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Stendhal - "Vittoria Accoramboni"

Captain Marryat - "Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra."

Henry James - "**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Henry Clay's Remarks Before The"

Alfred Tennyson - "Enoch Arden &c."

In Darkest England and The Way Out

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




"Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion,
destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness. They will not march
farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle:
they will not; nor ought they; nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to
order; begin reducing them to order, to just subordination; noble
loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad;
let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob,
but as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will these
men march any more. All human interests, combined human endeavours,
and social growth in this world have, at a certain stage of their
development, required organising and work, the grandest of human
interests, does not require it.

"God knows the task will be hard, but no noble task was ever easy.
This task will wear away your lives and the lives of your sons and
grandsons; but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were lives
given to men? Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound scalps;
the noble of you shall cease! Nay, the very scalps, as I say,
will not long be left, if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly
to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws, and become noble European
nineteenth-century men. Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs
and flunky 'respectabilities' in not the alone God; that of himself he
is but a devil and even a brute-god.

"Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that,
too, was difficult. The waste-cotton shrub, long useless, disobedient
as the thistle by the wayside; have ye not conquered it, made it into
beautiful bandana webs, white woven shirts for men, bright tinted air
garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder,
made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty; the forest-giants--
marsh-jotuns--bear sheaves of golden grain; AEgir--the Sea-Demon
himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on
Firehorses and Windhorses ye career. Ye are most strong.
Thor, red-bearded, with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and
strong thunder-hammer, he and you have prevailed. Ye are most strong,
ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged
Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the gray dawn of Time!
Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered.
Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding
that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier
thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all
Jotuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos
whatsoever!"--("Past and Present," pages 236-37.)

"A question arises here: Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps not
far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master-Worker may
not find it possible, and needful, to grant his Workers permanent
interest in his enterprise and theirs? So that it become, in practical
result, what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a joint
enterprise; all men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest Overseer
and Operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for it?
Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far,
is perhaps, Yes; and yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is
essential in most enterprises; I am told they do not tolerate 'freedom
of debate' on board a seventy-four. Republican senate and plebiscite
would not answer well in cotton mills. And yet, observe there too,
Freedom--not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is
indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile
Despotism with Freedom--well, is that such a mystery? Do you not
already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as
Destiny, but just, too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God;
all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them.
The way is already known, part of the way; and courage and some
qualities are needed for walking on it."
("Past and Present ," pages 241-42)

"Not a May-game is this man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare
with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant
orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses
and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy
solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men,
loves men, with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him,
but his soul dwells in solitude in the uttermost parts of creation.
In green oases by the palm-tree wells he rests a space, but anon he has
to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the
Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort.
The stars keen-glancing from the Immensities send tidings to him;
the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities.
Deep calls for him unto Deep."--("Past and Present," page 249.)



THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

The Rev. Dr. Barry read a paper at the Catholic Conference on
June 30th, 1890, from which I take the following extracts as
illustrative of the rising feeling of this subject in the Catholic
Church. The Rev. Dr. Barry began by defining the proletariat as those
who have only one possession--their labour. Those who have no land,
and no stake in the land, no house, and no home except the few sticks
of furniture they significantly call by the name, no right to employment,
but at the most a right to poor relief; and who, until the last 20 years,
had not even a right to be educated unless by the charity of their
"betters." The class which, without figure of speech or flights of
rhetoric, is homeless, landless, property less in our chief cities--
that I call the proletariat. Of the proletariat he declared there were
hundreds of thousands growing up outside the pale of all churches.

He continued: For it is frightfully evident that Christianity has not
kept pace with the population; that it has lagged terribly behind;
that, in plain words, we have in our midst a nation of heathens to whom
the ideals, the practices, and the commandments of religion are things
unknown--as little realised in the miles on miles of tenement-houses,
and the factories which have produced them, as though Christ had never
lived or never died. How could it be otherwise? The great mass of men
and women have never had time for religion. You cannot expect them to
work double-tides. With hard physical labour, from morning till night
in the surroundings we know and see, how much mind and leisure is left
for higher things on six days of the week? ... We must look this matter
in the face. I do not pretend to establish the proportion between
different sections in which these things happen. Still less am I
willing to lay the blame on those who are houseless, landless, and
property less. What I say is that if the Government of a country allows
millions of human beings to be thrown into such conditions of living
and working as we have seen, these are the consequences that must be
looked for. "A child," said the Anglican Bishop South, "has a right to
be born, and not to be damned into the world." Here have been millions
of children literally "damned into the world," neither their heads nor
their hands trained to anything useful, their miserable subsistence a
thing to be fought and scrambled for, their homes reeking dens under
the law of lease-holding which has produced outcast London and horrible
Glasgow, their right to a playground and amusement curtailed to the
running gutter, and their great "object-lesson" in life the drunken
parents who end so often in the prison, the hospital, and the
workhouse. We need not be astonished if these not only are not
Christians, but have never understood why they should be....

The social condition has created this domestic heathenism.
Then the social condition must be changed. We stand in need of a
public creed--of a social, and if you will understand the word, of a
lay Christianity. This work cannot be done by the clergy, nor within
the four walls of a church. The field of battle lies in the school,
the home, the street, the tavern, the market, and wherever men come
together. To make the people Christian they must be restored to their
homes, and their homes to them.

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