LIFE of
The GOSPEL TRUTH WILLIAM BOOTH
FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL
of the SALVATION ARMY
by
Harold Begbie
1920
In Two Volumes
Volume 1
Chapter 23
A SUMMING UP IN MIDDLE AGE 1878
AT the time when he transformed the Christian Mission into the Salvation Army and became a figure of world-wide significance and a target for the scorn and bitter hatred of nearly the whole community, William Booth was entering his fiftieth year. The work which he had done in the provinces, culminating in thirteen years of incredible labour among the poor of Whitechapel, might very easily have exhausted the strength and energy of a man more powerfully fitted for such trying exertions. But it would almost seem as if this extraordinary person, whose body was continually breaking down under the strain his iron and resistless will imposed upon it, entered upon a new lease of life, and saw a more splendid vision before his eyes, at a time when most overworked men are looking forward to the ease and leisure of retirement.
We should give a false impression of his character if we emphasized the headlong and fiery energy of his will and mentioned only in occasional passages those pleasures and relaxations of his private life which certainly helped to keep him human, even if they failed to modify the intensity and the narrowness of his Hebraism. We propose, therefore, to give in this place, before proceeding to follow the history of the Salvation Army, some further particulars of William Booth's private life and to attempt a brief summary of his chief characteristics. The danger before us in approaching the tumultuous history of the Salvation Army without some such reference, is to lead the reader to the conclusion that General Booth was one of those hot-brained enthusiasts, one of those intolerant fire-eaters, whose natures are so radically different from the rest of mankind that they can never excite the affection of posterity.
It is with a feeling of real gratitude that one learns of the General's indulgent habit of taking a short nap every day after the midday meal. This habit, contracted during his visit to Cornwall, lasted to the end of his life. He made up to some extent for the long sleepless hours to which he was often condemned at night by these brief snatches of sleep in the middle-day; and wherever he might be, or on whatever business he might be engaged, he insisted upon his nap and could go to sleep almost in the act of closing his eyes. From these slumbers he awakened with renewed energy for the other half of the day's work.
Literature provided him with the easiest escape from the obsession of his one idea. He was a great reader, if not a very judicious or a very catholic-minded reader. He would have nothing to do with religious fiction; but, with the exception of Dickens, whom he found intolerable, he did occasionally browse among the novelists. He had well-nigh unbounded admiration for Les Miserables and Jane Eyre; as a boy he had taken a deep pleasure in the tales of Fenimore Cooper; and in early youth he found a new world opening before his vision in the romances of Sir Walter Scott, to which he returned in middle life. But he always liked to have some book at hand which attempted to deal, or professed to deal, in a spirit of sober and exact truth, with the real facts of human existence--such as books of history, biography, and travel. He was absorbed for some time by the French Revolution, and would defend Robespierre and Danton with a good deal of eloquence. Carlyle's epic was the chief source of his information. He made an effort, but failed, to read the whole of the same author's Frederick. He was never tired of reading Froude's Caesar, and was a student of Burke's career. In the literature of political economy he was influenced by Mallock and by Professor Flint's Socialism.
Literature afforded him the easiest way of escape from his work, but the happiest and dearest of his distractions was the countryside. He had a particular love for rivers. He was fond, not only of landscape, but of the business of the fields. Nothing in nature more stirred his admiration than a horse--a good horse. He told me on more than one occasion that it seemed to him as if the spectacle of a strong horse moving finely and freely gave him waves of strength, inspired him with a feeling of force and power. He was very fond of riding and driving, but the mere sight of a good, well-fed, well-groomed, and well-handled horse gave him quite as much inspiration as either of these exercises.
In the matter of field games, he was without a single liking; indeed, he was intolerantly sceptical of their value. He had loved fishing as a youth, and as a young minister he had once tasted the pleasures of shooting; but so far as we are able to discover he never took part in a game of cricket, football, or tennis. Any game which absorbed grown men's attention to the exclusion of the great end of life incurred his condemnation. Games were only to be regarded as diversions. The danger of cricket and football lay in their tendency to deflect the mind of men from the serious purposes of life. But his contempt for the majority of such games was perhaps coloured, if not directly inspired, by a kind of inability to understand their attraction.
With his children, as we have seen, he played a very hearty game of "Fox and Geese," and Bramwell Booth informs us, with a smile that almost writes a chapter of his father's biography "He was always the Fox." Dominant and masterful everywhere, he was dominant and masterful even in the games of his children, throwing himself into all their pleasures with a quite boyish zest, and insisting that whatever they did should be done thoroughly. It is characteristic of him that he taught his boys to buy and sell postage stamps to advantage, concerning himself in their collection, and encouraging them so to conduct this business that they might be independent of pocket-money. In the same manner, he did not merely cast a paternal eye upon the menagerie in the garden, but on occasion took an active part in "the rigging up of rabbit-hutches," in the serious side of the silkworm enterprise, and in the breeding and sale of guinea pigs. Something of the naturalist showed itself in the interest he manifested from the very first in the children's collection of moths, and particularly in one of the boys' early enthusiasm for ants.
It may be imagined that with such a father the children did not see anything odd or tyrannical in his religious habits. They worshipped him; and when he told them about the Bible they accepted every word he said without a moment's question. He encouraged them to discuss every subject under the sun, delighted indeed to set them arguing; but never was the fundamental question of the Bible's absolute authority even raised. It was a household founded upon the Bible. The children might and did argue about the French Revolution, about socialism, about history, about characters in fiction; but the one unquestioned and unquestionable centre of their life was the unerring authority of the Bible as the Word of God.
One of the indoor games which he liked, and at this time played occasionally, was draughts, in which he seems to have been something of a master. But above everything else he liked to romp with his children, to surrender himself to their animal spirits, and to let them pull him about on the floor, to tumble over his prostrate body, and to drag him up by his hands to his feet.
He believed in discipline and punishment, and his children accepted this faith as part of their religion. He would be indulgent and kind; he interested himself heart and soul in their games; but let one of them break a rule, let them even say something foolish in discussion or arrive five minutes late for a meal, and they were at once made acquainted with his discipline. "I think, looking back," says one of the sons, "that he was over-stern on occasion; I am perfectly sure he flogged me several times without just cause; but I am equally certain that the spirit of discipline which ruled the household was salutary. None of us grew up slackers; none of us played with life. How many families go to pieces for want of discipline and punishment?"
That William Booth was in some respects a strict father may be judged from the following narrative. A slight discrepancy was discovered at the last moment in the accounts of the Christian Mission. Bramwell Booth, then a boy of thirteen, was set to help in discovering the mistake. For a stretch of seventy-two hours, without sleep, the boy toiled through all the jumble of figures, and at last found where the error lay. So delighted were the committee that they subscribed and made him a present of £5. Of this £5 his father allowed him to keep ten shillings. "I want the balance," he said, "for the rice pudding," referring to that rice pudding which always appeared on the dinnertable challenging any member of the family to go away hungry.
Another instance may be given. In the year 1872 William Booth entered upon a commercial speculation, dictated by sympathy with the sufferings of the poor. He set up six or seven shops, where soup was always to be purchased night and day, and where a dinner of three courses could be bought for sixpence. This venture of "Food for the Million"--the first, I believe, of its kind--was a very considerable success. Bramwell Booth, a lad of sixteen, was the manager of this difficult business. He bought the necessary provisions, he inspected the depots, he examined the accounts, he supervised in its details the work of the assistants. And for this labour, a labour which might have tried the powers of a practised business man, he was rewarded by his father, who feared the effect of money, with a wage which most boys would have regarded as pocket-money.
We must bear in mind, however, that William Booth was not snatching at the profits of this enterprise in the spirit of a money-grabber. He needed every penny he could get for the expenses of his household and for his innumerable charities. The domestic expenditure was a serious charge upon his precarious income. Bramwell Booth has a most distinct memory of his father's financial worries, "He had an anxious temperament," he tells me; "he was always expecting ruin." This business of "Food for the Million," even in its prosperity, did not allay his anxiety. His children were a growing expense; Mrs. Booth was continually falling ill; the future seemed never to promise a rest from his burdens. In 1878 trouble arose with the managers of his scattered shops, competition from men with large capital threatened them with ruin, and the worry of the thing interfered with his work at the Mission. In a moment of disappointment he abandoned the business altogether.
At this point we may refer with convenience to the finances of William Booth. He aimed from the very first at an income of £300 a year, with a house provided for him. Mr. Rabbits, in the early days, offered to settle money on him, but he replied, "I am not going to settle down. You must keep it." At the age of thirty-two, a similar offer was made by another admirer, and again refused. He refused, as we have seen, the £10,000 proffered to him for his Mission, conditionally, by Mr. Henry Reed of Tunbridge Wells; but he accepted, much later on, £5,000 which the same sympathiser settled upon him unconditionally, and which became the only capital he ever possessed to the end of his days. Mr. Frank Crossley, the engineer of Manchester, more than once pressed upon William Booth, for whom he had a warm admiration, blank cheques to be filled up for his domestic needs; but invariably these personal cheques were returned. Later on, when Mrs. Booth was dying, Mr. Crossley offered temporary help which was accepted, and in the course of three or four years this generous good man subscribed some £60,000 to the funds of the Salvation Army.
The reader will remember that in one of his letters to Mrs. Booth, quoted [earlier, Chap XIX] William Booth, writing from Manchester in a time of poverty and desolation, lays emphasis on the satisfaction he feels in his independence and freedom: "I do feel a measure of comfort from the thought that we are securing our own livelihood . . . and not hanging on to any one. That thought has been like a canker at my heart of late. It must not be after that fashion." If this letter could have been published at a time when men of repute and newspapers of distinction were attacking the General of the Salvation Army on the financial question, and when rumours of the basest kind, calumnies of the most odious nature were filling the air, even in East London itself, how great a reproval would have been administered to the traducers of William Booth.
When his will was published, the world offered its tribute of admiration to the honour of this true friend of the poor; but even then it was not known that from the first the very thought of "hanging on to any one" had been "like a canker" at the heart of this honest, struggling, and much enduring man. His income, even with the interest arising from Mr. Reed's £5,000, never exceeded £600. His average expenditure on his wife and family was between £400 and £500 a year.
After the disposal of his business, "Food for the Million," William Booth largely supported himself by the sale of books, his own and Mrs. Booth's. Between 1878 and 1890 these books produced an income in the neighbourhood of £400 a year.
It is remarkable that while General Booth quite properly made profit out of the sale of these books, he refused to take the advice of the late Mr. John Cory--one of the most generous supporters of the Army--in the matter of The War Cry. Many people, perhaps, are unaware that The War Cry is one of the valuable newspaper properties of the world, and that with outside advertisements it might be made a still greater financial success. By keeping this weekly periodical as his own property, as Mr. Cory and others counselled him to do, even without the aid of outside advertisements William Booth could have secured to himself a very considerable income. But he refused the idea. He argued that he had enough to live upon, and that The War Cry belonged to the Army. Every penny of profit earned by this publication has gone to the funds of the Army. But more than this. On several occasions wealthy admirers of William Booth pressed on him large sums of money for the purpose of endowing his family. He invariably refused. In one case, a lady was so angered by his refusal that she threatened to strike the Salvation Army out of her will and to cease her subscription from that moment. But the General remained adamant. He did not need the money, he said. "Give it to me and I shall pass it on to the Army, just as the least of my Officers would do." This was not the only occasion on which the General refused large sums pressed upon him by those who admired his work and were acquainted with the straitened circumstances of his domestic life.
I have reason to believe that William Booth had a great fear of money. The memory of his father lasted with him into old age. He felt in himself the possibility of becoming a money-lover. "Criminal instincts?" he once exclaimed to me, "why, we have all got them. I have got them. My father was a grab, a get. He had been bred in poverty. He determined to grow rich; and he did. He grew very rich, because he lived without God and simply worked for money; and when he lost it all his heart broke with it, and he died miserably. I have inherited the grab from him. I want to get. I am always wanting to get." It is more than probable that when he gave Bramwell Booth only ten shillings out of the five pounds the boy had earned, and when he paid him the small weekly sum for very difficult and arduous work, he was inspired by a dread of encouraging in his son that disposition to grab and to get which he had inherited from his own father and which he had laboured to convert into a grabbing and a getting of the souls of men.
Few of his words are more illuminating than those which he once addressed to an Officer of the Salvation Army. "I have been trying," he said, "all my life, to stretch out my arms so as to reach with one hand the poor, and at the same time keep the other in touch with the rich. But my arms are not long enough. I find that when I am in touch with the poor I lose my hold upon the rich, and when I reach up to the rich I let go of the poor. And I very much doubt whether God Almighty's arms are long enough for this."
To sum up. At the time when William Booth transformed the Christian Mission into the Salvation Army, he was a delicate, middle-aged, family man, with a precarious income of some four or five hundred pounds a year, and an infinitely larger number of enemies to oppose and traduce him than friends to cheer him in his heart-breaking work. He was neither a scholarly man nor a great orator. The three qualities which supported him throughout life were sympathy, earnestness, and masterfulness. A hundred men, more gifted physically and mentally, might have attempted, indeed have attempted, the work to which he set his hand, and failed utterly to move the heart of the world. Two great qualities in his nature, seldom combined in one personality, intense and passionate sympathy, imperious and resistless masterfulness, carried him through even when his earnestness was doubted on every hand. He really felt the agonies of the poor and suffering, he really felt the horror of godlessness and debauchery, he really felt the death of torpor and indifference; and in setting out to relieve the suffering, to convert the wicked, and to raise the spiritually dead, he would suffer no man to dictate to him the words he should use or allow another to point the way in which he should go. Despotic by temperament and by habit and by conviction, he was nevertheless a simple man at heart, hallowed by a love which sweetened his tumultuous mind, and held to his course by a dogmatic faith which was the very breath of his existence.
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