To The Editor.
SIR,—Now that the delirium and enthusiasm caused by the visit of General Booth have somewhat subsided, we can, perhaps, when untrammelled by creed and partisan bias or prejudice, deal with this subject as rational thinking beings. In the first place those who have read General Booth's book will remember how it has been puffed up in an unprecedented fashion by Mr. Stead, who so thoroughly understands the art of booming superstitious nostrums. Like the Rev. James Bryant, I admire the sagacity displayed by the Premier and Sir James Le-Steers, and I consider it the most democratic action they have performed daring their term of office in thus refuting to be hoodwinked into exploiting the community to bolster up a temporary reform organisation. In Darkest England there is a vivid, but of course exaggerated, picture of the diseases of society. These writers have walked through the shambles of our civilisation until it seemed as if God were no longer in this world, but that in his place reigned a fiend merciless as hell and ruthless as the grave. This is certainly a satire upon our Christianity, wherein he states that after 19 centuries of its teaching, and the advent of the Redeemer and in the most pious country in the world one-tenth of the population, of about three millions of men, women, and children, are sunk in destitution, vice, and crime. According to General Booth the disease is getting worse; and something must be done immediately.
Now, what is the General's scheme for dealing with this disgraceful blot upon our civilisation, and in what spirit will he set about it if be gets the £100,000 down with the prospect of a million afterwards ? He is a bold man, and his promises are certainly magnificent. " If the scheme," he says, " which I set forth in these pages is not applicable to the thief, the harlot, the drunkard and the sluggard, it may as well be dismissed without ceremony." Now, Sir, speaking as an actual worker, and principally in their support, I know from experience that the sluggard will be the toughest subject of the lot. For first the General will have to solve the as yet unsolvable problem of how to put nervous energy into a body in which it is constitutionally lacking. Common sense says it cannot be done. You may galvanise the sluggard for a while, but the effect will not last. Energy and perseverance are not acquired, they are congenital. The sluggard and the thief are first cousins. Both have a defective vitality, only the thief and criminal generally are capable, like all predatory creatures, of spasmodic activity. Those creatures are well-known to the scientist, and should be segregated. There is no necessity to treat them with cruelty. They should be surrounded with comfort, but they should be prevailed from procreating their like. Science says that the only way of dealing with them is to cut off the supply. Thus we can see that General Booth is no scientist. He knows nothing of the lessons of evolution ; he is not aware that thousands of men and women are born in every generation who are behind the age. They are types of a vanished order of mankind, relics of antecedent stages of culture. Natural selection is always eliminating them. But General Both proposes to coddle them, to surround them with artificial and superstitious props. He does not perceive that by simply changing their abode, their nature still remains the same, also that to bring them here would ultimately tend, by contact and cohabitation to beget and rear a much more numerous offspring of this class of beings than we possess at the present time. The law of heredity is a stern fact, and will not budge an inch ever for even General Booth and all the religious sentimentalists in the world. Take the harlot, for instance. Christian society has no mercy on female frailty; it drives a girl who has listened to the voice of the tempter, or the first suggestions of her sexual passions, into a career of infamy, and then, when it has helped to poison her life, hypocritically shed tears of sorrow over her, and sets up associations for her rescue. Just as there are congenital criminals there are congenital harlots. They prefer to do what they like and when they like ; disciplines of every kind is hateful to them. Animality and variety are strong in them ; they have little steady energy and self control. In a polygamous society they would find a place in a harem, but in a monogamous and industrial society they are hopelessly out of harmony with the general environment. Here is an instructive little table from the General's book. He takes a hundred cases as they come from his rescue register : Census of fall: Drink, 14; seduction, 33; wilful choice, 24; bad company, 27 ; poverty, 2 ; total, 100. Twenty three of these girls had been in prison, only two were pushed into vice by poverty. Seduction, wilful choice, and bad company come to much the same thing in the end. In any case, one fourth of the hundred deliberately took to prostitution.
Now, if General Booth fancies that the money he has spent on those is a good investment, while a far greater number of good girls are trying to lead an honest life in difficult circumstances, with little or no assistance from charity, he is barking in a fool's paradise, unless he is only trading on pious credulity when be looks forward to the girls of Piccadilly exchanging their quarters for the strawberry beds of Essex or Kent, or even the mulga scrub sands and rocks of West Australia. Even granting for the sake of argument that his home scheme has succeeded the surroundings and conditions of Australia are so vastly different that the probabilities are ten to one against such being the case here. In the old country his subjects are, comparatively speaking, living a life of splendour, compared with their condition as outcasts of England in the middle of winter. But here nature has by her invariable laws deposited wealth in her soil, which has attracted a majority of self-reliant and industrious people, who are now helping to make the future of Western Australia a prosperous and a happy one. We are now without any guarantee from General Booth that his intended colonists would not get dissatisfied with his rigid rule and emotional discipline when in contact with a more envious and efficient state of society and thus by unequal and unjust competition reduce to the level of themselves our already under-paid fellow-workers. Such, it appears to me, most be the inevitable result, nor especially as they receive no wages, and the General may replace them by others. This is irrespective of their being able to compete with our producers, who would also in the end have to succumb in conjunction with the workers. General Booth, in one of his lucid intervals, recognises these hard facts I have just above mentioned. "No change in circumstances," he says (page 95), "no revolution is social conditions, can possibly transform the nature of man" 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 with vice and crime that work is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion." He says, " When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can rationally be pursued. Sorrowfully but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, in capable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, mast be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large." So we see the very people who constitute the worst part of the social problem, General Booth will not trouble himself much about.
What could show the utter fallaciousness of his scheme better than the following, taken from his own " Rules to Colonists ?" Clause (a.) Expulsion for drunkenness, dishonesty or falsehood, (b) After a certain period of probation and patience, all who will not work to be expelled. (c) Third offence will incur expulsion, or being handed over to the authorities. Thus we see that expulsion is General Booth's whip, and a very convenient one for him. He would soon simplify his enterprise. All may come but he would speedily return to society all the liars, drunkards, thieves and idlers. So we see when his scheme is in full swing, society will still have to deal with the residuum, and in this respect "Booth" will not have helped in the least. Thus the General's scheme in the ultimate analysis is merely one for dealing with the unemployed. On this point his ideas are simply childish. He seems to think 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 be studied the law of population, which lies behind everything else.
In his labour shops in London he proposed to make matches and salvation soap—which is often needed among his converts—bottles, etc. Well, now the public are already supplied with these commodities. The demand cannot be stimulated, and every girl that General Booth rescues from the streets and sets to work thereat, and places these articles on the market, will turn some other girls out of employment at Bryant and May's factories. Singly and collectively these schemes and 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 come or be effected. Now the causes of want of employment, if men desire to know, are political and economical. The business of the true reformer is to ascertain them, and remove or counteract them. Pottering with the effects, in the name of charity, is only prolonging the evil besides leading the masses away from their true and only solution. At the very best charity is artificial, and social remedies must be natural. Work cannot be provided.
People have certain incomes and allow themselves certain expenditures. Therefore if they give General Booth, or any other charlatan £100, with which to find work for the unemployed, they have £100 less to spend in other ways, and those who previously supplied them with that amount of commodities, or services must necessarily suffer. Shuffle the cards whichever way he will, the hands may differ, but the total number still remains fifty two. Again, the general talks infinite nonsense where he accuses Unionism of utter failure, and that it only includes a million and a half of workers. Rome was not built in a day, and even the Salvation Army with the great Jehovah to help is nothing near as extensive as unionism is today. The General must be unacquainted with history and the many struggles unionism has had to contend against. Why, it was only a few years ago that a law was in force declaring it illegal for workman to combine together. This statute made it illegal, whereas General Booth's organisation has been specially recognised by the British parliaments, and has been allowed to block up leading thoroughfares, and any person causing the army any annoyance has been speedily arrested. On the other hand, unionism has been subjugated not only by the combined forces of avaricious capital, but by the iron hand and mechanism of party government. In my experience of unionism, it has rendered unto its members a faithful account of its finances, by the appointment of auditors, trustees and committees. This I believe is more than the adherents of Booth's organisation can boast of. The basis of unionism has been of a democratic nature, whereas General Booth's is extremely despotic and conservative. He is also to be followed by the Booth dynasty ; he has known how to marry his family well, both from a worldly as well as a religious point of view, and he has not forgotten to place them all in the chief posts. Of course, in such, an arrangement there will be no mutiny while this plan lasts, nor, perhaps, while the whole of the army's property is legally in the family's hands. But the leader's death may cause changes, especially as to the division, and his noisy empire may split up like that of Alexander's.
Statistics disprove the army's pretensions, its boast of something like two millions of converts. If these had been drawn from the moral residuum of England a serious impression must have been made in the ranks of vice and crime. But what do we find? Prostitutes are as numerous as ever, the regular thief still adheres to his profession, and the drink bill of England is still increasing.
I.
Faith I have, but not in charity ;
Faith in truth and love of man.
Human sorrow moves my passions,
Duty holds me to my plan.
II.
Doing good is my religion,
Knowledge is my life and joy,
Something to improve my brethren,
Ever will my mind employ.
Yours, etc.,
JAMES BALL.
Perth, January 15.
Western Mail 31 January 1896.
[The Salvation Army is still here in 21st century trying to reform the unemployed, with government backing from a Tory party]
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