William Booth Vol. 2

TROUBLES OF AN OVERWORKED
AND SUFFERING AUTOCRAT

OBSESSED by the idea of William Booth’s autocracy, and seeing in the Army, “a strong, far-reaching, centralized organization, the disposal of the physical, moral, and financial strength of which rests with an irresponsible chief, who, according to his own account, is assured of the blind obedience of nearly 10,000 subordinates,” Mr. Huxley asked, “prudent men and good citizens,” whether they ought “to aid in the establishment of an organization which, under sundry, by no means improbable, contingencies, may easily become a worse and more dangerous nuisance than the mendicant friars of the Middle Ages.”

Respectable people were asked to pause before they gave money to William Booth for saving 3,000,000 miserable and suffering fellow-creatures, lest they should be endowing “a new Ranter-Socialist sect.” He actually brought himself to speak of General Booth’s “socialistic autocracy.”

Carlyle’s writings on social miseries, he tells us in one place, made upon his mind “an ineffaceable impression forty years ago”; but the appeal of William Booth, who cried out, not rhetorically from a student’s library, but with authentic piteousness from the very abyss itself, only produced in the mind of the middle-aged comfortable Professor in his Eastbourne villa a feeling of terror for the safety of society.

Who could guarantee, he asked, the character of the Salvation Army in 1920, under the autocracy of a General who “controls the action, say, of 100,000 Officers pledged to blind obedience, distributed through the whole length and breadth of the poorer classes, and each with his finger on the trigger of a mine charged with discontent and religious fanaticism?"

The nation’s “political and industrial affairs“ would be “at the mercy of a despot.” He prophesies “ruthless intimidation.” No member of Parliament would be safe. He warns the people against “the great social danger of the spread of Boothism,” and against “despotic socialism in all its forms, and more particularly in its Boothian disguise.”

Now, this criticism, however exaggerated, had the merit of being intelligent and reasonable. William Booth happened to be one of the stiffest Conservatives and one of the most unbending Individualists of the Victoria era, but under the autocratic system of the Salvation Army no one could guarantee the character of the organization in future, or say decisively what colour the politics of its General would assume in 1920.

We may point out that shareholders in The Times newspaper, where Professor Huxley’s indictment appeared, could not have foreseen that a dozen years later that moderate and dignified organ of public opinion would be valiantly supporting an ex-Republican in his gospel of Protection; nor can they be guaranteed at the present day that next week or next year the fortunes of the paper will not be directed by a Radical millionaire in favour of the single tax.

Men undoubtedly change their minds. Things do unquestionably happen. The devout Roman Catholic of five or six hundred years ago, in bestowing his goods to build a church, could not be certain that the voice of Heresy would not one day slightly distress his branching roof and pillared aisles, or that a powerful nobleman would not enrich himself out of the endowments.

Nevertheless, Mr. Huxley’s criticism had real point, and it certainly succeeded so far in its purpose as to prejudice considerable numbers of people against William Booth and the Salvation Army.

Two years before Mr. Huxley’s attack, that is to say in March, 1888, William Booth had made a gift of £500 to the Army in the manner indicated by the following letter from a firm of chartered accountants:

2 GRESHAM BUILDINGS, BASINGHALL STREET, E.C.
LONDON, March 22, 1888.
General Booth.
DEAR SIR — Referring to our conversation with you last Tuesday, in which you informed us of your desire to make a gift to the funds of the Army of the sum of £500 —being about the amount of the payments made in respect of your life policies by direction of your then Committee (1869 to 1880), we have pleasure in confirming what we then stated to you that the above-named sum will about cover the amounts paid.

We have also to acknowledge the receipt of your cheque for £300, which amount we have paid over to the Cashier at Headquarters as from, “A Friend per J. Beddow & Son.”— Yours faithfully, (Signed) JOSIAH BEDDOW & SON.

During the years of his extreme poverty, when he was struggling to bring up his family, the committee of the Christian Mission, a body of friends interested in its work, had taken the burden of his insurance premiums off his shoulders; and one of his first acts, when his head was above water, and when he could count with fair confidence on a modest income, was to make over to the Salvation Army, quite privately, the whole sum which had been paid during those eleven years by his committee.

He lived for a number of years, as we have already seen, by the slender profits of his books; and he had refused to possess himself, as he had a perfect right to do, of the very valuable copyright of The War Cry. He received nothing from the Salvation Army at the time of Mr. Huxley’s attack, and he never drew one farthing from its funds or from the profits of his book In Darkest England during the whole of his life, except for expenses.

When he was in the United States, and warmer clothing than he possessed became necessary in winter, he refused to let the Army in America charge itself with this expenditure, “although his work there was bringing us in thousands of dollars.”

And at every one of his meetings in whatever country he might be he always contributed to the offertory out of his own purse. No man controlling enormous funds was ever more nice and scrupulous in his handling of public money. No man, we think, ever thought less of himself and more of the work for which he had sacrificed health and comfort.
We are bound at the same time to confess that the obvious dangers of autocracy were no doubt present in the Salvation Army organization from the first days of its existence.

Our purpose here, since we are concerned only with the life of William Booth and not with the history of the Army, is only to express as accurately as possible his personal attitude towards this important matter.

He learned from experience, as we have already shown, that to get anything done well and swiftly, autocracy was essential. He could not suffer his work to be hindered by committees and councils. He could not stop on his road to discuss matters of casuistry or questions of finance.

He was always inveighing, as we have seen, against “government by talk.” He had upon his hands a work of gigantic magnitude, and after a long and grievous experience of committees, he determined in middle age — encouraged by the most able and devoted of his followers — to make himself an autocrat. His autocracy, then, was not for personal aggrandisement, certainly not for villainy or despotic socialism, but was established solely and publicly for the sake of the righteous work to which he had set his hand.

Moreover, it was an autocracy which depended absolutely on the loyalty of his followers — an autocracy which guarded itself by rules laid down for its own limitation. He never concealed his faith in the principle of autocracy. At a crowded meeting of business men in Edinburgh, after he had explained his scheme and his methods, a small, fussy, and somewhat aggressive member of the audience tackled him on the subject of his despotic control of the Army, talking till everybody was wearied, and demanding as he went along,

“Don’t you think two heads are better than one?” Before he could go on, the General rapped out, “It depends on the heads!” At which the audience laughed with a good understanding.

“I am determined,” he wrote to a correspondent in 1877, “that Evangelists in this Mission must hold my views and work on my lines.” This was his position from the beginning to the end.

There are risks in every great undertaking, and William Booth confronted the public with the avowal that he and he alone was in this sense master of the Salvation Army, thus stating without apology or equivocation the risk incurred by the public in contributing to his funds. Moreover he believed that he could so select and so train his successor that the same character which had founded the Army would be transmitted to future generations, and the risk of malversation in 1920 or 1999 be no greater than it was in 1890.

A man so enormously employed, and struggling to impress his will upon thousands of Soldiers, some of whom, many of whom, had been but lately rescued from suffering and sin, would have been a god if he had not made mistakes.

William Booth was occasionally impatient, irritable, masterful; but he was never really irascible. He sometimes blurted out his feelings of the moment without weighing his words and without looking ahead. He trusted some of his followers too frankly. He censured others, perhaps, too hastily. But, on the whole, his wise handling of this most difficult force is abundantly proved — it cannot possibly need to be argued — by the affectionate devotion, extraordinary in its character, which inspired the lives of thousands of intelligent men and women who obeyed his orders in nearly every country of the world.

Is it to be supposed that the Salvation Army was free of domestic troubles? Is it to be assumed that because most of its Soldiers were satisfied and happy some were not mutinous and discontented? From the beginning of his career to the end, William Booth was constantly embroiled in troubles of this domestic nature.

One Officer was jealous, another was lazy, another was stupid, another was conceited and insolent; occasionally, an Officer either confessed to, or was discovered in, some act which compromised the honour of the Flag.

William Booth, we make bold to claim, handled these besetting difficulties with great humaneness and with considerable wisdom. His mistakes caused him infinitely more suffering and sorrow than they caused other people. He was always on the side of mercy, and would forgive and forgive again a disloyal, even a traitorous, follower, until it was scandal to retain his services.

“My father used to say to me,” says Bramwell Booth, who at that time, conscious of the Army’s watchful enemies, was perhaps a stricter disciplinarian than Wilham Booth, “whenever, for the good name of the Army, I wanted summarily to dismiss a bad Officer, ‘Bramwell, you must not judge a man in that out-of-hand fashion. How do you know the force of the temptation to which he succumbed?

Don’t you see, some men are more tempted by a woman or by money than others? The temptation is greater, fiercer. It sweeps them off their feet. It draws them down like a whirlpool. And perhaps they repent afterwards, as the less-tempted man never repents."

He forgave one or two Officers over and over again. He never once dismissed the least of his Soldiers without sorrow and regret.

There is no doubt that at times he was rough in manner, and on occasions could be rude and harsh; but a kindly and assuaging humour was never far behind the most vigorous of his upbraidings. Commissioner Kitching, on one occasion, at that time a newly-appointed Major, made a mistake of some kind in the business of the Army, and went to report this matter to his General. “What fool made you a Major?” demanded the old man. The answer was given with a smile, “Your son, General.” And in a moment William Booth was laughing with a rich pleasure.

We shall have to say something in another chapter about the family defections which in after years came as the crown of his sorrows. But we would observe at this point that while the autocracy of William Booth might be swayed, somewhat unduly perhaps, by family affection, love for his children could not bend it against the interests of the Army.

He did undoubtedly appoint his children to important offices at an age when some of them had not given adequate proof of administrative ability; but when they questioned an order he dealt firmly with them, and when they refused to obey an order he let them go. I can discover no single instance in which he used his autocracy to favour himself or his children against the rules and regulations laid down by himself for the welfare of the Army.

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