity of view upon this point, which is one that I have advanced for years, that first brought me into contact with the Salvation Army. But to preach the advantages of bringing people back to the land is one thing, and to get them there quite another. Many obstacles stand in the way. I need only mention two of these: the necessity for large capital and the still more important necessity of enabling those who are settled on it to earn out of Mother Earth a sufficient living for themselves and their families.
That well-known philanthropist, the late Mr. Herring, was another person much impressed with the importance of this matter, and I remember about five years ago dining with him, with General Booth as my fellow-guest, on an occasion when all this subject was gone into in detail. So lively, indeed, was Mr. Herring's interest that he offered to advance a sum of £100,000 to the Army, to be used in an experiment of land-settlement, carried out under its auspices. Should that experiment prove successful, the capital repaid by the tenants was to go to King Edward's Hospital Fund, and should it fail, that capital was to be written off. Of this £100,000, £40,000 has now been invested in the Boxted venture, and if this succeeds, I understand that the balance will become available for other ventures under the provisions of Mr. Herring's will. A long while must elapse, however, before the result of the experiment can be definitely ascertained.
The Boxted Settlement is situated In North Essex, about three miles from Colchester, and covers an area of 400 acres. It is a flat place, that before the Enclosures Acts was a heath, with good road frontages throughout, an important point where small-holdings are concerned. The soil is a medium loam over gravel, neither very good nor very bad, so far as my judgment goes, and of course capable of great improvement under intensive culture.
This estate, which altogether cost about £20 per acre to buy, has been divided into sixty-seven holdings, varying in size from 4-1/2 acres to 7 acres. The cottages which stand upon the holdings have been built in pairs, at a cost of about £380 per pair, which price includes drainage, a drinking well, and, I think, a soft-water cistern. These are extremely good dwellings, and I was much struck with their substantial and practical character. They comprise three bedrooms, a large living-room, a parlour, and a scullery, containing a sink and a bath. Also there is a tool-house, a pigstye, and a movable fowl-house on wheels.
On each holding an orchard of fruit trees has been planted in readiness for the tenant, also strawberries, currants, gooseberries, and raspberries, which in all occupy about three-quarters of an acre. The plan is that the rest of the holding should be cultivated intensively upon a system that is estimated to return £20 per acre.
The arrangement between the Army and its settlers is briefly as follows: In every case the tenant begins without any capital, and is provided with seeds and manures to carry him through the first two years, also with a living allowance at the rate of 10s. a week for the man and his wife, and 1s. a week for each child, which allowance is to cease after he has marketed his first crops.
The tenancy terms are, that for two years the settler is a tenant at will, the agreement being terminable by either party at any time without compensation. At the end of these two years, subject to the approval of the Director of the Settlement, the settler can take a 999 years' lease of his holding, the Army for obvious reasons retaining the freehold. After the first year of this lease, the rental payable for forty years is to be 5 per cent per annum upon the capital invested in the settlement of the man and his family upon the holding, which rent is to include the cost of the house, land, and improvements, and all moneys advanced to him during his period of probation.
It is estimated that this capital sum will average £520 per holding, so that the tenant's annual rent for forty years will be £26, after which he will have nothing more to pay save a nominal rent, and the remainder of the lease will be the property of himself, or rather, of his descendants. This property, I presume, will be saleable.
So, putting aside all legal technicalities and complications, it comes to this: the tenant is started for two years after which he pays about £4 a year rent per acre for the next forty years, and thereby virtually purchases his holding. The whole question, which time alone can answer, is whether a man can earn £4 per acre rent per annum, and, in addition, provide a living for himself and family out of a five-acre holding on medium land near Colchester.
The problem is one upon which I cannot venture to express any decisive opinion, even after many years of experience of such matters. I trust, however, that the answer may prove to be in the affirmative, and I am quite sure that if any Organization is able to cause it to work out this way, that Organization is the Salvation Army, whose brilliant business capacity can, as I know, make a commercial success of the most unpromising materials.
I should like to point out that this venture is one of great and almost of national importance, because if it fails then it will be practically proved that it is impossible to establish small holders on the land by artificial means, at any rate, in England, and at the present prices of agricultural produce. It is not often that a sum of £40,000 will be available for such a purpose, and with it the direction of a charitable Organization that seeks no profit, the oversight of an Officer as skilled and experienced as Lieut.-Colonel Hiffe, and, in addition, a trained Superintendent who will afford advice as to all agricultural matters, a co-operative society ready to hire out implements, horses and carts at cost price, and, if so desired, to undertake the distribution or marketing of produce. Still, notwithstanding all these advantages, I have my misgivings as to the ultimate result.
The men chosen to occupy these holdings by a Selection Committee of Salvation Army Officers, are for the most part married people who were born in the country, but had migrated to the towns. Most of them have more or less kept themselves in touch with country life by cultivating allotments during their period of urban residence, and precedence has been given to those who have shown a real desire to return to the land. Other essentials are a good character, both personal and as a worker, bodily and mental health, and total abstention from any form of alcohol. No creed test is required, and there are men of various religious faiths upon the Settlement, only a proportion of them being Salvationists.
I interviewed two of these settlers at hazard upon their holdings, and, although the year had been adverse, found them happy and hopeful. No. 1, who had been a mechanic, proposed to increase his earnings by mending bicycles. No. 2 was an agriculturist pure and simple, and showed me his fowls and pigs with pride. Here, however, I found a little rift within the rural lute, for on asking him how his wife liked the life he replied after a little hesitation, 'Not very well, sir: you see, she has been accustomed to a town.'
If she continues not to like it 'very well,' there will, I think, be an end to that man's prospects as a small holder.
I had the pleasure of bring present in July, 1910, at the formal opening of the Boxted Settlement, when the Salvation Army entertained several hundred guests to luncheon, many of them very well-known people. The day for a wonder was fine, General Booth spoke for over an hour in his most characteristic and interesting way; the Chairman, Earl Carrington, President of the Board of Agriculture, blessed the undertaking officially and privately; everybody seemed pleased with the holdings, and, in short, all went merrily as a marriage bell.
As I sat and listened, however, the query that arose in my mind was—What would be the state of these holdings and of the tenants or of their descendants on, say, that day thirty years? I trust and hope that it will be a good state in both instances; but I must confess to certain doubts and fears.
In this parish of Ditchingham, where I live, there is a man with a few acres of land, an orchard, a greenhouse, etc. That man works his little tenancy, deals in the surplus produce of large gardens, which he peddles out in the neighbouring town, and, on an average, takes piecework on my farm (at the moment of writing he and his son are hoeing mangolds) for two or three days a week; at any rate, for a great part of the year. He is a type of what I may call the natural small holder, and I believe does fairly well. The question is, can the artificially created small holder, who must pay a rent of £4 the acre, attain to a like result?
Again, I say I hope so most sincerely, for if not in England 'back to the land' will prove but an empty catchword. At any rate, the country should be most grateful to the late Mr. Herring, who provided the funds for this intensely interesting experiment, and to the Salvation Army which is carrying it out in the interests of the landless poor.
It has occurred to the writer that a few words descriptive of William Booth, the creator and first General of the Salvation Army, set down by a contemporary who has enjoyed a good many opportunities of observing him during the past ten years, may possibly have a future if not a present value.
Of the greatness of this man, to my mind, there can be no doubt. When the point of time whereon we stand and play our separate parts has receded, and those who follow us look back into the grey mist which veils the past; when that mist has hidden the glitter of the decorations and deadened the echoes of the high-sounding titles of to-day; when our political tumults, our town-bred excitements, and many of the very names that are household words to us, are forgotten, or discoverable only in the pages of history; when, perhaps, the Salvation Army itself has fulfilled its mission and gone its road, I am certain that the figure of William Booth will abide clearly visible in those shadows, and that the influences of his work will remain, if not still felt, at least remembered and honoured. He will be one of the few, of the very few enduring figures of our day; and even if our civilization should be destined to undergo eclipse for a period, as seems possible, when the light returns, by it he will still be seen.
For truly this work of his is fine, and one that appeals to the imagination, although we are so near to it that few of us appreciate its real proportions. Also, in fact, it is the work that should be admired rather than the man, who, after all, is nothing but the instrument appointed to shape it from the clay of circumstance. The clay lay ready to be shaped, then appeared the moulder animated with will and purpose, and working for the work's sake to an end which he could not foresee.
I have no information on the point, but I should be surprised to learn that General Booth, when Providence moved him to begin his labours among the poor, had even an inkling of their future growth within the short period of his own life. He sowed a seed in faith and hope, and, in spite of opposition and poverty, in spite of ridicule and of slander, he has lived to see that seed ripen into a marvellous harvest. Directly, or indirectly, hundreds of thousands of men and women throughout the world have benefited by his efforts. He has been a tool of destiny, like Mahomet or Napoleon, only in this case one fated to help and not to harm mankind. Such, at least, is my estimate of him.
A little less of the spirit of self-sacrifice, a different sense of responsibility, and the same strength of imagination and power of purpose devoted to purely material objects, might have raised up another multi-millionaire, or a mob-leader, or a self-seeking despot. But, as it happened, some grace was given to him, and the river has run another way.
Opportunity, too, has played into his hands. He saw that the recognized and established Creeds scarcely touched the great, sordid, lustful, drink-sodden, poverty-steeped masses of the city populations of the world: that they were waiting for a teacher who could speak to them in a tongue they understood. He spoke, and some of them have listened: only a fraction it is true, but still some. More, as it chanced, he married a wife who entered into his thoughts, and was able to help to fulfil his aspirations, and from that union were born descendants who, for the most part, are fitted to carry on his labours.
Further, like Loyola, and others, he has the power of rule, being a born leader of men, so that thousands obey his word without question in every corner of the earth, although some of these have never seen his face. Lastly, Nature endowed him with a striking presence that appeals to the popular mind, with a considerable gift of speech, with great physical strength and abounding energy, qualities which have enabled him to toil without ceasing and to travel far and wide. Thus it comes about that as truly as any man of our generation, when his hour is ended, he, too, I believe, should be able to say with a clear conscience, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do': although his heart may add, 'I have not finished it as well as I could wish.'
Now let me try to convey my personal impressions of this man. I see him in various conversations with myself, when he has thought that he could make use of me to serve his ever-present and impersonal ends, trying to add me up, wondering how far I was sincere, and to what extent I might be influenced by private objects; then, at last, concluding that I was honest in my own fashion, opening his heart little by little, and finally appealing to me to aid him in his labours.
'I like that man;he understands me!' I once heard him say, mentioning my name, and believing that he was thinking, not speaking.
I tell this story merely to illustrate his habit of reflecting aloud, for as he spoke these words I was standing beside him. When I repeated it to his Officers, one of them remarked horrified:—
'Good gracious! it might just as well have been something much less complimentary. One never knows what he will say.'
He is an autocrat, whose word is law to thousands. Had he not been an autocrat indeed, the Salvation Army would not exist to-day, for it sprang from his brain like Minerva from the head of Jove, and has been driven to success by his single, forceful will.
Yet this quality of masterfulness is tempered and illuminated by an unfailing sense of humour, which he is quite ready to exercise at his own expense. Thus, a few years ago he and I dined with the late Mr. Herring, and, as a matter of fact, although I had certain things to say on the matters under discussion, his flow of most interesting conversation did not allow me over much opportunity of saying them. It is hard to compete in words with one who has preached continually for fifty years!
When General Booth departed to catch a midnight train, for the Continent I think, Mr. Herring went to see him to the door. Returning presently, much amused, he repeated their parting words, which were as follows:—
GENERAL BOOTH: 'A very good fellow Haggard; but a talker, you know, Herring, a talker!'
MR. HERRING (looking at him): 'Indeed!'
GENERAL BOOTH (laughing): 'Ah! Herring, you mean that it wasIwho did the talking, not Haggard. Well,perhaps I did.'
Some people think that General Booth is conceited.
'It is a pity that the old gentleman is so vain,' a highly-placed person once said to me.
I answered that if he or I had done all that General Booth has done, we might be pardoned a little vanity.
In truth, however, the charge is mistaken, for at bottom I believe him to be a very humble-minded man, and one who does not in the least overrate himself. This may be gathered, indeed, from the tenor of his remarks on the subject of his personal value to the Army, that I have recorded at the beginning of this book.
What people of slower mind and narrower views may mistake for pride, in his case, I am sure, is but the impatient and unconscious assertiveness of superior power, based upon vision and accumulated knowledge. Also, as a general proposition, I believe vanity to be almost impossible to such a man. So far as my experience of life goes, that scarce creature, the innately, as distinguished from the accidentally eminent man, he who is fashioned from Nature's gold, not merely gilded by circumstance, is never vain.
Such a man knows but too well how poor is the fruit of his supremest effort, how marred by secret weakness is what the world calls his strength, and when his gifts are in the balance, how hard it would be for any seeing judge to distinguish his success from common failure. It is the little pinchbeck man, whom wealth, accident, or cheap cleverness has thrust forward, who grows vain over triumphs that are not worth having, not the great doer of deeds, or the seer whose imagination is wide enough to enable him to understand his own utter insignificance in the scale of things.
But to return to General Booth. Again I hear him explaining to me vast schemes, as yet unrealized, that lurk at the back of his vivid, practical, organizing brain. Schemes for settling tens of thousands of the city poor upon unoccupied lands in sundry portions of the earth. Schemes for great universities or training colleges, in which men and women might be educated to deal with the social problems of our age on a scientific basis. Schemes for obtaining Government assistance to enable the Army to raise up the countless mass of criminals in many lands, taking charge of them as they leave the jail, and by regenerating their fallen natures, saving them soul and body.
In the last interview I had with him, I read to him a note I had made of a conversation which had taken place a few days before between Mr. Roosevelt and myself on the subject of the Salvation Army. Here is the note, or part of it.
MR. ROOSEVELT: 'Why not make use of all this charitable energy, now often misdirected, for national ends?'
MYSELF: 'What I have called "the waste forces of Benevolence." It is odd, Mr. Roosevelt, that we should both have come to that conclusion.'
MR. ROOSEVELT: 'Yes, that's the term. You see the reason is that we are both sensible men who understand.'
'That is very important,' said General Booth, when he had heard this extract. '"Make use of all this charitable energy, now often misdirected for national ends!" Why not, indeed? Heaven knows it is often misdirected. The Salvation Army has made mistakes enough. If only that could be done it would be a great thing. But first we have got to make other people "understand" besides Roosevelt and yourself.'
That, at least, was the sense of his words.
Once more I see him addressing a crowded meeting of City men in London, on a murky winter afternoon. In five minutes he has gripped his audience with his tale of things that are new to most of them, quite outside of their experience. He lifts a curtain as it were, and shows them the awful misery that lies often at their very office doors, and the duty which is theirs to aid the fallen and the suffering. It is a long address, very long, but none of the hearers are wearied.
At the end of it I had cause to meet him in his office about a certain matter. He had stripped off his coat, and stood in the red jersey of his uniform, the perspiration still streaming from him after the exertion of his prolonged effort in that packed hall. As he spoke he ate his simple meal of vegetables (mushrooms they were, I remember), and tea, for, like most of his family, he never touches meat. Either he must see me while he ate or not at all; and when there is work to be done, General Booth does not think of convenience or of rest; moreover, as usual, there was a train to catch. One of his peculiarities is that he seems always to be starting for somewhere, often at the other side of the world.
Lastly, I see him on one of his tours. He is due to speak in a small country town. His Officers have arrived to make arrangements, and are waiting with the audience. It pours with rain, and he is late. At length the motors dash up through the mud and wet, and out of the first of them he appears, a tall, cloaked figure. Already that day he has addressed two such meetings besides several roadside gatherings, and at night he must speak to a great audience in a city fourteen miles away; also stop at this place and at that before he gets there, for a like purpose. He is to appear in the big city at eight, and already it is half-past three.
Five minutes later he has been assisted on to the platform (for this was before his operation and he was almost blind), and for nearly an hour pours out a ceaseless flood of eloquence, telling the history of his Organization, telling of his life's work and of his heart's aims, asking for their prayers and help. He looks a very old man now, much older than when first I knew him, and with his handsome, somewhat Jewish face and long, white beard, a very type of some prophet of Israel. So Abraham must have looked, one thinks, or Jeremiah, or Elijah. But there is no weariness in his voice or his gestures; and, as he exhorts and prays, his darkening eyes seem to flash.
It is over. He bids farewell to the audience that he has never seen before, and will never see again, invokes a fervent blessing on them, and presently the motors are rushing away into the wet night, bearing with them this burning fire of a man.
Such are some of my impressions of William Booth, General of the Salvation Army.