Army should scarcely doubt the
wisdom of his first terms of service?

"But towards the end he suffered greatly in his own personal life, and
suffering loosens the rigidity of the mind. Those of his own household
broke away from him, the dearest of his children died, trusted Officers
forsook him, some of those whose sins he had forgiven again and again
deserted his Flag, and whispered scandal and tittle-tattle into the ears
of degraded journalism. He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the
vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by
himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at
the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a
grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in
these last years of distress.

"We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through
opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look
back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of
self-congratulation. It is not often true. A well-known millionaire told
me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little
boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother's cottage carrying to
her in a tight-clenched fist his first week's wage--a sixpenny bit. Mr.
Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to
dream of his romantic life. 'I haven't time,' he said; 'the present is
too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.' Mr. Chamberlain in
the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing. Perhaps we
may say that men of action never look back. And so it was with General
Booth. He might well have rested during these last few years in a large
and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement,
and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent
in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over
the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction.
Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to
rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child
happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are
full of happiness and delight. But this old, rough-tongued,
weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but
thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of
the world thousands of little girls rescued from