第65章

The "Times," December 9th, 1890 Sir,--The purpose of my previous letter about Mr. Booth's scheme was to arouse the contributors to the military chest of the Salvation Army to a clear sense of what they are doing. I thought it desirable that they should be distinctly aware that they are setting up and endowing a sect, in many ways analogous to the "Ranters" and "Revivalists" of undesirable notoriety in former times; but with this immensely important difference, that it possesses a strong, far-reaching, centralized organization, the disposal of the physical, moral, and financial strength of which rests with an irresponsible chief, who, according to his own account, is assured of the blind obedience of nearly 10,000 subordinates. I wish them to ask themselves, Ought prudent men and good citizens to aid in the establishment of an organization which, under sundry, by no means improbable, contingencies, may easily become a worse and more dangerous nuisance than the mendicant friars of the middle ages? If this is an academic question, I really do not know what questions deserve to be called practical. As you divined, I purposely omitted any consideration of the details of the Salvationist scheme, and of the principles which animate those who work it, because I desired that the public appreciation of the evils, necessarily inherent in all such plans of despotic social and religious regimentation should not be obscured by the raising of points of less comparative, however great absolute, importance.

But it is now time to undertake a more particular criticism of "Darkest England." At the outset of my examination of that work, I was startled to find that Mr. Booth had put forward his scheme with an almost incredibly imperfect knowledge of what had been done and is doing in the same direction. A simple reader might well imagine that the author of "Darkest England" posed as the Columbus, or at any rate the Cortez, of that region. "Go to Mudie's," he tells us, and you will be surprised to see how few books there are upon the social problem. That may or may not be correct; but if Mr. Booth had gone to a certain reading-room not far from Mudie's, I undertake to say that the well-informed and obliging staff of the national library in Bloomsbury would have provided him with more books on this topic, in almost all European languages, than he would read in three months. Has socialism no literature? And what is socialism but an incarnation of the social question? Moreover, I am persuaded that even "Mudie's" resources could have furnished Mr. Booth with the "Life of Lord Shaftesbury" and Carlyle's works. Mr. Booth seems to have undertaken to instruct the world without having heard of "Past and Present" or of "Latter-Day Pamphlets"; though, somewhat late in the day, a judicious friend calls his attention to them. To those of my contemporaries on whom, as on myself, Carlyle's writings on this topic made an ineffaceable impression forty years ago, who know that, for all that time, hundreds of able and devoted men, both clerical and lay, have worked heart and soul for the permanent amendment of the condition of the poor, Mr. Booth's "Go to Mudie's" affords an apt measure of the depth of his preliminary studies. However, I am bound to admit that these earlier labourers in the field laboured in such a different fashion, that the originality of the plan started by Mr.

Booth remains largely unaffected. For them no drums have beat, no trombones brayed; no sanctified buffoonery, after the model of the oration of the Friar in Wallenstein's camp dear to the readers of Schiller, has tickled the ears of the groundlings on their behalf.

Sadly behind the great age of rowdy self-advertisement in which their lot has fallen, they seem not to have advanced one whit beyond John the Baptist and the Apostles, 1800 years ago, in their notions of the way in which the metanoia, the change of mind of the ill-doer, is to be brought about. Yet the new model was there, ready for the imitation of those ancient savers of souls. The ranting and roaring mystagogues of some of the most venerable of Greek and Syrian cults also had their processions and banners, their fifes and cymbals and holy chants, their hierarchy of officers to whom the art of making collections was not wholly unknown; and who, as freely as their modern imitators, promised an Elysian future to contributory converts. The success of these antique Salvation armies was enormous. Simon Magus was quite as notorious a personage, and probably had as strong a following as Mr. Booth. Yet the Apostles, with their old-fashioned ways, would not accept such a success as a satisfactory sign of the Divine sanction, nor depart from their own methods of leading the way to the higher life.