if General Booth fancies that the money he spends on these is a good investment, while a greater number of good girls are trying to lead an honest life in difficult circumstances, with little or no assistance from “charity,” we venture to say he is grievously mistaken; and we think he is basking in a Fool’s Paradise, unless he is trading on pious credulity, when he looks forward (p. 133) to the girls of Piccadilly exchanging their quarters for “the strawberry beds of Essex or Kent.”
Facts are facts. It is useless to blink them. The present writer did not make the world, or its inhabitants, and he disowns all responsibility for its miserable defects. But when you attempt to reform the world there is only one thing that will help you. Humanity is presupposed. Without it you would never make a beginning. But after that the one requisite is Science. Now all the science displayed in General Booth’s book might be written large on thick paper, and tied to the wrings of a single pigeon without impeding its flight.
General Booth himself, in one of his lucid intervals, recognises the hard facts we have just insisted on. “No change in circumstances,” he says (p. 85), “no revolution in social conditions, can possibly transform the nature of man.” “Among the denizens of Darkest England there are many who have found their way thither by defects of character which would, under the most favorable circumstances, relegate them to the same position.” Again he says (p. 204):
“There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement you could offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.”
These very people, who are the worst part of the social problem, Booth will not trouble himself very greatly about. Here are a few extracts from the Rules for the “Colonists,” as he calls the people who come into his scheme.
(a) Expulsion for drunkenness, dishonesty, or falsehood will follow the third offence.
(b) After a certain period of probation, and a considerable amount of patience, all who will not work to be expelled.
(c) The third offence will incur expulsion, or being handed over to the authorities.
Expulsion is Booth's whip, and a very convenient one – for him! He will soon simplify his enterprise. All who come to him will be taken, but he will speedily return to society all the liars, drunkards, thieves, and idlers; so that when the scheme is in full swing, society will still have the old problem of dealing with the residuum, and in this respect Booth will not have helped in the least.
General Booth’s scheme is thus, in the ultimate analysis, merely one for dealing with the unemployed. On this point his ideas are simply childish. He seems to imagine that work is a thing that can be found in unlimited quantities. He does not suspect the existence of economic laws. It never occurs to him that by artificially providing work for one unemployed person he may drive another person out of employment. Nor has he the least inkling of the law of population which lies behind everything.
In his Labor Shops, in London, he proposes to make match-boxes. Well, now, the community is already supplied with all the match-boxes it wants. The demand cannot be stimulated. And every girl that Booth takes in from the streets and sets to making match-boxes, which are to be put on the market, will turn some other girl out of employment at Bryant and May’s or other match factories.
Similarly with the Salvation Bottles (p. 120) and the Social Soap (p. 136). Booth's soap, if it gets sold, will lessen the demand for other people’s soap, and thus a lot of existing soap-makers will be thrown out of work. If he collects old bottles, and furbishes them up “equal to new,” there will be so many less new bottles wanted, and a lot of existing glass-bottle makers will be thrown out of work. The wily old General of the Salvation Army, owing to a want of economic knowledge, falls into a most obvious fallacy. He is like the Irishman, who lengthened his shirt by cutting a piece off the top and sewing it on the bottom.
Getting hold of fish and meat tins, cleaning them up, and manufacturing them into toys, is hardly worth all the eloquence spent upon it by Booth’s literary adviser. Nor is there much to be said in favor of an Inquiry Office for lost people. If it be true that 18,000 people are “lost” in London every year, it may be assumed that the majority of them do not want to be found, and it is the business of the police to look after the rest. Neither is there any necessity to subvention General Booth to obtain workman’s dwellings out of town instead of ugly, dreary model dwellings in the midst of dirt and smoke. Nothing can be done until provision is made by the railway companies for conveying the workmen to and fro for twopence a day, and when this step is taken, as it must be, private enterprise will construct the dwellings without Salvation charity. With regard to the scheme of the Poor Man’s Bank, it would have been but fair to say that the idea is borrowed from infidel Paris, where for many years a benevolent Society has lent money to honest and capable poor men with gratifying results.
The giving of legal advice gratis to the poor would be a good thing if it did not lead to unlimited litigation. Of course General Booth does not say, and perhaps he does not know, that Mr. Bradlaugh has been doing this for twenty-five years. Thousands of poor men, not necessarily Freethinkers, have had the benefit of his legal advice. No one in quest of such assistance has ever knocked at his door in vain. Finally, with respect to “Whitechapel-at-Sea,” a place which Booth projects for the reception of his poor people when they badly need a little sea-air and sunshine, it must be said that this kind of charity has been carried on for years, and that Booth is only borrowing a leaf from other people's book. In fact, the “General” collects all the various charitable ideas he can discover, dishes them up into one grandiose scheme, and modestly asks for a million pounds to carry out “the blessed lot.”
Singly and collectively these projects will no more affect “the unemployed” than scratching will cure leprosy. Every effect has its cause, which must be discovered before any permanent good can be done. Now the causes of want of employment (if men desire to find it) are political and economical. The business of the true reformer is to ascertain them and to remove or counteract them. Pottering with their effects, in the name of “charity,” is like dipping out and purifying certain barrels of water from an everflowing dirty stream.
At the very best “charity” is artificial, and social remedies must be natural. Work cannot be provided. People have certain incomes and allow themselves a certain expenditure. If they give Booth, or any other charlatan, a hundred pounds to find work for “the unemployed,” they have a hundred pounds less to spend in other ways, and those who previously supplied them with that amount of commodities or service will necessarily suffer. Shuffle one pack of cards how you will, the hands may differ, but the total number of cards will be fifty-two.
General Booth talks infinite nonsense about the “failure” of Trade Unions because they only include a million and a half of workmen. Rome was not built in a day, and even the Salvation Army, with God Almighty to help it, is not yet as extensive as this “failure.” Nor does the world need Booth to tell it the benefits of co-operation. He looks to it as “one of the chief elements of hope in the future.” So do thousands of other people, but what has this to do with the Salvation Army?
The only part of Booth’s scheme which is of the least value is the one he has borrowed from a Freethinker. The Farm Colony is suggested by the Rahaline experiment associated with the name of Mr. E. T. Craig. But not only was Mr. Craig a Freethinker, the same may be said of Mr. Vandeleur, the landlord who furnished the ground for the experiment. At any rate, he was a disciple and friend of Robert Owen, who declared that the great cause of the frustration of human welfare was “the fundamental errors of every religion that had hitherto been taught to man.” “By the errors of these systems,” said Owen, “he has been made a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found.”
The Rahaline experiment was a co-operative one, while Booth’s is to be despotic. He proposes to put the unemployed at work on a big farm, and afterwards to draft them to an Over-sea Colony, where the reformed “thieves, harlots, drunkards, and sluggards” are to lay the foundations of a new province of the British Empire. Something, of course, might be done in this way, but it is doubtful if Booth will get hold of the right material to do it with, or if his Salvation methods will be successful. Much greater effects than “charity” could realise would be produced by a wise alteration of our Land Laws, which would lead to the application of fresh capital and labor to the cultivation of the soil. It is, indeed, one of the prime evils of Booth's scheme, no less than of almost every other charitable effort, that it helps to divert attention from political causes of social disorders. No doubt charity is an excellent thing in certain circumstances, but the first thing to agitate for is justice; and when our laws are just, and no longer create evils, it will be time enough for a huge system of charity to mitigate the still inevitable misery.
So far we have discovered nothing original in General Booth's scheme. Its elements may be reduced to three. There is (a) the reformation of weak, vicious, and criminal characters, which is a rather hopeless task especially when the attempt is made with adults. Something might be done with children, and in this respect Dr. Barnardo’s work, with all its defects, is infinitely more sensible than General Booth’s. Then there is (b) providing labor for the unemployed, which, whether attempted by governments or charitable bodies is an economical fallacy. Finally there is (c) the planting of town populations on the land, which has a certain small promise of success if the scheme were to take the form of allotments to capable cultivators; but which, on the other hand, will surely come to grief if the experiment is made with even the selected residuum of great cities.