, and that mankind is indebted
to him for the stirring up to benevolent action of countless millions
who never even heard his name.

At the same time it will be found that by his financial plans he has
made The Army so largely dependent upon public opinion that, were its
beneficent work to cease, its means of survival would at the same time
become extinct, so that it could not continue to exist when it had
ceased to be a Salvation Army.

Chapter XXIII

In Germany in Old Age

Though we have had occasion to mention Germany repeatedly, there has
been no opportunity to call attention to the great importance which The
General attached to our Work in that country. It seemed almost as though
we had been premature in our attack upon the country, so little were
either Governments or people prepared for our violent urgency, when we
began in Stuttgart, in 1886. But The General lived to see his annual
visits to Berlin looked forward to by the Press and public as a natural
provision for the spiritual wants of those who had practically ceased to
be of any religion.

In the following description of him, taken from German papers during one
of his last visits to that country, we get not only some idea of his
appearance to the people when he was eighty-one years of age, but his
sense of the importance of that people in the future of The Army. And it
is a remarkable fact that German cities should have been subsidising The
Army's work before any English one did so.

We have happily got complete enough accounts of The General's tour in
Germany, when eighty-one, to supply not merely a most artistic
representation of his own appearance and action at that age, but at the
same time to give an almost perfect view of the impressions and
teachings his Army has been giving out there for nearly thirty years.

In Duesseldorf, we are told:--

"The old idealist spoke for an hour and a half with the fire of
enthusiasm, throwing out every now and then some spark of his
humour amidst his stream of eloquence. He did not speak like a
dying greybeard, but like a young man ready to take up to-morrow
morning the struggle with the misery of the whole world. Out of
such material as this old man are made the great men who do great
deeds on the battle-field, in the sphere of science, in the
province of religion, of humanity, and of society."

The _Cologne Gazette_ goes more into detail, and says:--