GENERAL BOOTH.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 18 September 1912, Page 3

GENERAL BOOTH.

The great force known as " General Booth" has, disappeared, leaving a void which may never be filled. Certainly if it is to be well filled it will be by a man of different calibre. Nature does not make Booths in quantities any more than she makes Napoleons. This was one of the greatest men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Non-Conformist parson, without much credit with his own denomination, poor as the proverbial church mouse, with a boundless ambition to benefit the poorest of God's creatures, who though without a single aid of any sort, achieved by the sheer strength of his personality, results only short of miraculous. It was ; not only that he moved the hearts : of men to generous support of charity, it was not only that he touched them to the sincerity of permanent resentance, it was not only that he devised the best methods extant of refuging lost womanhood —all these things he did better than nine hundred of overy thousand of the saints of history ; but in addition he founded a religious order which is not r^jf the world yet keeps in the ■-vvorld always to its vast benefit, based it on a personal hierarchy, and endowed it with a system of prudential expert management which makes the most of the monies and resources it exacts from the public by its splendid achievements. This beginner in the slums working among the poorest of men established a force in the world instinct with apostolic life, zealous beyond description, methodical in its charities, comprehensive in its scope, weilding the power of a splendid, well directed finance, making the children of men better, braver, happier from day to day, and destined so to do " till the last syllable of recorded time." And all this was practically the work of one man. He began alone, he added follower to follower, he infused into each the greatness of his own animating spirit, he fought off ridicule, he lived down misrepresentation, he triumphed over pride and timidity alike, he gave the world a revelation of the lot of the poor and the right way to alleviate their misery in a world anxious and able to throw up its hat for such results. Had the world at large taken him as those did who implicitly trusted him, he would have swept poverty out of the British Isles root and branch. Where mankind, out of its experience, thought the problem of reclamation impossible, he made citizens in thousands. Had he obtained the help he required in all its completeness, the submerged tenth he discovered and classified and did so much for would have been now a thing of history. He only got thousands where lie expected millions. But we wonder at the marvellous results. Had he got the millions mispent from the day of their inception by the poor houses and the Bumbles, there would have been teeming, industry and prosperous families in the place of the useless unfortunate products of the workhouse. The money remained in the workhouse channel and there is pauperism where there ought to be human happiness. The life of General Booth is not only the history of one of the greatest men who ever came on the earth, it is also the history of a tremendous lost opportunity. We can only hope the Booth tradition in the hands of the sqn may succeed where the father failed. It was, of course, the personal element of the General that kept together that wonderful institution of his creation, and it is the personal element in his son or some other at the head of the great centre of the Army on which that organisation must largely depend. If the second-general who starts where the first ended and is in possession of the vast potentiality the first collected, shows any of the combination of qualities possessed by the first, the basis he stands on for the pursuing of his enterprises is a guarantee for a development such as the world has never yet begun to dream about. Its work will be to clean the Augean Stable swept by the new ideas of the time, and raise those asphyxiated by its miasma back to self respect and productive dignity. It is the mission of the Army to restore man to the image and likeness of his Maker in a surrounding of faith, hope, and charity combined in the simple life. All men, we feel sure, wish it every success.