GENERAL BOOTH'S GREAT PLAN.
WE suppose, from some figures given elsewhere, that General Booth will get the money he asks—that is, £100,000 down, and £30,000 a year so long as his experi- ment succeeds—and we heartily hope he may. The country is sick to death of the avalanche of words, printed and spoken, which now precedes—and buries—every project for the benefit of the lowest poor. It is time that an actual experiment should be made, and the founder of the Salvation Army is just the man to make it. We cannot like either the religious teaching or the religious ritual of his new Church, but that dislike does not blind us to the fact that Mr. Booth has a genius for organisation, that he understands the English lower class as hardly' any religious teacher does, and that though his method requires much preaching, he uses preaching as a means of reforming, and not as an end in itself. The suspicion that he intends to steal the funds entrusted to him is absurd, and founded on a blunder as to the very nature of the man ; he is trying a principle, personal sovereignty, which, though as old as Nimrod, is new in English religious history ; and he has shown that, whether he governs wisely or not, he possesses the art, now almost lost in England, of governing a miscellaneous multitude strongly and for a lengthened period. If he is willing to try the experiment of collecting, governing, and re- forming London outcasts, the less successful thieves, the tired-out tramps, the beaten workmen, the more wretched harlots, let him try, in God's name ; and if he succeeds, let him be buried in Westminster Abbey, with the full consent of all the Churches, as a social con- queror. We fear—indeed, we think we know—that there is a weak place in his scheme which will bring it down ; but he is just as competent to judge about that as we are, having, at all events, the benefit of vast experi- ence of the low, and much of his plan is full of patent sense of a kind becoming only too unusual. General Booth is going to form a colony in England, away from the temptations of London; to invite thither the men and women " who have fallen overboard," whether from circumstances or vicious proclivities ; and to induce them, by religious pressure and a strong social organisation, to work hard enough to maintain themselves, partly, as we understand, by agriculture, and partly by utilising the waste products of city life, the refuse articles, broken or other, now carted away by dustmen. There are to be no inquiries as to the colonists' past ; they are to work as they would in a colony, or suffer ; and they are to obey orders implicitly, under penalty, as we presume, of expulsion, though upon this point the General is either intentionally- reticent—he will clearly have the power to administer rather sharp punishment in the way of poor food—or he honestly believes that he will always be obeyed.
It is a good, big, honest scheme for going down to the- bottom and reaching the lowest residuum, and there is, we do not doubt, a class with whom it will succeed. Without entering into the eternal disputes about conver- sion, in which controversialists on both sides seem to us usually to disregard all the evidence they dislike, it is safe to affirm that a certain proportion of apparently hopeless men and women have a germ of civilisation in them ; that they are capable, in particular, of religious emotion and religious terror ; and that, while under the influence of either, they will more or less earnestly, according to- temperament, do what they are told is right. With them the Salvationists will succeed more or less, for though a man without active vices may be abominably lazy, a man who has renounced vice under the pressure of any impulse will usually, under the same pressure, try to keep him- self by industry. He feels the rebukes of those around him, he gains a new physical health, he falls in love- with respectability, and he has been taught all his life- that respectability and hard work are inseparable com- panions. So far, General Booth has every chance ; but then, how far is that ? The proportion of his precipitate of rascaldom which can be cured, or, as he would himself say, " saved " in that way, is a. very small one, or why has he not cleaned the slums of London already ?—and what is to become of the remainder, the men and women whose emotions are only durable enough to take them to the colony, and who in a few months, weeks, or days, will detest its sobriety, the incessantness of its officers' admonitions—the General, with his curious frankness, admitted this drawback, and its irritating effect—and, above all, its demand for the steady, monotonous, fatiguing work which they have been avoiding all their lives ? The General, it will be observed, has and can have no legal power over the colonists—unless, indeed, he makes them all his servants by written contract, in which case opinion might support him in putting the law in force, and prosecuting them all for refusal to work—and no right even to keep them in the colony- They can wander away if they please ; they can mis- behave if they please ; and they can revolt against discipline if they please, without any consequences except expulsion, which means nothing except relegation to Om slums whence they were drawn. We quite admit that the General, having opinion provisionally on his side, will be able to make some sharp household rules, and we entirely believe in his energy ; but we venture to prophesy what will be the result of his first experiment with a thousand of his miscellaneous colonists. One hundred will do well ; one hundred will be declared, and will remain, objects of hope and fear to his officers ; and eight hundred will gradually, but rather rapidly, slide back to their unre- generate state of mind, and become, first idle, then fractious, then mutinous, and then one of the worst crowds ever gathered together, a nuisance to the neighbourhood which is to be selected for the experiment, and which we recom- mend in advance to strengthen its police. Fortunately, the worst specimens will speedily glide away, declaring starvation in any street better than all that lecturing and work ; but the remainder, not energetic enough for that course, will remain, either to poison the con- verts, or to provoke the Salvation officers to disci- plinary measures which the local Magistrates, however heartily they may approve them, cannot possibly sup- port. That is the frequent fate of " organised" colonies, even when formed of people who intended at first to work ; and this one will be mainly composed of those to whom work, with its cruel monotony and endlessness, is either detestable or impossible. The colony, we predict, will fail, even if planted on Lundy Island, which would not be a bad place for the first experiment, and would give the colonists a healthy impression of separation from the world. We must, of course, make one reserve as to the probability of failure. The officers of the Salva- tion Army, who have necessarily much experience of character, may pick their colonists, and choose only those who have "fallen overboard" under stress of wind or water ; but then the colony will not be either what the subscribers expect, or what its founder intends it to be. It will be merely a Refuge in the country, akin in all but scale to a moral convalescent home.
But Parliament might give General Booth the neces- sary authority ? Parliament will do nothing of the kind, and ought to do nothing of the kind. Not to mention • General Booth's own epigrammatic objection that " Eng- land could not bear two Established Churches," Parlia- ment cannot delegate power to irresponsible men ; and if 'General Booth were made responsible, his utility and the meaning of his experiment would be gone. The essential idea of all his schemes, the principle in them which dif- ferentiates them from all rival schemes, is that monarchy is an excellent system of government, or, as he puts it liinself, that funds are best managed when he is " sole -trustee," and he would neither work well in nor accept any other position. He is going to try to make citizens out of outcasts by force of religious emotion and his .own genius for organising miscellaneous crowds into .efficient workers,—that .is the essence of his plan ; and while we honour him for trying it, and heartily wish him success, we believe he will meet shipwreck on the old rock, the inherent need of the majority for punishment when they go wrong. He thinks, in fact, he can make an army without Articles of War. Well, let him try—the expense really signifies nothing—and show us, if he can, that all the wise in all the ages have misread human beings.
Previous page
