Since I talking about the new venture of the Salvation Army I have received a copy of General Booth's book, "In Darkest England". I had hoped to deal with it in these notes, but the heart grows sick at the recital, plain, direct, vivid, of such misery as we, wrapped in the luxury of our Anglo-Chinese life, can scarcely bear to contemplate, and certainly can never fathom. To write seriously on such a subject, we require an interval of time aa well as distance ere the brain steadies and the mind can bring itself to regard coolly such momentous issues in the clear light of common sense.
suffering, sad humanity O ye afflicted ones who lie Steeped to the lips in misery," who is there to deal help to you at once tenderly and wisely? If anything helpful is to be said about you at all it must be with eyes averted from the spectacle of a despair, which serves but to unnerve the outstretched arm and curdle the milk of human kindness into sickly sentimentality or sour cynicism. In such a spirit was a book written which now lies upon my table. It deals with the same problem, it is even by a writer of the same name. But Charles Booth, the vice-president of the Statistical Society, is a different man and writes in a different to the fervid "General" of the Salvation Army. Against the nervous passionate simplicity of "In Darkest England" you will find in "The Labour and Life of the People" some 600 pages of painful and laborious research. And yet to the careful reader of them both, even while he admits the difference and superiority of method of the statistician [until Charles Booth's book appeared a couple of years ago no attempt had been made to calculate the extent of the distress] the main thought that abides within him is the uncertainty of the result.
"And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and Where ignorant armies clash by night."
it
'The moral of Charles Booth's book is an extension of the existing Poor Law, ive, let the State take charge of all those who fall below a certain standard of poverty, let it, in fact, deal with them s Sunatios, Now where' are you to draw the line? The present workhouse system draws it very low. You must be very low, and poor, and miserable, before you go to the workhouse. Taking the population of East London as 900,000 Chazles. Booth divides its inhabitants into eight different regular earnings.
Higher class labour.
wer middle class.
H.—Upper middle class.
Now out of the 900,000 of East London, Charles Booth would include in the care of the State the 200,000 of class B. The line
the next class, C, with its odd 100,000 who is evidently arbitrary. Why not include are also poor and scarcely able to maintain an existence T seem to look out over history, over the development of man, and see the standard of comfort rising with the progress of lack in certain races and much with various races at any given tim: Pauperlunatics are looked after in England, but not in China. Some decades ago they wore j in England. As the standard of comfort rises for the masa in any given decade the standard of below which the State steps in and takes charge of the individual is gradually levelled up all gradually up I care little for the foolish cards our In India, 7s Hautes, $0, zilions sre friends and acquaintances shower upon us at Christmas. But as I opened one packet more bulky than the others and there
are considering the dropped to earth a sprig of heather, I could scarcely restrain an exclamation of question of "hot meals" to be given to delight, so sweetly did it recall an ancient the children by the State. In Chins large promise and the circumstances under which numbers are not only underfed but die it was made. But here la the story in largely in famines. The average standard rhyme if you care to hear it of comfort in China is not high enough to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.