A GREAT HUMANITARIAN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8982, 16 November 1907, Page 4

A GREAT HUMANITARIAN.

That wonderful philanthropist and social organiser, General Booth, compares with the late Mr Gladstone for persistent and untiring work. He is now very far advanced in agein his 73rd year —and has long passed the stage of life when most men seek retirement from worldly activities, and find happiness or the reverse in their reminiscent reflections. En* General Booth apparently has no intention of stopping in his great work of ameliorating the lot of the "submerged tenth," and of raising humanity generally, so long as an atom of physical and mental virility is loft to him. The cables are constantly recording his rapid progresses through European and American countries, and giving publicity to schemes of great magnitude which he is ever devising. One week we find him closeted with an Emperor bent upon wrenching by his persuasive eloquence some concession on behalf of the poor and down-trodden. Next he is in London negotiating for homes, for the homeless,, shipping out men and women bested in the struggle for existence in their "native England'"' to new and brighter and more hopeful lands beyond the cliffs of Albion. Then we hear of him from Canada planning the settlement of thousands of England's surplus population in that attractive country. This week tha cables from London informed; us that "General Booth announces that there will shortly be realised the greatest colonisation scheme srnce the days ,of Moses. There is,, he says,, room in South Africa for all! Britons unemployed, and he intends planting them there.",

Land colonisation schemes such as those mentioned do not absorb the whole of this great man's attention. He finds time to think out great ideas for ultimately bringing about, if even in a modified'form, "the brotherhood of man." In New Brunswick, Canada, lately, addressing at meeting of the Canadian Club, he stated that he had a scheme in hand for the establishment of what for want of a better name he would call a "University of Humanity." "There were," he said "colleges of all kinds in existence for the higher but he wanted a university for men and women to deal with broken hearts, and to teach people how to reclaim the criminal and the drunkard, and to rescue the children of the daughters of shame and all miserable creatures ©£ the human race." His idea is .to have two head institutions, one on either side of the Atlantic, with affiliated colleges in every land, where students would be taught how to alleviate the miseries of the people. He is appealing to the millionaires.to help with money. Whether it is possible to give effect to a scheme so. vast and so full ot obstacles —possibly the greatest of which is to get human nature to help itself —the very suggestion of so high, a humanitarian aim is calculated to make the world better. Earlier schemes of vast magnitude were upon their inception described as Utopian, but many of them have been or are being carried out with success;: and who shall say what is not possible when great and good men actuated by singleness of purpose, jbacked by dogged determination and conspicuous ability set their minds uoon achievement?