GENERAL BOOTHS BOOK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8472, 24 January 1891, Page 1 (Supplement)

GENERAL BOOTHS BOOK.

No. 111.

In Darkest England, and the Way Out.

By General Booth: Salvation Army Depot, London. The most important and the most novel part of General Booth's scheme is the Farm Colony. After receiving the utterly destitute in the labour shops in towns, and established labour bureaus all over the country, by which the employers and the people out of work are to be brought into communication, and after some period of novitiate in the shelter homes in the towns, the persons are tranferred to the farm colonies in the country. Here they are employed, nob merely in agricultural work proper, bub in all kinds of work that can be done in the open air, and without the aid of machinery. Of machinery General Booth has a wholesome horror, and purposes to use it as little as possible. There is no doubt that with cheap labour, and that General Booth will have, numbers of farms at present uncultivated, can bo workad with success. As he Bays :—"Talk about the land not being worth cultivating ! Go to the Swiss valleys and examine for yourselves the miserable patches of land, hewed out as it were from the heart of the granite [?] mountains, where the cottager grows his crops and makes a livelihood. . . . If it pays the Swiss mountainer, in the midst of the eternals snows, far removed for any market, to cultivate such miserable soil in the brief summer of the high Alps, it is impossible to believe that Englishmen, working on English soil, close to our markets, and enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, cannot earn their daily" bread by their daily toil. The soil of England is nob unkindly, and though much is said against our climate, it is, as Mr. Russell Lowell observes, after a lengthened experience of many countries and many climes, ' the best climate in the whole world for the labouring man.' " Mr. Russell Jewell, we believe, had had no experience of New Zealand when he made his observation.

There can be little doubt; that a system of farming such as General Booth purposes, carried on in conjunction with other trapes, making the establishments in effect, veritable colonies, all but self-sufficing, would be self-supporting. With proper regulations carried out with a firm hand and unswerving regularity, it is impossible to suppose that they cannot produce such a superfluity as, when sold to outsiders, will suffice to procure them whatever is absolutely necessary, which the farm itself does not produce. General Booth argues very justly that if farmers in America and Australia can produce grain, and sell it at a profit in England, surely Englishmen can do the same, when they are in the midst of the most thickly populated country in Europe. But there is one weak point in all these schemes to which, as ib seems bo us, General Booth has nob devoted sufficient attention. All his plans proceed on the assumption that moral force will be sufficient to procure obedience from tho people who are to occupy his establishments. He does not expect bo " convert" them all, he does not mean (as we have before mentioned,) bo subject them to the rigorous discipline of the Salvation soldiers, unless they become soldiers. But he expects prompt and implicit obedience. It is rather amusing in this democratic aee to find a plan of social reform based on a despotism of the patriarchal type. Bub there is no doubt that General Booth is right. Nothing bub an absolute despotism would have tho smallest chance of success. These people are neither in physical nor mental health. Their minds are diseased as 'well as their bodies. They have no will power, when ib comes to resisting temptation. '' lam labouring," ho says, " under no delusions as to the possibility of inaugurating the millennium by any social specific. In the struggle of lifo the weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest, in tooth and claw, will survive. All that we can do is to soften the lot of the unfit, and make their suffering less horrible than it is at. present. Wo amount of assistance will <jlvc a jelly-fish a backbone. No outside propping will make some men stand erect. All material help from without is useful only in so far as it develops moral strength within. And some, men seem to have lost even the very faculty of self-help. There is an immense lack of common-sense and of vital energy on the part of the multitude."

But besides those there are others who have will power to a certain extent, and for the gratification of their own sensual appetites. There are others who seem to have the nomadic instincts of some of the primitive races strongly developed; who can stop in no place long together ; who work only by fits and starts ; who are thus incompetent to fill posts for which they have abundant natural ability, because they never persevere long enough in one kind of work to become really skilled workmen. There are dipsomaniacs, and even kleptomaniacs. What does Mr. Booth propose to do with these classes, who would soon get tired of the regular, respectable, sober life of one of his colonies ? He seems to have no other remedy than turning them adrift again. And then the whole problem has to be solved again. For the majority of the persons whom lie proposes to benefit are mon and women of these classes, or worse. It may not be their fault ; to a very large extent it is not their fault, but the fault of the society into which they have been born. But there they are—or rather, we may sayhere they are, too. We have them in this young country, where there ought to be no such tiling as want, except as the result of some bodily accident or rare illness. What is to be done with them ? Out of thorn, if not of them, come the large proportion of the detected criminals. It is obvious that if such persons as these are to be allowed the ordinary privileges of British subjects, and can, whenever an unpleasant order is given, or a disagreeable mutter of discipline enforced, walk out of the establishment, we should have all the evils recommencing. And yet short of making the establishments virtually prisons, how can this be prevented ? Will the British Legislature consent to give General Booth and his subordinates power to detain disobedient inmates and to punish them? If not, no discipline can be enforced but by expulsion. With regard to those whom he calls " moral lunatics." General Booth proposes the very drastic, but very efficacious measure of imprisonment for life. Moral lunatics are defined to be those who after being afforded every chance to reform, after being forgiven again and again, " relapse and relapse until you have no strength left to pull him out once more. ... A residuum of men and women who have, whether from heredity or custom, or hopeless demoralisation, become reprobates. After a certain time, some men of science hold that persistence in habits tends to convert a man from a being with freedom of action and will into a mere automaton. There are some cases within our knowledge which seem to confirm the somewhat dreadful verdict by which a man appears to be a lost soul on this side of the grave. " There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work ; some so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveberately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. 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, morallv demented, incapable of self-gOTern-ment, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent exclusionfrom a world in which he is not Jit to be at large. The ultimate destiny of these poor wretches should be a penal settlement where they could be ;confined during Her Majesty's pleasure, aa are the criminal iuna-

tics at Broadmoor. I* is a crime

against the race to allow those who are so inveterably depraved the freedom to wander abroad, infect their fellows, prey upon society, and to multiply their kind. Whatever else society may do, and suffer to be done, this thing it ought not to allow, any more than the free perambulation of a mad dog. . . . " Between them and the wide world there should be reared an impassable barrier, which once passed should be recrossed no more for ever. Such a course must be wiser than allowing them to go in and out among their fellows, carrying with them the contagion of moral leprosy, and multiplying a progeny doomed before its birth to inherit the vices and diseased cravings of their unhappy parents." Pp. '204, 205. We have given this nearly full quotation, because it seems to us to stamp .General Booth as a social reformer of the very highest order. We know of no other instance in which any man who has set up as a moral teacher and reformer, has frankly acknowledged that there are human beings on whom all moral forces are thrown away, and who must be, dealt with as if they were wild or venomous beasts. This passage alone, supported as it is by facts and arguments which we have not space to quote, would make it worth the while of any man who has the welfare of his kind at heart, to purchase and read the book. But here again, it is obvious that fresh legislation, and that of a very drastic kind, is required betore these moral lunatics can can be dealt with effectually. However, it is clear that General Booth does not mean to retain them in his establishments, much less to send them to the colonies.

As branches or outcomes of the farm colonies in Britain the general purposes to effect settlements in the colonies, firstly it would appear in Africa. The persons he proposes to send will be the best, and not the worst members of the farm colonies ; those who by good conduct, ability, and physical strength are best capable of repaying the outlay that will have to be incurred in settling them in "the colonies beyond the sea." "To the colony over sea we should send none but those who have had a long period of training in this country" (p. 265). As this is the part of the book which will have the most immediate interest for us in in New Zealand, we need not apologise for the following long extract, which contains the pith of General Booth's scheme:—

SECTION I.—THE COLONY AND THE COLONISTS.

Before any decision is arrived at, however, information will be obtained as to the position and character of the land; the accessibility of markets for commodities ; communication with Europe, and other necessary particulars. « The next business would be to obtain on grant, or otherwise, a sufficient tract of suitable country for the purpose of a colony, on conditions that would meet its present and future character.

After obtaining a title to the country, the next business will be to effect a settlement in it. This, I suppose, will be accomplished by sending a competent body of men under skilled supervision to fix on a suitable location for the first settlement, erecting such buildings as would be required, enclosing and breaking up the land, putting in first crops, and so storing sufficient supplies of food for the future.

Then a supply of colonists would be sent out to join them, and from time to time other detachments, as the colony was prepared to receive them. Further locations could then be chosen, and more country brakes up, and before a very long period has passed the colony would be capable of receiving and absorbing a continuous stream of emigration of considerable proportions. The next work would be the establishment of a strong and efficient government, prepared to carry out and enforce the same laws and discipline to which the colonists had been accustomed in England, together with such alterations and additions as the new circumstances would render necessary. The colonists would become responsible for all that concerned their own support; that is to say, they would buy and sell, engage in trade, hire servants, and transact all the ordinary business affairs of every-day life.

■ Our headquarters iu England would represent the colony in this country on their behalf, and with money supplied by them, when once fairly established, would buy for their agents what they were at the outset unable to produce themselves, such as machinery and the like, also selling their produce to the best advantage. All land, timber, minerals, and the like would be rented to the colonists, all unearned increments, and improvements on the land, would be hold on behalf of the entire community, and utilsed for its general advantages, a certain percentage being set apart for the extension of its borders, and the continued transmisssion of colonises from England in increasing numbers. Arrangements would be made for the temporary accommodation of new arrivals, officers being maintained for the purpose of taking them in hand on landing and directing and controlling them generally. So far as possible, they would be introduced to work without any waste of time, situations being ready for them to enter upon ; and any way, their wants would be supplied till this was the case. There would be friends who would welcome and care for them, not merely on the principle of profit and loss, but on the ground of friendship and religion, many ot whom the emigrants would probably have known before in the old country, together with all the social influences, restraints, and religious enjoyments to which the colonists have been accustomed. After dealing with the preparation of the colony for the colonists, we now come to the preparation of the COLONISTS FOR THE COLONY OVEE-SEA. They would be prepared by an education in honesty, truth, and industry, without which we could not indulge in any hope of their succeeding. While men and women would be received into the city colony without character, none would be sent over the sea who had not been proved worthy of this trust. They would be inspired with an ambition to do well for themselves and their fellowcolonists. They would be instructed in all that concerned their future career. They would be taught those industries in which they would be most profitably employed. They would be inured to the hardships they would have to endure. They would be accustomed to the economies they would have to practice. They would be made acquainted with the comrades with whom they would have to live and labour.

They would be accustomed to the government, orders, and regulations which they would have to obey. They would be educated, so far as the opportunity served, in those habits _of patience, forbearance, and affection which would so largely tend to their own welfare, and to the successful carrying out of this part of our scheme.

We have nob space for comments on this part of the scheme, which will probably be dealt with in another part of the Herald. Nor can we do more than refer our readers to this most interesting work for details of various subsidiary plans for dealing with prisoners, fallen women, etc. But as we said at first too much depends on General Booth's powerful individuality. As long a3 he is ab the head of the movement, and retains his bodily and mental vigour, it would probably, in some of its branches at all events, be a success. He has managed to secure the obedience of his Army. He is more powerful with his adherents than any other leader, except, perhaps, Mahomet. "The first condition of that service (the Salvation Army) is implicit, unquestioning obedience. The Salvationist is taught to obey as is the soldier on the field of battle." This is exactly the principle on which the order of Jesuits is founded, and it has been attended in both cases with astonishing success. General Booth says : —" There cannob bo a greater mistake in this world than to imagine that men object to be governed. They like to be governed, provided that the governor has his head " screwed on right," and that he is prompt to hear and ready to see and recognise all chat is vital to the interests of the commonwealth. . . . Against a capable Government no people ever rebel." At any rate they must obey in " the Army." There is no " counting of noses " there ; •* the Farm Colony will be governed, like all the other departments of the scheme, not on the principle of the counting of noses, but on the exactly opposite principle of admitting no noses into the concern that are not willing to be guided by the directing brain. It will be managed on principles which assert that the fittest ought to rule, and it will provide for the fittest being elected, and having gob them to the top, will, insist on universal and unquestioning obedience from those at the bottom." (P. 232.) With these words, that sound strange nowadays, we must conclude our notice of the most fascinating, and perhaps the most important, book that has been published in England during the present century.