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In Darkest England and The Way Out

G >> General William Booth >> In Darkest England and The Way Out



IN DARKEST ENGLAND and THE WAY OUT

by GENERAL BOOTH


(this Etext comes from the 1890 1st ed. pub. The Salvation Army)


To the memory of the companion, counsellor, and comrade of
nearly 40 years. The sharer of my every ambition for the
welfare of mankind, my loving, faithful, and devoted wife
this book is dedicated.


PREFACE

The progress of The Salvation Army in its work amongst the poor and
lost of many lands has compelled me to face the problems which an more
or less hopefully considered in the following pages. The grim
necessities of a huge Campaign carried on for many years against the
evils which lie at the root of all the miseries of modern life,
attacked in a thousand and one forms by a thousand and one lieutenants,
have led me step by step to contemplate as a possible solution of at
least some of those problems the Scheme of social Selection and
Salvation which I have here set forth.

When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor
Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken
through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the
Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare
subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have
continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my
whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the
workless realised. I think I am.

The commiseration then awakened by the misery of this class has been an
impelling force which has never ceased to make itself felt during forty
years of active service in the salvation of men. During this time I am
thankful that I have been able, by the good hand of God upon me, to do
something in mitigation of the miseries of this class, and to bring not
only heavenly hopes and earthly gladness to the hearts of multitudes of
these wretched crowds, but also many material blessings, including such
commonplace things as food, raiment, home, and work, the parent of so
many other temporal benefits. And thus many poor creatures have proved
Godliness to be "profitable unto all things, having the promise of the
life that now is as well as of that which is to come."

These results have been mainly attained by spiritual means. I have
boldly asserted that whatever his peculiar character or circumstances
might be, if the prodigal would come home to his Heavenly Father, he
would find enough and to spare in the Father's house to supply all his
need both for this world and the next; and I have known thousands nay,
I can say tens of thousands, who have literally proved this to be true,
having, with little or no temporal assistance, come out of the darkest
depths of destitution, vice and crime, to be happy and honest citizens
and true sons and servants of God.

And yet all the way through my career I have keenly felt the remedial
measures usually enunciated in Christian programmes and ordinarily
employed by Christian philanthropy to be lamentably inadequate for any
effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of these outcast
classes. The rescued are appallingly few--a ghastly minority compared
with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss.
Alike, therefore, my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of
them in any way as separate one from the other, have cried out for some
more comprehensive method of reaching and saving the perishing crowds.

No doubt it is good for men to climb unaided out of the whirlpool on to
the rock of deliverance in the very presence of the temptations which
have hitherto mastered them, and to maintain a footing there with the
same billows of temptation washing over them. But, alas! with many
this seems to be literally impossible. That decisiveness of character,
that moral nerve which takes hold of the rope thrown for the rescue and
keeps its hold amidst all the resistances that have to be encountered,
is wanting. It is gone.
The general wreck has shattered and disorganised the whole man.

Alas, what multitudes there are around us everywhere, many known to my
readers personally, and any number who may be known to them by a very
short walk from their own dwellings, who are in this very plight! Their
vicious habits and destitute circumstances make it certain that without
some kind of extraordinary help, they must hunger and sin, and sin and
hunger, until, having multiplied their kind, and filled up the measure
of their miseries, the gaunt fingers of death will close upon then and
terminate their wretchedness. And all this will happen this very
winter in the midst of the unparalleled wealth, and civilisation, and
philanthropy of this professedly most Christian land.

Now, I propose to go straight for these sinking classes, and in doing
so shall continue to aim at the heart. I still prophesy the uttermost
disappointment unless that citadel is reached. In proposing to add one
more to the methods I have already put into operation to this end, do
not let it be supposed that I am the less dependent upon the old plans
or that I seek anything short of the old conquest. If we help the man
it is in order that we may change him. The builder who should elaborate
his design and erect his house and risk his reputation without burning
his bricks would be pronounced a failure and a fool. Perfection of
architectural beauty, unlimited expenditure of capital, unfailing
watchfulness of his labourers, would avail him nothing if the bricks
were merely unkilned clay. Let him kindle a fire. And so here I see
the folly of hoping to accomplish anything abiding, either in the
circumstances or the morals of these hopeless classes, except there be
a change effected in the whole man as well as in his surroundings.
To this everything I hope to attempt will tend. In many cases I shall
succeed, in some I shall fail; but even in failing of this my ultimate
design, I shall at least benefit the bodies, if not the souls, of men;
and if I do not save the fathers, I shall make a better chance for the
children.

It will be seen therefore that in this or in any other development that
may follow I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from
the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope
for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this
world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by
the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for
the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy
where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but
impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ.

That I have confidence in my proposals goes without saying.
I believe they will work. In miniature many of them are working
already. But I do not claim that my Scheme is either perfect in its
details or complete in the sense of being adequate to combat all forms
of the gigantic evils against which it is in the main directed.
Like other human things it must be perfected through suffering.
But it is a sincere endeavour to do something, and to do it on
principles which can be instantly applied and universally developed.
Time, experience, criticism, and, above all, the guidance of God will
enable us, I hope, to advance on the lines here laid down to a true and
practical application of the words of the Hebrew Prophet: "Loose the
bands of wickedness; undo the heavy burdens; let the oppressed go free;
break every yoke; deal thy bread to the hungry; bring the poor that are
cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked cover him and hide
not thyself from thine own flesh. Draw out thy soul to the hungry--
Then they that be of thee shall build the old waste places and Thou
shalt raise up the foundations of many generations."

To one who has been for nearly forty years indissolubly associated with
me in every undertaking I owe much of the inspiration which has found
expression in this book. It is probably difficult for me to fully
estimate the extent to which the splendid benevolence and unbounded
sympathy of her character have pressed me forward in the life-long
service of man, to which we have devoted both ourselves and our
children. It will be an ever green and precious memory to me that amid
the ceaseless suffering of a dreadful malady my dying wife found relief
in considering and developing the suggestions for the moral and social
and spiritual blessing of the people which are here set forth, and I do
thank God she was taken from me only when the book was practically
complete and the last chapters had been sent to the press.

In conclusion, I have to acknowledge the services rendered to me in
preparing this book by Officers under my command. There could be no
hope of carrying out any part of it, but for the fact that so many
thousands are ready at my call and under my direction to labour to the
very utmost of their strength for the salvation of others without the
hope of earthly reward. Of the practical common sense, the resource,
the readiness for every form of usefulness of those Officers and
Soldiers, the world has no conception. Still less is it capable of
understanding the height and depth of their self-sacrificing devotion
to God and the poor.

I have also to acknowledge valuable literary help from a friend of the
poor, who, though not in any way connected with the Salvation Army,
has the deepest sympathy with its aims and is to a large extent in
harmony with its principles. Without such assistance I should probably
have found it--overwhelmed as I already am with the affairs of a
world-wide enterprise--extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
have presented these proposals for which I am alone responsible in so
complete a form, at any rate at this time. I have no doubt that if any
substantial part of my plan is successfully carried out he will
consider himself more than repaid for the services so ably rendered.

WILLIAM BOOTH.

INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE SALVATION ARMY, LONDON, E.C.,
October, 1890.



CONTENTS

PART 1. THE DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 1. Why "Darkest England"?

CHAPTER 2. The Submerged Tenth

CHAPTER 3. The Homeless

CHAPTER 4. The Out-of-Works

CHAPTER 5. On the Verge of the Abyss

CHAPTER 6. The Vicious

CHAPTER 7. The Criminals

CHAPTER 8. The Children of the Lost

CHAPTER 9. Is there no Help?


PART 2. DELIVERANCE.

CHAPTER 1. A Stupendous Undertaking

Section 1. The Essentials to Success
Section 2. My Scheme


CHAPTER 2. To the Rescue!--The City Colony

Section 1. Food and Shelter for Every Man
Section 2. Work for the Out-of-Works--The Factory
Section 3. The Regimentation of the Unemployed
Section 4. The Household Salvage Brigade


CHAPTER 3. To the Country!--The Farm Colony

Section 1. The Farm Proper
Section 2. The Industrial Village
Section 3. Agricultural Villages
Section 4. Co-operative Farm


CHAPTER 4. New Britain--The Colony Over Sea

Section 1. The Colony and the Colonists
Section 2. Universal Emigration
Section 3. The Salvation Ship


CHAPTER 5. More Crusades

Section 1. A Slum Crusade.--Our Slum Sisters
Section 2. The Travelling Hospital
Section 3. Regeneration of our Criminals--The Prison Gate Brigade
Section 4. Effectual Deliverance for the Drunkard
Section 5. A New Way of Escape for Lost Women--The Rescue Homes
Section 6. A Preventive Home for Unfallen Girls when in Danger
Section 7. Enquiry Office for Lost People
Section 8. Refuges for the Children of the Streets
Section 9. Industrial Schools
Section 10. Asylums for Moral Lunatics


CHAPTER 6. Assistance in General

Section 1. Improved Lodgings
Section 2. Model Suburban Villages
Section 3. The Poor Man's Bank
Section 4. The Poor Man's Lawyer
Section 5. Intelligence Department
Section 6. Co-operation in General
Section 7. Matrimonial Bureau
Section 8. Whitechapel-by-the-sea


CHAPTER 7. Can it be done, and how?

Section 1. The Credentials of the Salvation Army
Section 2. How much will it cost?
Section 3. Some advantages stated
Section 4. Some objections met
Section 5. Recapitulation

CHAPTER 8. A Pratical Conclusion



IN DARKEST ENGLAND

PART 1. THE DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 1. WHY "DARKEST ENGLAND"?

This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by
the story which Mr. Stanley has told of Darkest Africa and his
journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all that
spirited narrative of heroic endeavour, nothing has so much impressed
the imagination, as his description of the immense forest, which
offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance. The intrepid
explorer, in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way
for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true
tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to
realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half
as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never
penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the
heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into
cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring
home to us the full horror of that awful gloom. He says:

Take a thick Scottish copse dripping with rain; imagine this to be mere
undergrowth nourished under the impenetrable shade of ancient trees
ranging from 100 to 180 feet high; briars and thorns abundant; lazy
creeks meandering through the depths of the jungle, and sometimes a
deep affluent of a great river. Imagine this forest and jungle in all
stages of decay and growth, rain pattering on you every other day of
the year; an impure atmosphere with its dread consequences, fever and
dysentery; gloom throughout the day and darkness almost palpable
throughout the night; and then if you can imagine such a forest
extending the entire distance from Plymouth to Peterhead, you will have
a fair idea of some of the inconveniences endured by us in the Congo
forest.

The denizens of this region are filled with a conviction that the
forest is endless--interminable. In vain did Mr. Stanley and his
companions endeavour to convince them that outside the dreary wood were
to be found sunlight, pasturage and peaceful meadows.

They replied in a manner that seemed to imply that we must be strange
creatures to suppose that it would be possible for any world to exist
save their illimitable forest. "No," they replied, shaking their heads
compassionately, and pitying our absurd questions, "all like this," and
they moved their hand sweepingly to illustrate that the world was all
alike, nothing but trees, trees and trees--great trees rising as high
as an arrow shot to the sky, lifting their crowns intertwining their
branches, pressing and crowding one against the other, until neither
the sunbeam nor shaft of light can penetrate it.

"We entered the forest," says Mr. Stanley, "with confidence; forty
pioneers in front with axes and bill hooks to clear a path through the
obstructions, praying that God and good fortune would lead us."
But before the conviction of the forest dwellers that the forest was
without end, hope faded out of the hearts of the natives of Stanley's
company. The men became sodden with despair, preaching was useless to
move their brooding sullenness, their morbid gloom.

The little religion they knew was nothing more than legendary lore,
and in their memories there dimly floated a story of a land which grew
darker and darker as one travelled towards the end of the earth and
drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay supine and coiled
round the whole world. Ah! then the ancients must have referred to
this, where the light is so ghastly, and the woods are endless, and are
so still and solemn and grey; to this oppressive loneliness, amid so
much life, which is so chilling to the poor distressed heart; and the
horror grew darker with their fancies; the cold of early morning, the
comfortless grey of dawn, the dead white mist, the ever-dripping tears
of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling thunder bursts and the
echoes, and the wonderful play of the dazzling lightning. And when the
night comes with its thick palpable darkness, and they lie huddled in
their damp little huts, and they hear the tempest overhead, and the
howling of the wild winds, the grinding an groaning of the storm-tost
trees, and the dread sounds of the falling giants, and the shock of the
trembling earth which sends their hearts with fitful leaps to their
throats, and the roaring and a rushing as of a mad overwhelming sea--
oh, then the horror is intensified! When the march has begun once
again, and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew
their morbid broodings, and ask themselves: How long is this to last?
Is the joy of life to end thus? Must we jog on day after day in this
cheerless gloom and this joyless duskiness, until we stagger and fall
and rot among the toads? Then they disappear into the woods by twos,
and threes, and sixes; and after the caravan has passed they return by
the trail, some to reach Yambuya and upset the young officers with
their tales of woe and war; some to fall sobbing under a spear-thrust;
some to wander and stray in the dark mazes of the woods, hopelessly
lost; and some to be carved for the cannibal feast. And those who
remain compelled to it by fears of greater danger, mechanically march
on, a prey to dread and weakness.

That is the forest. But what of its denizens? They are comparatively
few; only some hundreds of thousands living in small tribes from ten to
thirty miles apart, scattered over an area on which ten thousand
million trees put out the sun from a region four times as wide as
Great Britain. Of these pygmies there are two kinds; one a very
degraded specimen with ferretlike eyes, close-set nose, more nearly
approaching the baboon than was supposed to be possible, but very
human; the other very handsome, with frank open innocent features,
very prepossessing. They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep
affection and gratitude, showing remarkable industry and patience.
A pygmy boy of eighteen worked with consuming zeal; time with him was
too precious to waste in talk. His mind seemed ever concentrated on
work. Mr. Stanley said: --

"When I once stopped him to ask him his name, his face seemed to say,
'Please don't stop me. I must finish my task.'

"All alike, the baboon variety and the handsome innocents, are
cannibals. They are possessed with a perfect mania for meat. We were
obliged to bury our dead in the river, lest the bodies should be
exhumed and eaten, even when they had died from smallpox."

Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a
devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of
civilisation. The race that wrote the Arabian Nights, built Bagdad and
Granada, and invented Algebra, sends forth men with the hunger for gold
in their hearts, and Enfield muskets in their hands, to plunder and to
slay. They exploit the domestic affections of the forest dwellers in
order to strip them of all they possess in the world. That has been
going on for years. It is going on to-day. It has come to be regarded
as the natural and normal law of existence. Of the religion of these
hunted pygmies Mr. Stanley tells us nothing, perhaps because there is
nothing to tell. But an earlier traveller, Dr. Kraff, says that one
of these tribes, by name Doko, had some notion of a Supreme Being, to
whom, under the name of Yer, they sometimes addressed prayers in
moments of sadness or terror. In these prayers they say; "Oh Yer, if
Thou dost really exist why dost Thou let us be slaves? We ask not for
food or clothing, for we live on snakes, ants, and mice. Thou hast
made us, wherefore dost Thou let us be trodden down?"

It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the
heart of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation
of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only
too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a
darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation,
which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own
pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover
within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to
those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?

The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy
appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate
denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who
flourish on the weakness of our poor? The two tribes of savages the
human baboon and the handsome dwarf, who will not speak lest it impede
him in his task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are
continually present with us--the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling
slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is
and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other
world conceivable; so is it here--it is all vice and poverty and
crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an
intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's
Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding
sullenness of dull despair, so the most of our social reformers, no
matter how cheerily they may have started off, with forty pioneers
swinging blithely their axes as they force their way in to the wood,
soon become depressed and despairing. Who can battle against the ten
thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the
innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest
England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many
of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat
the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil
days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, said
"It seemed to them as if God and his Saints were dead."

An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is
pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close
the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be
excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant
continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may
be observed at our very doors.

The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles that Darkest
England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent--both
stretch, in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead;"
its monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish
de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected,
their privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest
heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in
despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to
peck at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth;
to let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not
be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant
parasitical growth of the forest--who dare hope for that?
At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope!
It is the great Slough of Despond of our time.

And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as
some of us have done, up to the very neck for long years. Talk about
Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber
of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart
through the shambles of our civilisation needs no such fantastic images
of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the
young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the
morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt
these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but
that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the
grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the
slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the
capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the
violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they
could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete,
of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the
ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities
and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.

The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very
happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty
orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of
the dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the
shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here,
beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many
other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous
abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty,
is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always
by the alternative--Starve or Sin. And when once the poor girl has
consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her
virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men
who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an
ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless
perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths,
excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the
pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her
down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently by
while these Fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.

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