Sir,--The purpose of my previous letter about Mr. Booth's scheme was
to arouse the contributors to the military chest of the Salvation Army
to a clear sense of what they are doing. I thought it desirable that
they should be distinctly aware that they are setting up and endowing
a sect, in many ways analogous to the "Ranters" and "Revivalists" of
undesirable notoriety in former times; but with this immensely
important difference, that it possesses a strong, far-reaching,
centralized organization, the disposal of the physical, moral, and
financial strength of which rests with an irresponsible chief, who,
according to his own account, is assured of the blind obedience of
nearly 10,000 subordinates. I wish them to ask themselves, Ought
prudent men and good citizens to aid in the establishment of an
organization which, under sundry, by no means improbable,
contingencies, may easily become a worse and more [248] dangerous
nuisance than the mendicant friars of the middle ages? If this is an
academic question, I really do not know what questions deserve to be
called practical. As you divined, I purposely omitted any
consideration of the details of the Salvationist scheme, and of the
principles which animate those who work it, because I desired that the
public appreciation of the evils, necessarily inherent in all such
plans of despotic social and religious regimentation should not be
obscured by the raising of points of less comparative, however great
absolute, importance.
But it is now time to undertake a more particular criticism of
"Darkest England." At the outset of my examination of that work, I was
startled to find that Mr. Booth had put forward his scheme with an
almost incredibly imperfect knowledge of what had been done and is
doing in the same direction. A simple reader might well imagine that
the author of "Darkest England" posed as the Columbus, or at any rate
the Cortez, of that region. "Go to Mudie's," he tells us, and you
will be surprised to see how few books there are upon the social
problem. That may or may not be correct; but if Mr. Booth had gone to
a certain reading-room not far from Mudie's, I undertake to say that
the well-informed and obliging staff of the national library in
Bloomsbury would have provided him with more books on this topic, in
almost all European languages, than he would [249] read in three
months. Has socialism no literature? And what is socialism but an
incarnation of the social question? Moreover, I am persuaded that even
"Mudie's" resources could have furnished Mr. Booth with the "Life of
Lord Shaftesbury" and Carlyle's works. Mr. Booth seems to have
undertaken to instruct the world without having heard of "Past and
Present" or of "Latter-Day Pamphlets"; though, somewhat late in the
day, a judicious friend calls his attention to them. To those of my
contemporaries on whom, as on myself, Carlyle's writings on this topic
made an ineffaceable impression forty years ago, who know that, for
all that time, hundreds of able and devoted men, both clerical and
lay, have worked heart and soul for the permanent amendment of the
condition of the poor, Mr. Booth's "Go to Mudie's" affords an apt
measure of the depth of his preliminary studies. However, I am bound
to admit that these earlier labourers in the field laboured in such a
different fashion, that the originality of the plan started by Mr.
Booth remains largely unaffected. For them no drums have beat, no
trombones brayed; no sanctified buffoonery, after the model of the
oration of the Friar in Wallenstein's camp dear to the readers of
Schiller, has tickled the ears of the groundlings on their behalf.
Sadly behind the great age of rowdy self-advertisement in which their
lot has fallen, they seem not to have advanced one whit [250] beyond
John the Baptist and the Apostles, 1800 years ago, in their notions of
the way in which the metanoia, the change of mind of the ill-doer, is
to be brought about. Yet the new model was there, ready for the
imitation of those ancient savers of souls. The ranting and roaring
mystagogues of some of the most venerable of Greek and Syrian cults
also had their processions and banners, their fifes and cymbals and
holy chants, their hierarchy of officers to whom the art of making
collections was not wholly unknown; and who, as freely as their modern
imitators, promised an Elysian future to contributory converts. The
success of these antique Salvation armies was enormous. Simon Magus
was quite as notorious a personage, and probably had as strong a
following as Mr. Booth. Yet the Apostles, with their old-fashioned
ways, would not accept such a success as a satisfactory sign of the
Divine sanction, nor depart from their own methods of leading the way
to the higher life.
I deem it unessential to verify Mr. Booth's statistics. The exact
strength of the population of the realm of misery, be it one, two, or
three millions, has nothing to do with the efficacy of any means
proposed for the highly desirable end of reducing it to a minimum. The
sole question for consideration at present is whether the scheme,
keeping specially in view the spirit in which it is to be worked, is
likely to do more good than harm.
[251] Mr. Booth tells us, with commendable frankness, that "it is
primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the
salvation of the body" (p. 45), which language, being interpreted,
means that the propagation of the special Salvationist creed comes
first, and the promotion of the physical, intellectual, and purely
moral welfare of mankind second in his estimation. Men are to be made
sober and industrious, mainly, that, as washed, shorn, and docile
sheep, they may be driven into the narrow theological fold which Mr.
Booth patronizes. If they refuse to enter, for all their moral
cleanliness, they will have to take their place among the goats as
sinners, only less dirty than the rest.
I have been in the habit of thinking (and I believe the opinion is
largely shared by reasonable men) that self-respect and thrift are the
rungs of the ladder by which men may most surely climb out of the
slough of despond of want; and I have regarded them as perhaps the
most eminent of the practical virtues. That is not Mr. Booth's
opinion. For him they are mere varnished sins--nothing better than
"Pride re-baptised" (p. 46). Shutting his eyes to the necessary
consequences of the struggle for life, the existence of which he
accepts as fully as any Darwinian,* Mr. Booth tells men, whose evil
case is one of those consequences, that envy is a corner-stone of our
[252] competitive system. With thrift and self-respect denounced as
sin, with the suffering of starving men referred to the sins of the
capitalist, the gospel according to Mr. Booth may save souls, but it
will hardly save society.
* See p. 100
In estimating the social and political influence which the Salvation
Army is likely to exert, it is important to reflect that the officers
(pledged to blind obedience to their "General") are not to confine
themselves to the functions of mere deacons and catechists (though,
under a "General" like Cyril, Alexandria knew to her cost what even
they could effect); they are to be "tribunes of the people," who are
to act as their gratuitous legal advisers; and, when law is not
sufficiently effective, the whole force of the army is to obtain what
the said tribunes may conceive to be justice, by the practice of
ruthless intimidation. Society, says Mr. Booth, needs "mothering"; and
he sets forth, with much complacency, a variety of "cases," by which
we may estimate the sort of "mothering" to be expected at his parental
hands. Those who study the materials thus set before them will, I
think, be driven to the conclusion that the "mother" has already
proved herself a most unscrupulous meddler, even if she has not fallen
within reach of the arm of the law.
Consider this "case." A, asserting herself to have been seduced twice,
"applied to our people. We hunted up the man, followed him to the
country, [253] threatened him with public exposure, and forced from
him the payment to his victim of [Pounds] 60 down, an allowance of
[Pounds] 1 a week, and an insurance policy on his life for [Pounds]
450 in her favour" (p. 222) .
Jedburgh justice this. We "constitute ourselves prosecutor, judge,
jury, sheriff's officer, all in one;" we "practice intimidation as
deftly as if we were a branch of another League; and, under threat of
exposure," we "extort a tolerably heavy hush-money in payment of our
silence. "
Well, really, my poor moral sense is unable to distinguish these
remarkable proceedings of the new popular tribunate from what, in
French, is called chantage and, in plain English, blackmailing. And
when we consider that anybody, for any reason of jealousy, or personal
spite, or party hatred, might be thus "hunted," "followed,"
"threatened," and financially squeezed or ruined, without a particle
of legal investigation, at the will of a man whom the familiar charged
with the inquisitorial business dare not hesitate to obey, surely it
is not unreasonable to ask how far does the Salvation Army, in its
"tribune of the people" aspect, differ from a Sicilian Mafia? I am no
apologist of men guilty of the acts charged against the person who
yet, I think, might be as fairly called a "victim," in this case, as
his partner in wrong-doing. It is possible that, in so peculiar a
case, Solomon himself might have been puzzled [254] to apportion the
relative moral delinquency of the parties. However that may be, the
man was morally and legally bound to support his child, and any one
would have been justified in helping the woman to her legal rights,
and the man to the legal consequences (in which exposure is included)
of his fault.
The action of the "General" of the Salvation Army in extorting the
heavy fine he chose to impose as the price of his silence, however
excellent his motives, appears to me to be as immoral as, I hope, it
is illegal.
So much for the Salvation Army as a teacher of questionable ethics and
of eccentric economics, as the legal adviser who recommends and
practices the extraction of money by intimidation, as the fairy
godmother who proposes to "mother" society, in a fashion which is not
to my taste, however much it may commend itself to some of Mr. Booth's
supporters.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
T. H. Huxley.
[255]