GENERA.L BOOTH'S SCHEME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 18, 30 January 1891, Page 11

GENERA.L BOOTH'S SCHEME.

(By William Babhy, D.D., in the Liverpool Catholic Times.) Modern life is a strange medley. Every ten yeara about, the financial worl iis shaken to its centre by a crash or a crisis. " Spiculatioa,' that is to Bay, thegamblingof high and mighty commercial potentates like Overend and Guraey, or Baring Brothers, defeats Use' f by grasping at too much and falls shattered with a tremendous noise and universal uproar. There is an earthquake in Wall street followed by tidal waves on the Bourses of European capitals. And, as a rule, thousands of private families are ruined. Turough such a crisis the mon j market h«.a just been passing. Only by the iotervent.on of the Bank of England, the Bink of France, and of millionaires, trembling for their salvation, has it escaped a catastrophe. But.ia violent contrast to the rich man's screams, every three or four years a cry rises out of the depths, the cry of social misery from Outcast London, Horrible Glasgow, Disinherited Liverpool — and now from darkest England — keeping anything but musical time with the agonised shrieking of stockbrokers to the world above. De profundis olamavi. Out of tbedepths,indeed! The smoke of our huge cities darkens tbe sky. The brooding horror which lies upon them is a disolaton to think of. Gambling thousands, and disowned and trampled millions, utter their various laments in this astoms .ing Pandemonium which goes by the name of modern civilisation ; and the gambling and the pauperism are of a piece ; they belong to one system of money-making. The Bink of England hastens to the rescue of Baring Brothers ; it nervously undertakes to meet the next coupon of th^ Argentine Bmda. And here is " General " Booth, of the Salvation Army, raising the cry of the disinherited once more, asking what can be done with our 11 submerged tenth," how we are going to deliver the three millions of the residuum out of the social hell into which they have fallen, and whether we will not give him a hundred thousand pounds to make a beginning. Well, I have no doubt he will get his hundred thousand pounds. He deserves them. General Booth, I allow, is a fanatic. He preaches an hysterical religion. He indulges in fantastic and repulsive ritual. He drags the New Testament in the mire. The chanting and drumming of his battalions have made day and night hideous this weary while. But still, in spite of these and a hundred more objections, I hope he will get the money he asks for and be encouraged to make his experiment. Ido not say that Catholics ought to swell his subscription lists. My impression is that there are serious difficulties in the way of our giving him much beyond good wishes and occasional co-opera-tion under circumstances which may allow of it. General Booth is honest and straightforward. He undertakes to keep his schema separate from the proselytising workof the Salvatioa Army ; and we may be sure that he will try, both because he Las promised and because the eyes of the world will be upon him. Try 1 Yes, I grant he will. But succeed 1 Of that I am doubtful. At the head of a great religious order, with officers and men devoted to their General and completely under his command, all convinced that theirs is the only way of salvation, can we reasonably expect that he will obsjrve a self-denying ordinance which would amount to throwing away the best chance he is ever likely to have of making converts and followers ? He asks,with a bold confidence in his own powers,that the army of tramps, beggars, thieves, drunkards, and starviug wretches all over England may be surrendered into his hands. There is no department of social want and suffering that he is not prepared to take over, if the public will fiud him the money and leave him the rest of the trouble. But among the thieves, tramps, beggars, harlots, and outcasts are many thousands of baptised Catholics, and I say that we neither can nor ouiht io hand them over to General Booth. They belong to ae. They are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. We may be ashamed of them, but we cannot let a stranger do the work which we, and not aoy stranger, ought to be doing. General Booth will cot s >lye the social problem. With a practical sense which speaks well for the success of what he has undertaken to do, he assures us that he will give a wide berth to questions of labour and capital, trades-unions, strikes, monopolies, competition, and all other matters of debate between the producers and the owners of wealth. He is really proposing, but on a gigantic scale, to fulfil the task which the Charity Organisation Society was intended to perform, and which it has allowed to drop from its benumbed fingers. He will deal only with the "reßiduum." At Bradford, in the midst of enthusiastic meetiogs, he was asked, very pertinently now he proposed, when he h3d filled up one ditch, to prevent another from being dug. Relieve and raise all the paupers in the kingdom, but leave the conditions unaltered which go to the making of paupers, and when you have finished your day's work, another a* hard and as hopeless will be waiting for you. Cut off the source, and you may empty the river ; but let the spring keep running and all the baling out in the world will not dry it up. General Booth seems to hold that it is poverty which breeds poverty, and that crime is the daughter of crime. But how, let us ask, if it were the present organisation of labour and capital which bred poverty 1 Suppose crime ware the outcome of nn-Ohnstian, nay, of anti-Christian social conditions all the way up from ihe East end to South Kensington 1 What if drunkenness were not only the cause of widespread growing misery, as it plainly io, but also the sign, the necessary effect indeed, of that real enslavement of the workers which has followed on takemg from them the land they cultivate the houses they do not own, but merely pay rent for the leaseholders, and the means of amusement and recreation now possessed chiefly, if not exclusively, by the upper classes? I recognise General Booth's earnestness. I am sure that he could not attempt the Radical solution of this problem without drawing down attacks on himself from every vested interest in England. On his present track, he will persuade them, as I said, to give him a hundred thousand pounds, as " ransom " for the immense aggregate of capital with which he does not pretend to meddle. — Ami all ransom is worth having. But while he is drawing the multitudes out of the ditch other multitudes will be falling iv. And though ho does not wish for a moment to increase the competition

among producers which tends to bring down wages to starvationpoint, ,i is oi. ar that when another 1 wo or three millions are producing commodities for a »)e, ibe same (fleets will follow which we bhould anticipate fiom an immigration into this country of an equal number of abl.-bodieri workmen. Now, I say, while labour and capital continue to be employed under the present system of free contract, can we suppose that the Kngh.h work.ng dawn wo H M I( , ok npo n «uch an immigration as a stroke of luck for them ? There are rocks ahead. General Booth has been forewarned. So has the public. If both are forearmed, so much the better. Iv any case, it will reauire miraculous piloting to steer between the Scylla of paupensation and the Chary bdis of over-competition. But the trial ought to be made. I quite agree. There is scandalous waste of good material in the workoouses. On tha Dutch plan of ''beggar colonies," described by the Rev, Mr. Mills, these could be made self-supporting. Prisons are schools of vice. A first sentence leads to a second by a regular system of training as things are now arranged. The discharged prisoner has often no resource but to commit himaelf again, and get committed if he would not starve The horrible story of fallen girls, of their temptations, the actual slavery in which they live and exercise their calling, for their forlorn and pitiable case when they look for a door of escape, is in the language cf Mr. Armstrong, the "deadly shame," not of Liverpool only, but of many another " city ot dreadful nigh. It demands the attention of such a vigilance committee as we have hardly yet be^n fortunate enough to ootain anywhere. The rum of children condemned by tntir very innocence and helplessness to be made thieves and gaol-birds, vagabonds, night wanderers, savages and heathens of the darkest dye. goes on without pause, without hindrance, except where the Criminal Law Amendment Act and similar measuns are enforced by voluntary effort. The protection of these little ones whose angels behold the face of their Father in Heaven but cannot save them unless men and women lend their help, has by no means reached the point which was long ago attained by the prevention of cruelty to animals. Poor children ? They are not animals and they fetch a price only in the market of thieves and prostitutes' If they were dogs or horses, they would be carefully tended, watched over, trained to useful work. But no small number of Christian ladi c 8 and so-called gentlemen spend as much money for their own amusement on the aforesaid dogs and horses as would rescue thousands of children from degradation. Ihe cry goes up to Heaven of those who are bought and soil by men devils and by womendevila in the open empujiumof vice as fuely as meat is sold m the shamble?. To Heaven it asct nds, bin it cannot make iis way into the drawing rooms of these idle rich ladies, or to the luxuri msly-fitted clubs of the men who could not live w.thout Tartereall'H «nd Newmarket I have known Catholics in this clas— people who went to Mass on bundays hnd had a prayer-book as well as a betting-book, or wbo combined chanty with fishicn as if both were sacraments of the secular state. And the whole has reminded me of averse of Scripture — Jbat seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. No certainly they do not understand But >et tbe cry of the children has entered iuto the cais of ibeLoid of Husts. Of that we may rest assuied. Tbe unemployed, th.- Bhelteiless. the ciimmal, the deutitu'e — men and wunun, and the children of both sexes-Gen, rai Bo th will admit them all into his harb ur of refu X . . Iv God's nam, , I repeat let him try. For my part, I had rather they all became .Salvationists fu v V r (lutr(lctln S drum music s«.ve"n d.us a wetk, than s c them heathen as so many „f thtm are, m rags and nmerv, drunken feckless, abandoned cf mankind-made the devouring cancer winch is to break down, poison, and dts'.oy the body politic. " Take ih.-m from their surroundings, put them under discipl ne tenc . th, m how towork.dmcttb.Tnsothfittbuv shall build homes for th. rasehe. live on the Und and by means of it, and when they are unable to get a subsistence in Kupl.ir.ri. lead them to a colony where ih.-y may e^n all th.y need and txun.i the empire of eivilmiuM.,' 1 sajs G^eral Booth. By all means. It is tue only plan Ami though .-tr era L ad been attending it piecemeal, and the charitable association* are doing a me-sure of sound work, therein every reason why a conn, cted scheme of this aort Hbould be set m motion, by any man who .s capable of execu'ing what he attempts. He will begin with . netenth of the thiee millions, the Gem ral declares. There will remain then, niin.-entbs for others to put into order, train, educate, discipline and moralise. It is not enough to clmng.- the su. rounding* Th.' character mus' be changed. And. again, General Booth tells in m his Bradford speech, that he knows no way of charging thecharac'ei but by his ■Salvdiionism. 1 We cannot blame him for think, n- so But how it we do iot agree with him? Tie answer h- makes is veiv simple "If you will no. help me," he replies in t ffect, "at kast do not hinder me. And see whether you can do an thing yourselves " it seems to me that he could not answer moie n-*Bouab y