children, as distinct from infants, saw one girl of nine with a
curious history. This child had been twelve times in the hands of the
police before her father brought her to the Army on their suggestion.
Her mania was to run away from home, where it does not appear that she
was ill-treated, and to sleep in the streets, on one occasion for as
long as five nights. This child had a very curious face, and even in
her sleep, as I saw her, there was about it something wild and
defiant. When the Matron turned her over she did not yawn or cry, but
uttered a kind of snarl. I suppose that here is an instance of
atavism, that the child throw back for thousands or tens of thousands
of years, to when her progenitors were savages, and that their
primitive instincts have reasserted themselves in her, although she
was born in the twentieth century. She had been ten months in the Home
and was doing well. Indeed, the Matron told me that they had taken her
out and given her opportunities of running away, but that she had
never attempted to avail herself of them.
The Officer in charge informed me that there is much need for a
Maternity Hospital in Liverpool.
There are also Institutions for men in Liverpool, but these I must
pass over.
THE MEN'S SOCIAL WORK
MANCHESTER
The Officer in charge of the Men's Social Work in Manchester told me
the same story that I had heard in Liverpool as to the prevailing
distress. He said, 'It has been terrible the last few winters. I have
never seen anything like it. We know because they come to us, and the
trouble is more in a fixed point than in London. Numbers and numbers
come, destitute of shelter or food or anything. The cause is want of
employment. There is no work. Many cases, of course, go down through
drink, but the most cannot get work. The fact is that there are more
men than there is work for them to do, and this I may say is a regular
thing, winter and summer.'
A sad statement surely, and one that excites thought.
I asked what became of this residue who could not find work. His
answer was, 'They wander about, die off, and so on.'
A still sadder statement, I think.
The Major in charge is a man of great organising ability, force of
character, and abounding human sympathy. Yet he was once one of the
melancholy army of wasters. Some seventeen years ago he came into the
Army through one of its Shelters, a drunken, out-of-place
cabinet-maker, who had been tramping the streets. They gave him work
and he 'got converted.' Now he is the head of the Manchester Social
Institutions, engaged in finding work for or converting thousands of
others.
At first the Army had only one establishment in Manchester, which used
to be a cotton mill. Now it is a Shelter for 200 men. Then it took
others, some of which are owned and some hired, among them a great
'Elevator' on the London plan, where waste paper is sorted and sold.
The turn-over here was over £8,000 in 1909, and may rise to £12,000. I
forget how many men it finds work for, but every week some twenty-five
new hands come in, and about the same number pass out.
This is a wonderful place, filled with what appears to be rubbish, but
which is really valuable material. Among this rubbish all sorts of
strange things are to be found. Thus I picked out of it, and kept as a
souvenir, a beautifully-bound copy of Wesley's Hymns, published about
a hundred years ago. Lying near it was an early edition of Scott's
'Marmion.' This Elevator more than pays its way; indeed the Army is
saving money out of it, which is put by to purchase other buildings.
Then there are houses where the people employed in the paper-works
lodge, a recently-acquired home for the better class of men, which was
once a mansion of the De Clifford family, and afterwards a hospital,
and a store where every kind of oddment is sold by Dutch auction.
These articles are given to the Army, and among the week's collection
I saw clocks, furniture, bicycles, a parrot cage, and a crutch. Not
long ago the managers of this store had a goat presented to them,
which nearly ate them out of house and home, as no one would buy it,
and they did not like to send the poor beast to the butcher.
In these various Shelters and Institutions I saw some strange
characters. One had been an electrical engineer, educated under
Professor Owen, at Cardiff College. He came into money, and gambled
away £13,000 on horse-racing, although he told me that he won as much
as £8,000 on one Ascot meeting. His subsequent history is a story in
itself, one too long to set out; but the end of it, in his own words,
was 'Four years ago I came here, and, thank God! I am going on all
right.'
Why do not the writers of naturalistic novels study Salvation Army
Shelters? In any one of them they would find more material than could
be used up in ten lifetimes; though, personally, I confess I am
content to read such stories in the secret annals of the various
Institutions.
Another man, a very pleasant and humorous person, who was once a
Church worker and a singer in the choir, etc., when, in his own words,
he used 'to put on religion with his Sunday clothes and take it off
again with them,' came to grief through sheer love of amusement, such
as that which is to be found in music-halls and theatres. His habit
was to spend the money of an insurance company by which he was
employed, in taking out the young lady to whom he was engaged, to such
entertainments. Ultimately, of course, he was found out, and, when
starving on the road, determined to commit suicide. The Salvationists
found him in the nick of time, and now he is foreman of their
paper-collecting yard.
Another, at the ripe age of twenty-four, had been twenty-seven times
in prison. His father was in prison, his eldest brother committed
suicide in prison by throwing himself over the banisters. Also, he had
two brothers at present undergoing penal servitude, who, when he was a
little fellow, used to pass him through windows to open doors in
houses which they were burgling.
I suggested that it was a poor game and that he had better give it up.
He answered:--'I shall never do it again, sir, God helping me.'
Really I think he meant what he said.
Another, in the Chepstow Street Shelter, where he acted as
night-watchman, was discharged from Portland, after serving a fifteen
years' sentence for manslaughter. His trouble was that he killed a man
in a fight, and as he had fought him before and had a grudge against
him, was very nearly hanged for his pains. This man earned £9 in some
way or other during his sentence, which he sent to his wife.
Afterwards, he discovered that she had been living with another man,
who died and left her well off. But she has never refunded the £9, nor
will she have anything to do with her husband.
OAKHILL HOUSE
MANCHESTER
Oakhill House is a Rescue Home for women, which was given to the Army
by Mrs. Crossley, a well-known local lady. It deals with prison,
fallen, inebriate, and preventive cases. At the time of my visit there
were sixty-three inmates, but when a new adjacent building is
completed there will be room for more. There is a wonderful laundry in
this Home, where the most beautiful washing is done at extremely
moderate prices. The ironing and starching room was a busy sight, but
what I chiefly remember about it was the spectacle of one melancholy
old man, the only male among that crowd of women, seated by a
steam-boiler that drove the machinery, to which it was his business to
attend. (No woman can be persuaded to look after a boiler.) In the
midst of all those females he had the appearance of a superannuated
and disillusioned Turk contemplating his too extensive establishment
and reflecting on its monthly bills.
The matron in charge informed me that even for these rough women there
is no system of punishment whatsoever. No girl is ever restricted in
her food, or put on bread and water, or struck, or shut away by
herself. The Army maxim is that it is its mission not to punish but to
try to reform. If in any particular case its methods of gentleness
fail, which they rarely do, it is considered best that the case should
depart, very possibly to return again later on.
She added that although many of these women had committed assaults,
and even fought the Police, not one of them attacks another in the
Home once in a year, and that during her twenty years of work,
although she had lived among some of the worst women in England, she
had never received a single blow. As an illustration of what the
Salvation Army understands by this word 'work' I may state that
throughout these twenty years, except for the allotted annual
fortnight, this lady has had no furlough.
THE MEN'S SOCIAL WORK
GLASGOW
I saw the Brigadier in charge of the Men's Social Work in Glasgow at a
great central Institution where hundreds of poor people sleep every
night. The inscriptions painted on the windows give a good idea of its
character. Here are some of them: 'Cheap beds.' 'Cheap food.' 'Waste
paper collected.' 'Missing friends found.' 'Salvation for all.'
In addition to this Refuge there is an 'Elevator' of the usual type,
in which about eighty men were at work, and an establishment called
the Dale House Home, a very beautiful Adams' house, let to the Army at
a small rent by an Eye Hospital that no longer requires it. This house
accommodates ninety-seven of the men who work in the Elevator.
The Brigadier informed me that the distress at Glasgow was very great
last year. Indeed, during that year of 1909 the Army fed about 35,000
men at the docks, and 65,000 at the Refuge, a charity which caused
them to be officially recognized for the first time by the
Corporation, that sent them a cheque in aid of their work. Now,
however, things have much improved, owing to the building of
men-of-war and the forging of great guns for the Navy. At Parkhead
Forge alone 8,000 men are being employed upon a vessel of the
Dreadnought class, which will occupy them for a year and a half. So it
would seem that these monsters of destruction have their peaceful
uses.
Glasgow, he said, 'is a terrible place for drink, especially of
methylated spirits and whisky.' Drink at the beginning, I need hardly
remark, means destitution at the end, so doubtless this failing
accounts for a large proportion of its poverty.
The Men's Social Work of the Army in Glasgow, which is its
Headquarters in Scotland, is spreading in every direction, not only in
that city itself, but beyond it to Paisley, Greenock, and Edinburgh.
Indeed, the Brigadier has orders 'to get into Dundee and Aberdeen as
soon as possible.' I asked him how he would provide the money. He
answered, 'Well, by trusting in God and keeping our powder dry.'
As regards the Army's local finance the trouble is that owing to the
national thriftiness it is harder to make commercial ventures pay in
Scotland than in England. Thus I was informed that in Glasgow the
Corporation collects and sells its own waste paper, which means that
there is less of that material left for the Salvation Army to deal
with. In England, so far as I am aware, the waste-paper business is
not a form of municipal trading that the Corporations of great cities
undertake.
Another leading branch of the Salvation Army effort in Scotland is its
Prison work. It is registered in that country as a Prisoners' Aid
Society, and the doors of every jail in the land are open to its
Officers. I saw the Army's prison book, in which are entered the
details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough
some of them were.
I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was
that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was
separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second
was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by
the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be
wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The
explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of
capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.
My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the
permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there
were notes in his book to this effect.
I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom
had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man
who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the
Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South
African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at £7;
but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither
of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at
the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally
came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as
he said, 'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.'
Another was a Glasgow silk merchant, who made a bad debt of £3,000
that swamped him. Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered. He
had been three years cashier of this Shelter.
Another arrived at the Shelter in such a state that the Officer in
charge told me he was obliged to throw his macintosh round him to hide
his nakedness. He was an engineer who took a public-house, and helped
himself freely to his stock-in-trade, with the result that he became a
frightful drunkard, and lost £1,700. He informed me that he used to
consume no less than four bottles of whisky a day, and suffered from
delirium tremens several times. In the Shelter--I quote his own
words--'I gave my heart to God, and after that all desire for drink
and wrongdoing' (he had not been immaculate in other ways) 'gradually
left me. From 1892 I had been a drunkard. After my conversion, in less
than three weeks I ceased to have any desire for drink.'
This man became night-watchman in the Shelter, a position which he
held for twelve months. He said: 'I was promoted to be Sergeant; when
I put on my uniform and stripes, I reckoned myself a man again. Then I
was made foreman of the works at Greendyke Street. Then I was sent to
pioneer our work in Paisley, and when that was nicely started, I was
sent on to Greenock, where I am now trying to work up a (Salvation
Army) business.'
Here, for a reason to be explained presently, I will quote a very
similar case which I saw at the Army Colony at Hadleigh, in Essex.
This man, also a Scotsman (no Englishman, I think, could have survived
such experiences), is a person of fine and imposing appearance, great
bodily strength, and good address. He is about fifty years of age, and
has been a soldier, and after leaving the Service, a gardener. Indeed,
he is now, or was recently, foreman market-gardener at Hadleigh. He
married a hospital nurse, and found out some years after marriage that
she was in the habit of using drugs. This habit he contracted also,
either during her life or after her death, and with it that of drink.
His custom was to drink till he was a wreck, and then take drugs,
either by the mouth or subcutaneously, to steady himself. Chloroform
and ether he mixed together and drank, strychnine he injected. At the
beginning of this course, threepennyworth of laudanum would suffice
him for three doses. At the end, three years later (not to mention
ether, chloroform, and strychnine), he took of laudanum alone nearly a
tablespoonful ten or twelve times a day, a quantity, I understand,
which is enough to kill five or six horses. One of the results was
that when he had to be operated on for some malady, it was found
impossible to bring him under the influence of the anaesthetic. All
that could be done was to deprive him of his power of movement, in
which state he had to bear the dreadful pain of the operation.
Afterwards the surgeon asked him if he were a drug-taker, and he told
me that he answered:--
'Why, sir, I could have drunk all the lot you have been trying to give
me, without ever knowing the difference.'
In this condition, when he was such a wreck that he trembled from head
to foot and was contemplating suicide, he came into the hands of the
Army, and was sent down to the Hadleigh Farm.
Now comes the point of the story. At Hadleigh he 'got converted,' and
from that hour has never touched either drink or drugs. Moreover, he
assured me solemnly that he could go into a chemist's shop or a bar
with money in his pocket without feeling the slightest desire to
indulge in such stimulants. He said that after his conversion, he had
a 'terrible fight' with his old habits, the physical results of their
discontinuance being most painful. Subsequently, however, and by
degrees, the craving left him entirely, I asked him to what he
attributed this extraordinary cure. He replied:--
'To the power of God. If I trusted in my own strength I should
certainly fail, but the power of God keeps me from being overcome.'
Now these are only two out of a number of cases that I have seen
myself, in which a similar explanation of his cure has been given to
me by the person cured, and I would like to ask the unprejudiced and
open-minded reader how he explains them. Personally I cannot explain
them except upon an hypothesis which, as a practical person, I confess
I hesitate to adopt. I mean that of a direct interposition from above,
or of the working of something so unrecognized or so undefined in the
nature of man (which it will be remembered the old Egyptians, a very
wise people, divided into many component parts, whereof we have now
lost count), that it may be designated an innate superior power or
principle, brought into action by faith or 'suggestion.'
That these people who have been the slaves of, or possessed by certain
gross and palpable vices, of which drink is only one, are truly and
totally changed, there can be no question. To that I am able to bear
witness. The demoniacs of New Testament history cannot have been more
transformed; and I know of no stranger experience than to listen to
such men, as I have times and again, speaking of their past selves as
entities cast off and gone, and of their present selves as new
creatures. It is, indeed, one that throws a fresh light upon certain
difficult passages in the Epistles of St. Paul, and even upon the
darker sayings of the Master of mankind Himself. They do, in truth,
seem to have been 'born again.' But this is a line of thought that I
will not attempt to follow; it lies outside my sphere and the scope of
these pages.
After the Officer who used to consume four bottles of whisky a day,
and is now in charge of the Salvation Army work in Greenock, had left
the room, I propounded these problems to Lieut.-Colonel Jolliffe and
the Brigadier, as I had done previously to Commissioner Sturgess. I
pointed out that religious conversion seemed to me to be a spiritual
process, whereas the craving for drink or any other carnal
satisfaction was, or appeared to be, a physical weakness of the body.
Therefore, I did not understand how the spiritual conversion could
suddenly and permanently affect or remove the physical desire, unless
it were by the action of the phenomenon called miracle, which mankind
admits doubtfully to have been possible in the dim period of the birth
of a religion, but for the most part denies to be possible in these
latter days.
'Quite so,' answered the Colonel, calmly, in almost the same words
that Commissioner Sturgess had used, 'it _is_ miracle; that is our
belief. These men cannot change and purify themselves, their vices are
instantaneously, permanently, and miraculously removed by the power
and the Grace of God. This is the truth, and nothing more wonderful
can be conceived.'
Here, without further comment, I leave this deeply interesting matter
to the consideration of abler and better instructed persons than
myself.
To come to something more mundane, which also deserves consideration,
I was informed that in Glasgow, with a population of about 900,000,
there exists a floating class of 80,000 people, who live in
lodging-houses of the same sort as, and mostly inferior to the
Salvation Army Shelter of which I am now writing. In other words, out
of every twelve inhabitants of this great city, one is driven to that
method of obtaining a place to sleep in at night.
In this particular Refuge there is what is called a free shelter room,
where people are accommodated in winter who have not even the few
coppers necessary to pay for a bed. During the month before my visit,
which took place in the summer-time, the Brigadier had allotted free
beds in this room to destitute persons to the value of £13. I may add
that twice a week this particular place is washed with a carbolic
mixture!
THE ARDENSHAW WOMEN'S HOME
GLASGOW
I visited two of the Salvation Army's Women's Institutions in Glasgow.
The first of these was a Women's Rescue Home known as Ardenshaw. This
is a very good house, substantially built and well fitted up, that
before it was bought by the Army was the residence of a Glasgow
merchant. It has accommodation for thirty-six, and is always full. The
inmates are of all kinds, prison cases, preventive cases, fallen
cases, drink cases. The very worst of all these classes, however, are
not taken in here, but sent to the Refuge in High Street. Ardenshaw
resembles other Homes of the same sort that I have already dealt with
in various cities, so I need not describe it here.
Its Officers visit the prisons at Duke Street, Glasgow, Ayr, and
Greenock, and I saw a letter which had just arrived from the chaplain
of one of these jails, asking the Matron to interest herself in the
case of a girl coming up for trial, and to take her into a Home if she
were discharged as a first offender.
While I was eating some lunch in this house I noticed a young woman in
Salvation Army dress coming up the steps with a child of particularly
charming appearance. At my request she was brought into the room,
where I extracted from her a story which seems to be worth repeating
as an illustration of the spirit which animates so many members of the
Army.
The young woman herself had once been an invalid who was taken into
the Home and nursed till she recovered, after which she was sent to a
situation in a large town. Here she came in contact with a poor family
in which the mother is a drunkard and the father a respectable,
hardworking man, and took a great fancy to one of the children, the
little girl I have mentioned. This child, who is about five years of
age, it is her habit to supply with clothes and more or less to feed.
Unfortunately, however, when the mother is on the drink she pawns the
clothes which my Salvation Army friend is obliged to redeem, since if
she does not, little Bessie is left almost naked. Indeed, before
Bessie was brought away upon this particular visit her protectress had
to pay 14_s_. to recover her garments from the pawnshop, a
considerable sum out of a wage of about £18 a year.
I asked her why she did not take away this very fascinating child
altogether, and arrange for her to enter one of the Army Homes. She
answered because, although the mother would be glad enough to let her
go, the father, who is naturally fond of his children, objected.
'Of which the result may be,' remarked Lieut.-Colonel Jolliffe grimly,
'that about a dozen years hence that sweet little girl will become a
street-walking drunkard.'
'Not while I live,' broke in her foster-mother, indignantly.
This kind-hearted little woman told me she had been six years in
service as sole maid-of-all-work in a large house. I inquired whether
it was a hard place. She replied that it would be easier if her four
mistresses, who are sisters and old maiden ladies, did not all take
their meals at four different times, have four different teapots,
insist upon their washing being sent to four different laundries,
employ four different doctors, and sleep in four different rooms.
'However,' she added, 'it is not so difficult as it was as there used
to be five, but one has died. Also, they are kind to me in other ways
and about Bessie. They like me to come here for my holiday, as then
they know I shall return on the right day and at the right hour.'
When she had left the room, having in mind the capacities of the
average servant, and the outcry she is apt to make about her
particular 'work,' I said that it seemed strange that one young woman
could fulfil all these multifarious duties satisfactorily.