rld, _August 22, 1912_

"No name is graven more deeply in the history of his time than that of
William Booth, Founder and General of The Salvation Army, who passed to
his rest on Tuesday night. At sixteen, the Nottingham builder's son
underwent an 'old-fashioned conversion,' and, as he told a
representative of _The Christian World_, 'within six hours he was going
in and out of the cottages in the back streets, preaching the Gospel
that had saved himself.' From that day he toiled terribly, and never
more terribly than since his sixtieth year, after which the Social
Scheme was launched, and The General undertook those evangelistic tours
in which he traversed England again and again in every direction, and
covered a great part of the Western world. How he kept up is a miracle,
for he was a frail-looking figure, and he ate next to nothing--a slice
or two of toast or bread and butter or rice pudding and a roasted apple,
were his meals for many years past. It was his great heart, his
invincible faith, his indomitable courage that kept him going.

"Plutarch would have put William Booth and John Wesley together in his
'Parallel Lives.' Each man 'thought in continents.' 'The world is my
parish,' said Wesley, and Methodism to-day covers the world. So General
Booth believed in world conquest for Christ, because he believed in
Christ's all-conquering power, and he had the courage of his conviction.
He learnt much from Wesley, for he began as a Methodist. He knew what
can be done by thorough organisation, and what financial resources there
are in the multiplication of small but cheerful givers. Like Wesley,
too, he combined the genius for great conceptions with the genius for
practical detail, without which great conceptions soon vanish into thin
air. He was more masterful than Wesley. When he broke away from the
Methodist New Connexion, and founded the Christian Mission of which The
Salvation Army was the evolution, he found that committees wasted their
time in talk and were distracted in opinion. He read lives of Napoleon,
Wellington, and other great commanders, and came to the conclusion that
a committee is an excellent thing to receive and carry out instructions
from a masterful man who knows what he wants, but otherwise they are
worthless. He persuaded those of his colleagues who had unbounded belief
in him, and whose sole concern was the progress of the Mission, to
accept the military organisation with himself as Commander-i