William Booth

“ The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth; teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. ”

“ Pass in parade those who make up the submerged tenth, count the paupers indoor and outdoor, the homeless, the starving, the criminals, the lunatics, the drunkards, and the harlots—and yet do not give way to despair! Even to attempt to save a tithe of this host requires that we should put much more force and fire into our work than has hitherto been exhibited by anyone. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits of a garden pond. ”

“ It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's care. To men and women who are without homes children must be more or less of an incumbrance. ”

“ But as we have Lord Mayor's Days, when all the well-fed fur-clad City Fathers go in State Coaches through the town, why should we not have a Lazarus Day, in which the starving Out-of-Works, and the sweated half-starved "in-works" of London should crawl in their tattered raggedness, with their gaunt, hungry faces, and emaciated Wives and children, a Procession of Despair through the main thoroughfares past the massive houses and princely palaces of luxurious London? ”

“ It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all. Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market, and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on the spot? ”

“ There is not one of us but has an Emin somewhere or other in the heart of Darkest England, whom he ought to sally forth to rescue. Our Emins have the Devil for their Mahdi, and when we get to them we find that it is their friends and neighbours who hold them back, and they are, oh, so irresolute! It needs each of us to be as indomitable as Stanley, to burst through all obstacles, to force our way right to the centre of things, and then to labour with the poor prisoner of vice and crime with all our might. ”

“ These girls who do not know how to bake? These lads who never handled a spade? And where are you to emigrate them? Are you going to make the Colonies the dumping ground of your human refuse? On that the colonists will have something decisive to say, where there are colonists; and where there are not, how are you to feed, clothe, and employ your emigrants in the uninhabited wilderness? Immigration, no doubt, is the making of a colony, just as bread is the staff of life. ”

“ A man's labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.
Of all heart-breaking toil the hunt for work is surely the worst. Yet at any moment let a workman lose his present situation, and he is compelled to begin anew the dreary round of fruitless calls. Here is the story of one among thousands of the nomads, taken down from his own lips, of one who was driven by sheer hunger into crime. ”

“ One of the secrets of the success of the Salvation Army is, that the friendless of the world find friends in it. There is not one sinner in the world— no matter how degraded and dirty he may be—whom my people will not rejoice to take by the hand and pray with, and labour for, if thereby they can but snatch him as a brand from the burning. Now, we want to make more use of this, to make the Salvation Army the nucleus of a great agency for bringing comfort and counsel to those who are at their wits' end, feeling as if in the whole world there was no one to whom they could go. ”

“ They should lead as human a life as is possible to those who have fallen under so terrible a judgment. They should have their own little cottages in their own little gardens, under the blue sky, and, if possible, amid the green fields. I would deny them none of the advantages, moral, mental, and religious which might minister to their diseased minds, and tend to restore them to a better state. Not until the breath leaves their bodies should we cease to labour and wrestle for their salvation. But when they have reached a certain point access to their fellow men should be forbidden. ”

“ The supreme test of any scheme for benefiting humanity lies in the answer to the question, What does it make of the individual? Does it quicken his conscience, does it soften his heart, does it enlighten his mind, does it, in short, make more of a true man of him, because only by such influences can he be enabled to lead a human life? Among the denizens of Darkest England there are many who have found their way thither by defects of character which would under the most favourable circumstances relegate them to the same position. ”

“ It is bad for a single man to have to confront the struggle for life in the streets and Casual Wards. But how much more terrible must it be for the married man with his wife and children to be turned out into the streets. So long as the family has a lair into which it can creep at night, he keeps his footing; but when he loses that solitary foothold then arrives the time if there be such a thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to save him from the vortex that sucks him downward—ay, downward to the hopeless under-strata of crime and despair. ”

“ SECTION I.—THE ESSENTIALS TO SUCCESS. The first essential that must be borne in mind as governing every Scheme that may be put forward is that it must change the man when it is his character and conduct which constitute the reasons for his failure in the battle of life. No change in circumstances, no revolution in social conditions, can possibly transform the nature of man. Some of the worst men and women in the world, whose names are chronicled by history with a shudder of horror, were those who had all the advantages that wealth, education and station could confer or ambition could attain. ”

“ As long as that is the case, vice has an enormous advantage over virtue; such an abnormal social arrangement interdicts morality and places a vast premium upon prostitution. We must get back to nature if we have to cope with this ghastly evil. There ought to be more opportunities afforded for healthy human intercourse between young men and young women, nor can Society rid itself of a great responsibility for all the wrecks of manhood and womanhood with which our streets are strewn, unless it does make some attempt to bridge this hideous chasm which yawns between the two halves of humanity. ”

“ I do not wish to have any hand in establishing a new centre of demoralisation. I do not want my customers to be pauperised by being treated to anything which they do not earn. To develop self-respect in the man, to make him feel that at last he has go this foot planted on the first rung of the ladder which leads upwards, is vitally important, and this cannot be done unless the bargain between him and me is strictly carried out. So much coffee, so much bread, so much shelter, so much warmth and light from me, but so much labour in return from him. ”

“ Discipline, and that of the most merciless description, is enforced upon multitudes of these people even now. Nothing that the most authoritative organisation of industry could devise in the excess of absolute power, could for a moment compare with the slavery enforced to-day in the dens of the sweater. It is not a choice between liberty and discipline that confronts these unfortunates, but between discipline mercilessly enforced by starvation and inspired by futile greed, and discipline accompanied with regular rations and administered solely for their own benefit. ”

“ Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their grandmothers were at the same age? How many of all these mothers of the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes? Except minding the baby—a task that cannot be evaded—what domestic training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the mothers of babies themselves? ”

“ For these men are gradually, but surely, being sucked down into the quicksand of modern life. They stretch out their grimy hands to us in vain appeal, not for charity, but for work.
Work, work! it is always work that they ask. The Divine curse is to them the most blessed of benedictions. "In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread," but alas for these forlorn sons of Adam, they fail to find the bread to eat, for Society has no work for them to do. They have not even leave to sweat. ”

“ The dark and dismal jungle of pauperism, vice, and despair is the inheritance to which we have succeeded from the generations and centuries past, during which wars, insurrections, and internal troubles left our forefathers small leisure to attend to the well-being of the sunken tenth. Now that we have happened upon more fortunate times, let us recognise that we are our brother's keepers, and set to work, regardless of party distinctions and religious differences, to make this world of ours a little bit more like home for those whom we call our brethren. ”

“ That which sickens the stoutest heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to peck at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth; to let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical growth of the forest—who dare hope for that? ”

“ Just as Big Ben strikes two, the moon, flashing across the Thames and lighting up the stone work of the Embankment, brings into relief a pitiable spectacle. Here on the stone abutments, which afford a slight protection from the biting wind, are scores of men lying side by side, huddled together for warmth, and, of course, without any other covering than their ordinary clothing, which is scanty enough at the best. ”

“ When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the workless realised. ”

“ Who can battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, said "It seemed to them as if God and his Saints were dead." ”

“ As in Africa streams intersect the forest in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its River of the Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of the twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best in the manhood and womanhood of our land. ”

“ God, it was said in old time, setteth the desolate in families; but somehow, in our time, the desolate wander alone in the midst of a careless and unsympathising world. "There is no-one who cares for my soul. There is no creature loves me, and if I die no one will pity me," is surely one of the bitterest cries that can burst from a breaking heart. ”

“ If the premium is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close. And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately said, "Evil, be thou my Good," and for those who have been decoyed, snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a girl on the street you can never say without enquiry whether she is one of the most-to-be condemned, or the most-to-be pitied of her sex. ”

“ And here let me say that it is a great delusion to imagine that in the riffraff and waste of the labour market there are no workmen to be had except those that are worthless. Worthless under the present conditions, exposed to constant temptations to intemperance no doubt they are, but some of the brightest men in London, with some of the smartest pairs of hands, and the cleverest brains, are at the present moment weltering helplessly in the sludge from which we propose to rescue them. ”

“ The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilisation needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the grave. ”

“ As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?
The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who flourish on the weakness of our poor? ”

“ But it is the few prizes in every profession which allure the multitude, who think little of the many blanks. And speaking broadly, vice offers to every good-looking girl during the first bloom of her youth and beauty more money than she can earn by labour in any field of industry open to her sex. The penalty exacted afterwards is disease, degradation and death, but these things at first are hidden from her sight.
The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. ”

“ My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience. The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties, and yet, when taken to wife, are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family. A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it. ”

“ Here is John Jones, a stout stalwart labourer in rags, who has not had one square meal for a month, who has been hunting for work that will enable him to keep body and soul together, and hunting in vain. There he is in his hungry raggedness, asking for work that he may live, and not die of sheer starvation in the midst of the wealthiest city in the world. ”

“ When I look over the roll of men and women who have given up friends, parents, home prospects, and everything they possess in order to walk bare-footed beneath a burning sun in distant India, to live on a handful of rice, and die in the midst of the dark heathen for God and the Salvation Army, I sometimes marvel how it is that they should be so eager to give up all, even life itself, in a cause which has not power enough in it to induce any reasonable number of wealthy men to give to it the mere superfluities and luxuries of their existence. ”