Frederick St. George De Lautour Booth-Tucker

“ Fear and jealousy and suspicion and intolerance and despair were counsellors finding multitudes to listen, but he for one would listen to the nobler counsellor "Hope." Were none of them bold enough at the last moment to prefer even failure in a matter like this to the most brilliant success in pleasing the world and making truce with the devil? He would try to hope that the scheme might not fail, but what each one had to consider was the question, "Shall it fail through my cowardice, my greed, my supineness, my prudential cautiousness, my petty prejudices, my selfish conventionality?" ”

“ General Booth has uttered a trumpet-call, the echoes of which will be reverberated through the entire world. The destitute masses, whom he has in his book so vividly pourtrayed, are everywhere to be found. And I believe I speak truly when I say that in no country is their existence more palpable, their number more numerous, their misery more aggravated, their situation more critical, desperate and devoid of any gleam of hope to relieve their darkness of despair, than in India. ”

“ Often he has to choose between crime and starvation. For himself he might prefer to starve, but the sight of his emaciated wife and aged parents,—with whom, criminal though he be, he is as a rule ready to share his last crust,—the clamour of his hungry children, all this drives him to desperation and to a life of crime. He can only give voice to his sorrows and his needs by some fresh act of lawlessness. Hence the occasional outbursts of mutiny, and the murders of jail warders, which from time to time reach the newspapers and shock the public ear. ”

“ It is only of late that we have learnt for instance to put chains upon the genii of the tea-kettle, to put them as it were into harness, to bridle them and to compel them to drag our huge leviathans across thousands of miles of ocean. May not the enormous mass of waste labor that has accumulated in our cities and rural districts be fitly compared to the former waste of steam. The best that we have been able to do for it so far has been to provide for it the safety valves of beggary, destitution, famine, pestilence, crime, imprisonment and the gallows. ”

“ The millstone that hangs around our national neck, so that we can barely keep our heads above water, even when there is not a ripple upon its surface, and that always threatens to engulf us in perdition at the first symptoms of a storm,—this millstone shall be converted into an unsinkable life-buoy, that shall not only support itself upon the crest of the highest waves, but shall help to keep afloat the entire national body. What is now an eyesore shall become an adornment, and what is now a cause of weakness shall be a source of strength, bulwark of protection and mine of wealth to all India. ”

“ The careful provision made by the Hebrew law for the occasional manslayer surely casts a severe reflection on the millions who, many of them through no fault of their own, represent the submerged tenth! Let us leave for the time being the wilful criminals who are the open enemies of society to be dealt with as severely as you like by the arm of the law. Turn for a moment a pitying gaze towards those hungry destitute multitudes, who cannot it may be, plead their own cause, but whose woes surely speak with an eloquence that no mere words could ever match! ”

“ The feeble animals can only draw a plough which merely scratches the surface of the ground. Furthermore, as the population increases the land is divided into smaller and smaller holdings. The struggle against the advancing tide of adversity cannot be maintained. Inch by inch the tide rolls up, pushing the border-landers closer and closer upon the black rocks of famine, to escape which they at length plunge into the sea amongst the submerged millions, who, weary and bitter and despairing, or with blind submission to the iron hand of fate, have grown hopelessly and miserably indifferent. ”

“ The old adage that "labour is wealth," and that a nation's riches consist in its hardy sons and daughters of toil, will yet be proved true. Treat this human muck-heap even as you would ordinary sewage or manure, and who does not know that the very same putrefying mass of corruption which if allowed to remain near our doors would breed nothing but fever, cholera, and the worst forms of disease and death, when removed to a little distance, will double and treble the ordinary fertility of the soil and produce crops that will increase the wealth of the entire nation? ”

“ We have built our deliverance ship in the dockyard of loving design, we have wrought her plates, riveted her bolts, fixed her masts, put in her boilers and engines, fitted her and supplied her with gear. It is your privilege to launch her—to draw the silver bolt and permit her to leave the stocks and glide down into the dark deep sea of misery and land on heavenly shores the drowning submerged millions. ”

“ Caine says: "The people of India, unlike other people, only drink for the purpose of getting drunk, and if we make them drunken we destroy them more rapidly than by war, pestilence and famine."
Nothing is clearer than that a rapidly increasing multitude in this country, once remarkable for its sobriety and thrift, are rushing headlong into the disastrous vice of intemperance and its attendant horrors, almost without check. Something must be done. We cannot cold-bloodedly abandon them to a gospel of despair. ”

“ Are they not our fellow human beings, and ought not some one to care for them? We shall look upon it as a precious responsibility, and I speak fearlessly on behalf of our devoted officers when I say, that they would rather spend and be spent for such than for the richest in the land. If, as I have already shown, the effort can be made self-supporting and self-propagating, the mere fact of their misery or poverty only impels us to love them the more and to strive the more earnestly for their emancipation. ”

“ And knowing this can we be so blind, even to our selfish interests, as to treat this human waste in a manner that we should deem the very height of imprudence and folly in dealing with the other sort? Can we shut our eyes to the fact that there are moral diseases, more terrible in their nature, and more fatal to a nation's life, than the bodily ones, against which we are so anxious to guard, even at the most lavish expenditure of the public purse? ”

“ If it be true that starving men are driven by hunger to commit theft solely that they may be sent to jail where at least they will get food and be saved for a time from the hunger-wolf, how can we doubt but that thousands will hail with gladness a deliverance which is not only a deliverance from want and starvation, but the opening out of a brighter path for their whole future. ”

“ I should question whether there is a single town or country district in India which does not present the sad spectacle of a large number of men, willing and anxious to work, but unable to find employment. Moreover, as is well known, they have almost without exception families dependent upon them for their support, who are necessarily the sharers of their misfortunes and sufferings. There is one district in Ceylon, where deaths from starvation have been personally known to our Officers, and yet the country appears to be a very garden of Eden for beauty and fertility. ”

“ As already said, I am quite willing to admit that this question of shelter for the poor is of secondary importance as compared with that of their food-supply. And yet is it nothing to us that millions of the Indian poor have no place that they can call "home," not even the meagre shelter of the one-roomed hut with which they would gladly be content? Is it nothing to us that superadded to the sufferings of hunger, they have to face the sharp and sometimes frosty air of the cold weather with scarcely a rag to their backs, and no doors, windows, or even walls to keep off the chilly wind? ”

“ Each labourer represents to the state what the piece of gold is to the miser. He is the human capital of the nation and is capable of producing annual interest at the rate of at least a hundred per cent, if placed in sufficiently favourable circumstances. What folly is it then, nay what culpable negligence, nay what nothing short of criminality to sink this human gold in the bogs of beggary and destitution! Man is the most wonderful piece of machinery that exists in the world! ”

“ As a matter of fact, I have no hesitation in saying, that there are many millions in India who do not get even half this pittance from year's end to year's end, and yet toil on with scarcely a murmur, sharing their scanty morsel with those even poorer than themselves, until disease finds their weakened bodies an easy prey, and death gives them their release from a poverty-stricken existence ”

“ And if the genius of man has been able to tame the strongest of animals, such as elephants,—the fiercest, such as lions,—the swiftest, such as horses, and the dullest, such as the ass,—why should we despair of reducing to order this chaotic mass of labor, and of turning that which at present constitutes a danger that threatens the very existence of society into a source of safety, of wealth and power? At any rate this is the object that will be kept steadily in view by our Labor Bureau. ”

“ True lovers of India (and nothing is more encouraging than the splendid manner in which the intelligence of this country is arousing itself to thoughtful active effort for the weal of the nation, putting aside all differences of race and religion, that it may unite to seek the common good,) true lovers of India, we say, will never allow differences in race and religion to hinder them in a question affecting the well-being of some 26,000,000 of people who are already a drag and a hindrance to the rising prosperity of the nation, and who are sure if neglected to become a danger. ”

“ We shall ourselves become the leaders of the coolies, and dig out channels in Ceylon, in Africa, in South America, and other countries, building up from entirely new centres new colonies and territories and kingdoms where the Indian colonist would find himself not a stranger in a strange land, unwelcome, neglected, or illtreated, but at home in a new India, more prosperous and happy than the one he had left behind,—a colony peopled and possessed and managed by those of his own race and language. ”

“ There is a buoyant enthusiasm in every page, a sanguine optimism at which the youngest among us might marvel, combined with a familiar acquaintance with the saddest and darkest phenomena of existence. The book deals with problems which of all others are most calculated to appal, and overwhelm the minds with the sense of desolation and despair, yet it is instinct throughout with a joyous hope and glowing confidence. General Booth, face to face with the devil, still believes in God. ”

“ The hungry, the dirty, the ragged, the hopeless and outcast, the criminal and the drunkard, the idle and the vicious—can he gather all these in with any hope of starting them afresh on the journey of life? ”

“ Again, it is not an indiscriminate system of largely extended charity that we propose to provide. Our object is to find work for these workless multitudes, and such work as shall more than pay for the very humble pittance the Indian destitute requires. He must be a poor specimen of a human being who cannot fairly earn his anna or two annas a day, and our brains must be poor addled affairs, if in this great vast world of ours we cannot find that amount of work for him to do. It is all nonsense to talk about over-population, when the world is three parts empty and waiting to be occupied. ”

“ The stock of the crab-apple can be made to bear quinces, and a mango tree that is scarcely worth the ground it occupies, can be made to yield fruit which will fetch four annas a piece!
What is done in the garden is possible in human nature. And God will yet enable us to graft into this wretched and apparently worthless Upas stock, a bud which in coming years shall be loaded with fruit that shall be the marvel of the world. This human desert shall yet blossom as the rose, this wilderness shall become a fruitful garden, and the waste places be inhabited. ”

“ Our Pharaoh is a Christian Queen, under whom we have, not one, but many Josephs, who are really anxious for the highest welfare of the submerged masses, and who are likely to hail with gladness (as has been already the case in England) any project which bids fair to alleviate permanently the existing misery. The wealth and power of the British Government and Nation, instead of being used to hinder such a scheme, is likely to be thrown bodily into the scale in favour of all reasonable reform that will help congested labour to redistribute itself and recover its normal balances. ”

“ Any remedy worthy of consideration must be on a scale commensurate with the evil, which it proposes to deal with. It is no use trying to bale out the ocean with a pint pot. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits of a garden pond. ”

“ They stand by the new-fledged proselyte to work, to encourage perseverance. They follow him to the country colony, the abomination of desolation to one who has walked the London pavements and found his heaven in the gin-palace and the music-hall, to stimulate effort. They accompany him to the colony to remind him that true freedom is not licence, that the conditions of success are a change of mind and not of climate. ”

“ We have all over the world fearlessly invaded these criminals in their lowest haunts and dens, in the teeth of the warnings of the Police; we have braved their fiercest fury when, urged on by publicans, maddened with drink, misled by all sorts of infamous lies, and winked at or patronised by the Police and Magistrates, they have wreaked on us the utmost cruelties. We have invariably weathered the storm, though often at the cost of health and even life itself. And in the end as a rule the Roughs, Criminals and Dangerous Classes have become our warmest friends and vigorous supporters. ”

“ While we are piercing the bowels of the earth in search of gold, minerals and coal, there lies at our very door a mine of wealth which it is simple folly for us to ignore. True, the shaft has become choked with the rubbish of despair, vice and crime, which will take time, trouble and untiring patience to dig through. ”

“ Religious by instinct, obedient to discipline, skilled in handicrafts, inured to hardship, and accustomed to support life on the scantiest conceivable pittance, we cannot imagine a more fitting object for our pity, nor a more encouraging one for our effort, than the members of India's "submerged tenth."
Leaving to the care of existing agencies those whose bodies are diseased, General Booth's scheme seeks to fling the mantle of brotherhood around the morally sick, the destitute and the despairing. ”

“ India has no poor law. There is not even the inhospitable shelter of a workhouse, to which the honest pauper may have recourse. Hence with tens of thousands it is literally a case of "steal or starve." I suppose that nine-tenths of the thefts and robberies, besides a large proposition of the other crimes committed in India, are prompted by sheer starvation, and until the cause be removed, it will be in vain to look for a diminution of the evil, multiply our police and soldiery as we will. ”