GENERAL BOOTH'S PROPOSAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 15, 9 January 1891, Page 17

GENERAL BOOTH'S PROPOSAL.

have referred elsewhere to the condemnation made in certain quarters of General Booth's proposal to supplement the measures he recommends as an adequate scheme of relief for the misery that abounds in England by forming special settlements in tbese colonies. It would seem that the spirit of brotherhood existing among us, and of which we sometimes hear a good d?al spoken, is, after all, somewhat exclusive and narrow in its sympathies. The General's appeal is one, nevertheless, that has no ordinary claims on everyone boasting his connection with English associations, and one indeed which right-minded men of every country must treat with due consideration. General Booth's book reveals a state of things as alarming as it is piteous and terrible. There are, he tells us, some three millions of people, or about one-tenth of the population of Great Britain, who are only able to live even for a single week by the aid they receive from charity of one kind or another, or from the proceeds of crime and vice. "To many," he says, " the world is all slum, with the workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the grave." — The unfortunate j people General Booth regards as, in their present condition, beyond the reach of hope. With the General in his character of a religious leader we necessarily have nothing to do. It is as a social reformer we are interested in him. But we can understand the view he takes of the state of things referred to : " What ia the use," be asks, "of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention ia concentrated upon a mad desperate struggle to keep themselves alive f Ton might as well giva ati act to a shipwrecked sal or who is battling with the surf which has drowned his coarades, and threatens to drown him. He will not listen to you. Nay, he cannot hear you any more than a man whose head is under water can bear a sermon. The first thing to ao is to get him at least a footing on firm ground, and to give him room to live. Then you may have a chance. At present you hare none. And you will have tbe better opportunity to find a way to bis heart, if be comes to know it was yon who pulled him oat of tbe horrible pit and miry clay in which he was sinking to perdition." As things are, moreover, the evil, instead of diminishing, is on the way to increase. The very measure on which the firmest reliance as remedial in its nature and tending to promote the national prosperity has been placed, seems, on the contrary, a force of an opposite kind : " It will be said," writes the General, " the child of to-day ba9 the inestimable advantage of education. No, he has not. Educated the children are not. They are pressed through ' standards,' which exact a certain acquaintance with ABU and pothooks and figures, bnt educated they are not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life. The new generation can read, no doubt. Otherwise where would be the sale of ' Sixteen String Jack, 1 ' Dick Turpin,' and the like. But take tbe girls. Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their grandmothers were at the same age ? . . And even tbe schooling, such as it is, at what ao expense is it often imparted 1 Tbe rakings of tbe human cesspool are brought into the schoolroom and mixed up with your children. Your little ones, who never heard a foul word, and who are not only innocent, but ignorant, of all the horrors of vice and sin, sit for houra side by side with little ones whose parents are habitually drank, end play with others whose idea of merriment are gained from tbe familiar spectacle of the sightly debauch by which their mothers earn their bread, It is good, no doubt, to learn tbe ABC, but it in not so good that in acquiring these indispensable rudiments yonr children should also acquire the vocabulary of the harlot and the corner-boy. I speak only of what I know, and of that which has been brought home to me as a matter of repeated complaint by my officers, when I aay that the obseeoity of the talk of many of the children of some cf our public scbo'ls could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrha. Childish innocence is very beautiful ; but the bloom is soon destroyed, and it is a cruel awakening for a mother to discover that her tenderlynurtared boy, or her carefully-guarded daughter, has been initiated by a compan on into tbe mysteries of abomination." Piteous and terrible, then, as we have said, is the condition of things already existing, — and the prospect that it must increase and grow, rather than suffer a check, is alarming in the extreme. When the colonies, therefore, are appealed to to take their part in measures proposed to remedy this fcarrible state of things, to rescue these people condemned to a world that is all slum — with the workhouse for their earthly purgatory, — shall we gather up our garments tight about us and exclaim against the defiling contact ? Rest assured that, with the Old Country already in such a condition and growing worse from day to day, we must suffer defilement whether we will or not, and even our own per-

sonal interests call on us to give all the aid we can in carrying oat a remedy. Besides, it is not proposed to tarn loose apon as a mob of criminals nnreformed and untried. General Booth's plan is to test bis emigrants. They would come to him first as casual inmates of a city depot, where, if found suitable, they would be draughted to a Faun Colony in tbe country, and, finally, having been fully proved and trained, they would be sent to the settlements beyond the seas. We have said that with General Booth as a religious leader we have nothing to do. We have no expectation, in short, respecting the sect founded by him but that it moat suffer the fate of all the sects that have preceded it and separate into divisions — mo re or less grotesque. As a social reformer, nevertheless, the General seems to us to hare practical notions and talents of considerable value, and it would be a waste of qualities sadly wanted and not often forthcoming, were he not to be given a fair field for their exercise. — It is to be hoped the colonies will not gain the evil distinction of repelling the General's proposal, through any nervous and groundless fear of defilement, or without a due and favourable consideration of it.