G. W. Foote

“ It is, indeed, one of the prime evils of Booth's scheme, no less than of almost every other charitable effort, that it helps to divert attention from political causes of social disorders. No doubt charity is an excellent thing in certain circumstances, but the first thing to agitate for is justice; and when our laws are just, and no longer create evils, it will be time enough for a huge system of charity to mitigate the still inevitable misery. ”

“ Nor does Booth expect that all will be saved by his scheme, however well supported and successful. It is perfectly clear, therefore, that the God he worships will allow men and women to perish whom he might promptly save; yes, allow them to perish in this world, physically, intellectually, and morally, and afterwards torment them for ever and ever in Hell. And it is this God, this incredible monster of wickedness, in whom General Booth trusts, and whom he bids the Freethinker look up to with admiration and love. ”

“ The whole scheme, from top to bottom, is to be worked by the Salvationists; every penny is to pass through Booth’s hands, and every order is to issue from his brain. Outsiders are only wanted in the shape of subscribers. Is it not idle then, to suppose that the scheme will, in practice, be anything else than a huge recruiting system for the Salvation Army? We venture to say that if Booth’s first thought were for the poor, he would invite the formation of an influential Committee, and not seek the monopoly of all the cash and credit for his own sect. ”

“ In ordinary prisons —so wretched, so inhuman, and so imbecile is the system—eighty per cent, of first offenders come back again; while in the one great American prison which is conducted on a better method the percentage is exactly reversed, only twenty per cent, returning to gaol, and eighty per cent, joining the ranks of decent society.
General Booth is not a scientist. He knows nothing of the lessons of Evolution. He is not aware that thousands of men and women are born in every generation who are behind the age. ”

“ He insists on retaining absolute command of all the funds, and on working the whole scheme through the Salvation Army. All who assist him, therefore, are helping to promote the development of a vast body of religious fanatics, under the despotic control of a single man, who will not scruple, when it serves his purpose to, use his voluntary slaves, for political as well as social objects. For General Booth has his own notions— crude as many of them are—and it is not in human nature to refrain from using power for the realisation of one’s ideas. ”

“ Booth's soap, if it gets sold, will lessen the demand for other people’s soap, and thus a lot of existing soap-makers will be thrown out of work. If he collects old bottles, and furbishes them up “equal to new,” there will be so many less new bottles wanted, and a lot of existing glass-bottle makers will be thrown out of work. The wily old General of the Salvation Army, owing to a want of economic knowledge, falls into a most obvious fallacy. He is like the Irishman, who lengthened his shirt by cutting a piece off the top and sewing it on the bottom. ”

“ There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement you could offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. ”

“ Neither is there any necessity to subvention General Booth to obtain workman’s dwellings out of town instead of ugly, dreary model dwellings in the midst of dirt and smoke. Nothing can be done until provision is made by the railway companies for conveying the workmen to and fro for twopence a day, and when this step is taken, as it must be, private enterprise will construct the dwellings without Salvation charity. ”

“ In the first place, if God gave Booth the idea, he might as well have given him the cash. In the second place, the idea—or rather, the set of ideas—is by no means a revelation. Every part of Booth’s scheme has been advocated by other men, and several parts are already reduced to practice, though not on the gigantic scale he contemplates. ”

“ When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.”
These very people, who are the worst part of the social problem, Booth will not trouble himself very greatly about. Here are a few extracts from the Rules for the “Colonists,” as he calls the people who come into his scheme. ”

“ But all the while the real work of progress is being done by other agencies—by the spread of knowledge, the growth of education, the discoveries of science, the silent triumphs of art, and the gradual expansion of the human mind. ”

“ Just as there are congenital criminals, there are congenital harlots. They are cases of survival or reversion. Discipline of every kind is hateful to them. They prefer to do what they like, how they like, and when they like. Animality and vanity are strong in them, but they have little steady energy and no self-control. In a polygamous state of society they would find a place in a harem; but in a monogamous and industrial state of society they are hopelessly out of harmony with the general environment. Here is an instructive little table from General Booth’s book. ”

“ Revival movements have always boasted of moral successes, but history shows that they make no real impression on the community. The method is unscientific and doomed to failure. A salvation meeting, with its noise and excitement, has as much effect on public morality as a savage’s tom-tom has upon the heavens. ”

“ At the very best “charity” is artificial, and social remedies must be natural. Work cannot be provided. People have certain incomes and allow themselves a certain expenditure. If they give Booth, or any other charlatan, a hundred pounds to find work for “the unemployed,” they have a hundred pounds less to spend in other ways, and those who previously supplied them with that amount of commodities or service will necessarily suffer. ”

“ But it is not thus that the spectre of poverty and misery will be laid.
Evil is wrought by want of thought, As well as by want of heart. If the so-called lower classes are to be elevated, the so-called upper classes will find they will have to do some thinking. Social knots cannot be cut, they must be untied. The Sphinx says you must read her riddle. All the money-bags in the world will never smooth her terrible brow.
General Booth's scheme of social salvation is before the world in the form of a book. Let us examine the prophecy of this would-be Moses of the serfs of poverty and degradation. ”

“ The law of heredity is a stern fact, and it will not budge a hair’s-breadth for General Booth and all the sentimental religionists in the world.
Take the Harlots, for instance. We are far from denying that many girls, after being seduced by men, are pushed into a life of vice. Christian society has no mercy on female frailty; it drives a girl who has listened to the voice of a tempter, or the first suggestions of her sexual passions, into a career of infamy ”

“ It is upon this truth that Booth’s scheme is founded. Sometimes, indeed, he forgets it, and talks as though the preaching of Christ and him crucified were enough to regenerate society. But this truth, that man is very largely the creature of circumstances, and that evil circumstances should be changed if there is to be any improvement, is the governing idea of his project. ”

“ Up to the present the Social Scheme has made no appreciable impression on the poverty and misery of London. General Booth has set up a match-factory, and is now selling Salvation matches. They are said to be worth their price, but it must be remembered that the General gets all his capital for nothing. It will also be obvious that every box of matches he sells will diminish by so much the demand for matches supplied by other firms. He therefore gives employment to one man by taking it away from another. ”

“ Booth is a bold man and his promises are magnificent.
“If the scheme,” he says, “which I set forth in these pages is not applicable to the Thief, the Harlot, the Drunkard, and the Sluggard, it may as well be dismissed without ceremony.”
We suspect that the Sluggard will be the toughest subject of all. Booth has to solve the insoluble problem of how to put nervous energy into a body in which it is constitutionally lacking. Common sense says the thing cannot be done. You may galvanise the Sluggard for a while, but the effect will not last. Energy is not acquired, it is congenital. ”

“ If they succeed, God will give him a seat in Heaven; if they fail, or neglect their duty, God will cast him into Hell. Thus Robinson’s fate depends upon the sympathy, self-sacrifice, and wisdom of Smith, Jones, and Brown. Want of heart on their part, and even want of sense, are alike fatal to his chance of salvation. God lets them do their best; if they do nothing, he is just as serene ”

“ When it is discovered that the poor rates, the statistics of drink, the number of the unemployed, the condition of the very poor, and the miseries and degradations of what is compendiously called the social evil, are not perceptibly affected by General Booth’s efforts, the very dullest will see the deception of such enterprises, and turn their attention to the scientific aspects of the great social problem. ”

“ He is essentially a man of business. His faculty is for organisation, not for the promulgation of new ideas or the creation of new material. His eye for a good advertisement is unequalled. Barnum forgot Booth in calling himself the greatest showman on earth. As the present writer said in 1882, the head of the Salvation Army is “a dexterous manager; he knows how to work the oracle; he understands catering for the mob; in short he is a very clever showman, who deals in religion, just as other showmen deal in wild animals, giants, dwarfs, two-headed sheep, fat women, and Siamese twins.” ”

“ Except for the Farm Colony, which we do not see how Booth is to manage successfully, we are able to perceive nothing in his scheme which really touches the heart of the social problem; while as a remedy for the “unemployed” it seems to us perfectly ridiculous. The whole project, at bottom, is a new gigantic device for furthering the interests of the Salvation Army. If the other Christian bodies do not see this they must be lamentably deficient in insight. ”

“ The Army’s pretensions are disproved by statistics. It boasts of nearly ten thousand officers and a million of adherents. Now if these, or a considerable proportion of them, had been drawn from the moral residuum of England, a very serious impression would have been made on the ranks of vice and crime. But what are the facts? While the Education Act has made a difference in the number of young criminals, there is no perceptible diminution in the number of hardened offenders. Prostitutes, also, are as numerous as ever, and the national drink-bill actually increases. ”

“ They mark the parting of the ways between the Christian and the Evolutionist. They are as incompatible as oil and water, and no thoughtful man would attempt to reconcile them. But Booth (or isn’t it Stead?) combines incompatibles with the alkali of sentiment. And this failure to discern the distinctiveness of opposite first principles shows the book to be the work of sciolists, and vitiates its scheme of social reform from beginning to end. No work can succeed without a knowledge of materials. ”

“ Getting hold of fish and meat tins, cleaning them up, and manufacturing them into toys, is hardly worth all the eloquence spent upon it by Booth’s literary adviser. Nor is there much to be said in favor of an Inquiry Office for lost people. If it be true that 18,000 people are “lost” in London every year, it may be assumed that the majority of them do not want to be found, and it is the business of the police to look after the rest. ”

“ The cash he collects will probably be diverted from other religious enterprises, and in this respect a Freethinker need not be in the least afflicted. His experiment will, in our opinion, do a real service to society. It will demonstrate before the very eyes of people who know next to nothing of history or economics the absolute futility of religious efforts to reform the world. ”

“ They must be put into a position in which they can work and eat, and have a decent room to live and sleep in, and see something before them besides along, weary, monotonous, grinding round of toil, and anxious care to keep themselves and those they love barely alive, with nothing at the further end but the Hospital, the Union, or the Madhouse. ”

“ When Archdeacon Farrar was preaching at Westminster Abbey on behalf of General Booth’s scheme, he made this observation:—“The country is being more and more depleted, the great cities are becoming more and more densely overcrowded, and in great cities there is always a tendency to the deterioration of manhood—morally, physically, and spiritually. ”

“ They shout approval because they dare not show hostility. Next come the mob of cheap philanthropists. This consists of rich ladies and gentleman, who feel twinges of remorse at living sumptuously while others are starving, and who are ready to pay conscience-money to any social charlatan. ”