SECOND EDITION. SALVATION ARMY HEAD

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16837, 28 December 1928, Page 8

SECOND EDITION. SALVATION ARMY HEAD

BOOTH ERA ENDING? COUNCIL'S POWERS LONDON, Doe. 18. The Salvation Army "High Council" of 64 members will meet at Sun-bury-ou-Thames, according to the Daily News, on January 8, to decide whether General B'ramwell Booth will continue in sole control of the organisation. Prior to the meeting a sub-committee will consider medical reports concerning the general's condition. The council will appoint a successor if there is a three-fourths majority ,on a ballot for General Booth's removal. The decision may involve the end of the Booth era and the whole future of the Salvation Army. The AvcA poll under which the council acts is a legal masterpiece, in which lawyers cannot find a loophole. It provides for the general's removal if a tribunal of commissioners adjudicate 11iiii mentally unfit, find him guilty of notorious misconduct, or adjudicate him unlit, through ill-health, to continue in office. The forthcoming proceedings ere based on the third clause. The council has not the power to reconstitute the Army, hut can indirectly compel the now general to take certain steps. It can, for instance, appoint: a general for a limited number of years, thus controlling him. The general, by a deed executed by consent of two-thirds of the commissioners, may alter or revoke the deed poll, enabling him to reconstitute the Army organisation. Since the Trustee Act was passed in 1926, General Booth c.aiinoi delegate to others the overwhelming task of signing legal documents, but must sign them, himself, unless he leaves the country for a month. The machinery for a general's election resembles that for tin? election of a Pope, on which it was modelled, the names' of candidates —not .necessarily members of the council —being submitted until one secures a two-thirds majority.