my money." And the Army answers, quite
rightly under the circumstances, "We will take money from the devil
himself sooner than abandon the work of Salvation." So Bodger pays his
conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused to Bill. In
real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the dramatist,
whose business it is to show the connexion between things that seem
apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in real life, have
contrived to make it known to Bill, with the result that the Salvation
Army loses its hold of him at once.

But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip of the
facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste for
blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee that happy
ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of our cities when
the men are not working, but resting and chewing the cud of their
reflections; and he will find that there is one expression on every
mature face: the expression of cynicism. The discovery made by Bill
Walker about the Salvation Army has been made by every one of them.
They have found that every man has his price; and they have been
foolishly or corruptly taught to mistrust and despise him for that
necessary and salutary condition of social existence. When they learn
that General Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because
it is a high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he
shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his character is
unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites and allies of their
sweaters and oppressors. They know that the large subscriptions which
help to support the Army are endowments, not of religion, but of the
wicked doctrine of docility in poverty and humility under oppression;
and they are rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul,
the doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage, and
terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness, humanity,
generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness. The confirmation
of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been working so hard for
years past, is the morality of militarism; and the justification of
militarism is that circumstances may at any time make it the true
morality of the moment. It is by producing such moments that we produce
violent and sanguinary revolutions, suc