too critical an examination of their weapons. While it is a striking proof of the liberality of the age that so many of our most prominent religious leaders, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning downwards, have expressed sympathy with General Booth's aims, we can readily understand that the Church and even dissenting bodies feel compelled to maintain a certain amount of reserve. The Church especially, naturally enough feels that General Booth's position implies a deficiency in its own exertions, and a consequent reproach. We do not so consider it. What ever blame attaches to the Church rests upon the past-upon the last century especially, and upon a considerable portion of this. Had the Church then done her duty, while destitution in our great cities could still be grappled with, she might have been able to do much to stem the tide of poverty and Ivice; but the time was allowed to pass until a "Darkest London" had sprung up far beyond the powers of either the Church or the poor-laws to deal with. During the last forty years she has been making zealous efforts to amend her fault, and no reflections need rest upon the energies which she is now putting out to reclaim the masses in the slums. Many other denominations are pushing rescue work with equal zeal, but both the workers and the means at their disposal are insignificant compared with the work that has to be done. It might, however, be said, What special claim has General Booth to come forward and ask public assistance for a work which is quite as sedulously being carried on by numerous other religious agencies in the slums of our great cities? General Booth's chief advantage, as it seems to us, consists in the fact that his organisation is designed solely for dealing with the poor. As we understand General Booth's explanation of his position, it is for the poor and the vicious alone that his organisation is worked. The Churches, on the other hand, have their energies directed to all classes of the community, and could not devote themselves exclusively to one particular section without a chance of injury to the rest. Important as is the place held by the poor in Christian doctrine, they are not its only object. But General Booth's organisation has been specially formed for labouring among social outcasts, with a recognition of their special need of rescue, and leaves the Churches to aid in the work on their own lines, and according to their abilities. It is as a special scheme to meet a special and dangerous evil that General Booth's proposals particularly recommend themselves to our attention. We shall take as read General Booth's exposition of the miseries of metropolitan destitution, with the sufferings of the various classes who swell its ranks. With these the public are already painfully familiar. The slums have long been the happy hunting-ground of the writer in search of a sensation, -where squalor, vice, and misery supply all the elements of repulsive horror without effort of imagination on the reporter's part. The daily papers have made us perfectly familiar with such painful scenes as General Booth describes in his work, if indeed they have If not made us case-hardened. has done no General Booth other service, he has at least touched the national conscience. And compunction has been by no means quick in coming. We might almost put in parallel columns against General Booth's pages the following description of the London slums nearly a hundred and fifty years ago which Henry Fielding drew, not from his imagination as a novelist, but from his experiences as a police magistrate : "If we were to make a progress through the outskirts of the metrop olis, and look for the habitations of the poor, we should there behold such pictures of human misery as must move the compassion of every heart that deserves the name of human. What, indeed, must be his composition who could see whole families in want of every necessary of life, oppressed with hunger, cold, nakedness, and filth, and with diseases the certain consequences of all these? The sufferings, indeed, of the poor are less known than their misdeeds; and therefore we are less apt to pity them. They starve and freeze and rot among themselves, but they beg and steal and rob among their betters. There is not a parish in the liberty of Westminster which doth not swarm all day with beggars, and all night with thieves."1 This condition of the slums, limited as it must seem to our eyes to have been in Fielding's days, and therefore the more easily to be effectually dealt with, has been allowed to go on until in the present day we find ourselves face to face with a "submerged tenth." If we allow another century and "HOUSELESS Loafers, casuals, and some criminals, STARVING a half to elapse without some determined attempt to grapple with the evil, heaven knows what proportion of the population may be under the wave by the time that General Booth's book comes to be exhumed as an antiquarian curiosity of social literature. The figures which General Booth puts forward as a basis of his estimate that a tenth part of our population are submerged by the wave of poverty, vice, and crime, are melancholy enough as regards London itself. The numbers are based on actual enumeration in the East End, and an approximate estimate for the rest of the me tropolis. There are paupers, in asylums, workhouses, and hospitals, 51,000; homeless, loafers, casuals, and some criminals, 33,000; starving, casual earnings between 18s. a-week and chronic want, 300,000. We do not follow him into his statistics of the very poor wageearning classes whose earnings amount to more than 18s. a-week, for while they are still struggling, it may be in very stormy waves, we cannot regard them as submerged. According to the General's calculation, three millions or one-tenth come under the category of the "submerged," or 1,200,000 more than Mr Giffen's estimate based on official returns. We quote from the General's figures for East London and the United Kingdom at large : 1 A Proposal for making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, for amending their Morals, and for rendering them useful Members of Society: 1755. Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding criminals)-78,966-and we have an army of nearly two millions belonging to the submerged classes. To this there must be added, at the very least, another million representing those dependent upon the criminal, lunatic, and other classes, not enumerated here, and the more or less helpless of the classes immediately above the houseless and starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it roughly, to one-tenth of the population.' It is obvious, however, that only sections of the classes mentioned above can fall within the range of General Booth's scheme, and even then the residue which properly claims his ministrations is ghastly in its dimensions. Let us now examine the various methods by which General Booth proposes to make an impression upon the pauper stricken and vicious masses which go to make up the population of "Darkest England," and consider how far experience and common-sense can be made to guarantee their success. And in this investigation sources. Independence is one of the General's creditable failings; would have all the more chance of but it strikes us that his scheme success, the wider he can dig its foundations among the roots of law and society, and the more he can make his plans fit into the institutions of the State and the operations of other Christian and benevolent bodies. If we take, at the very outset, General Booth's own division of the denizens of Darkest England, we shall find that one class might very justly be set aside, leaving room for greater exertions among the more necessitous and desperate classes. We give the General's own words: "The denizens in Darkest England for whom I appeal are- —(1) those who, having no capital or income of their own, would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively dependent upon the money earned by their own work; and (2) those who, by their utmost exertions, are unable to attain the regulation scribes as indispensable, even for the allowance of food which the law preworst criminals in our jails." This will at once strike the reader as being a very incomplete classification, and he will not be surprised to find that the greater part of the General's book is devoted to cases which do not properly come under one or the other of these categories, as they leave' out, or ought to leave out, those whose destitution is the result of idleness, intemperance, or crime. But to revert to General Booth's own division, his first class, those in danger of starvation from want of capital or work, have a special claim to our attention. Among them must be many-let us hope the greater number-who have not yet got the franchise of Darkest England. Either by poverty or by misfortune they stand on its brink, and it ought to be the object of all benevolent efforts of all the Churches, of the charities, of the thousands of zealous workers workers among the poor, to save this class from being submerged. Even if these were unequal to the task, there is the poor - law, which ought to relieve General Booth of this care. They cannot earn a livelihood by work if they had it; therefore they are, failing charity, the proper care of the State. Roughly we may say the same of General Booth's second class; but his definition is so loose that it is difficult to say precisely the particular treatment that would be most applicable to it. It is only when he comes to deal with particular divisions and particular cases that General Booth makes clear the sections of Darker England which he proposes to deal with. we Exclusiveness rather than comprehensiveness should be the aim of General Booth in fixing the limits of his relief scheme are speaking of practical relief, not of religious rescue-but his plans will be subjected to a very severe strain at the outset by the wideness of the scope which he proposes to give them. A large proportion of the sections which he proposes to bring within his plans might be left with safety to charity and to the poor-laws, 'provided that both were properly administered. But General Booth ignores other charitable operations than his own, and denounces the poor - laws, which is very much to be regretted, as he would find most valuable auxiliaries in both. That the poor - laws are not of themselves sufficient to relieve the misery of the London slums, we know; that they might be advantageously amended, we can easily gather from General Booth's experiences. We have already quoted his statement that 870,000 persons in receipt of outdoor relief were practically homeless and starving-a charge so serious that we trust it will receive the special attention of the Local Government Board. The first descent into Darkest London is through the Casual Ward, to which sensational journalists have vied with each other in giving an evil reputation. That it is unpopular with the poor, the numbers who prefer the streets to its shelter is sufficient proof. The " casual," in return for his shelter for the night, his supper and breakfast, has a certain amount of work to do, which involves his remaining one whole day and two nights. This work is complained of as excessive, the food is merely a starvation regimen, and, what is perhaps worst of all, the man being shut up all day has no chance of looking for work. We can scarcely combine a benevolent philanthropy with that strict administration of the law which is due to the ratepayers. But as the casual ward is the first entrance in many cases into the "city dolent," it is a focus round which many benevolent efforts should be concentrated to save unfortunates from going farther, and if possible to turn them into the ways of honest livelihood. If the work described is excessive-if the rules throw undue obstacles in the way of the relieved getting work we may justly call for amendment. We might go a step farther, and urge that an effort should be made to discriminate between worthless and hopelessly chronic "casuals" and "casuals "" who had some chance of doing well, and treating them accordingly. As the casual ward is the first gate into Darkest Lon don, so General Booth's "shelter" is the first exit from it in his plan. "Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny doss - house, where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, some one who sees you suggests that you should go to our shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the casual ward of the workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our shelters. On entering, you pay fourpence, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assemble about five o'clock in the afternoon. In the women's shelter, you find that many come much earlier, and sit sewing, reading, and chatting in the sparely furnished but well warmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime. You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free. Then, after having washed and eaten, you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o'clock the shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men's shelter, or as many women in the women's shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor-what are you going to do with them? This is what we do VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCIII. with them. We hold a rousing salvation meeting. The officer in charge of the depot, assisted by detachments from the training homes, conducts a jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are, of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand, and who are, as they say in all sincerity, as happy as the day is long.' There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and conditions of men-casuals, jail-birds, out-of-works-who have come there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now -still poor, but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer outcasts and forlorn in this wide world. There are men who have at last seen revived before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful vortex into which their sins and misfortunes have drawn them, and being restored to those comforts which they had feared so long were gone for ever-nay, of rising to live a true and godly life. These tell their mates how this has come about, and urge all who hear them to try for themselves and see whether it is not a good and a happy thing to be soundly saved. In the intervals of testimonies-and these testimonies, as every one will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our meetings, are not long, sanctimonious, lackadaisical speeches, but simple confessions of individual experience there are bursts of hearty melody. The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences men I |