s taken from them."

In 1911 A. M. Nicholl, in his not unfriendly book on GENERAL BOOTH
AND THE SALVATION ARMY, makes the following statement, which I make no
apology for reproducing.

His judgment, considering the position he held with the Army for so many
years, is worthy of consideration. Here are some of his words--

"From an economic standpoint the social experiment of the Salvation
Army stands condemned almost root and branch. So much the worse for
economics, the average Salvation Army officer will reply. But at the
end of twenty years the Army cannot point to one single cause of social
distress that it has removed, or to one single act which it has promoted
that has dealt a death-blow at one social evil....

"A more serious question, one which lies at the root of all
indiscriminate charity, is the value to the community of these shelters.
So far as the men in the shelters are benefited by them, they do
not elevate them, either physically or morally. A proportion--what
proportion?--are weeded out, entirely by the voluntary action of the
men themselves, and given temporary work, carrying sandwich-boards,
addressing envelopes, sorting paper, etc.; but the cause of their
social dilapidation remains unaltered. They enter the shelter, pay their
twopence or fourpence as the case may be (and few are allowed to enter
unless they do), they listen to some moral advice once a week, with
which they are surfeited inside and outside the shelter, they go to bed,
and next morning leave the shelter to face the streets as they came in,
The shelter gets no nearer to the cause of their depravity than it does
to the economic cause of their failure, or to the economic remedy which
the State must eventually introduce....

"The nomads of our civilisation wander past us in their fringy, dirty
attire night by night. If a man stops us in the streets and tells us
that he is starving, and we offer him a ticket to a labour home or a
night shelter, he will tell you that the chances are one out of ten if
he will procure admission. The better class of the submerged, or those
who use the provision for the submerged in order to gratify their own
selfishness, have taken possession of the vacancies, and so they wander
on. If a man applies for temporary work, the choice of industry
is disappointingly limited. One is tempted to think that the
whole superstructure of cheap and free shelters has tended to the
standardisation of a low order of existe