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.

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 deion 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 100to 180feet 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.