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TWICE-BORN MEN
A FOOTNOTE IN NARRATIVE TO PROFESSOR WILLIAM
JAMES'S STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE 'THE
VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE '
BY
HAROLD BEGBIE
AUTHOR OF 'MASTER WORKERS,1 'THE PRIEST,' 'THE VIG]
'TABLES OF STONE,' 'RACKET AND REST,'
' THE CAGE,' ETC.
POPULAR EDITION
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
' No heart is pure that is not passionate,
No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.'
SEELEY.
TO
WILLIAM JAMES
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
WITH ADMIRATION AND RESPECT
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 9
I. — A PART OF LONDON 23
II. — THE PUNCHER 29
III. — A TIGHT HANDFUL 45
IV.— O. B. D. ......... 63
V. — THE CRIMINAL 77
VI. — A COPPER BASHER 101
VII. — LOWEST OF THE Low 117
VIII. — THE PLUMBER 131
IX. — RAGS AND BONES . „ 151
X. — APPARENT FAILURE 167
POSTSCRIPT 187
PREFACE
I was gathering together the strange and almost
inconceivable materials which go to make this book,
I was conscious of so many and such diverse emotions that
the point of view from which it should be written changed
with every fresh turn in my journey of discovery, and per
plexed me increasingly with the multitude of its aspects.
But now that I sit down actually to write what I have
learned, now that I set out to play showman, dramatist, or
author to the little group of human beings with whom I
have been companioned for the past few weeks, there is
in my mind one uppermost feeling, one central and domin
ating sensation of the emotions, and this is a feeling of
astonishment that all the terrible tragedy, all the infinite
pathos, all the amazing psychology, all the agony and bitter
suffering, all the depth and profundity of spiritual experi
ence with which I have to deal, all of it, was discovered
in a single quarter of London.
Here in this little book, which tells the story of a
few humble and quite commonplace human beings, is such
astonishing psychology as must surely bewilder the meta
physician, the social reformer, the criminologist, the
theologian, and the philosopher ; and it is unearthed>
brought to the surface of observation, this incredible
psychology, from a single quarter of London, from a few
shabby streets huddled together on the western edge of the
metropolis, forming a locality of their own, calling them
selves by a particular name, and living almost as entirely
aloof from the rest of London as Cranford from Drumble.
io PREFACE
One would say that a man might go here and there
in London, picking and choosing among all the city's multi
farious districts, and at the end of his researches find half
a dozen human beings whose psychological experiences
would amaze the general world and prove of considerable,
even of lasting interest to metaphysics and philosophy.
But who would say that one might find, without difficulty
and without selection, in a single negligible fragment of
the vast city, men whose feelings, struggles, and experi
ences in the moral sphere contribute such extraordinary
material to psychology as that of which this book is com
posed? One is startled by the possibility that every single
individual among the swarming millions of London, the
fermentation of whose brains is the spirit, mystery, and
attraction of the great city, has this supreme interest for
the rest of us — that every single individual maintains a
struggle of some kind with the forces of good and evil,
and in the silence of his soul holds some secret intercourse
with the universe. Is it possible that the vilest, the most
degraded, the most abandoned, and even the most stupid
of all those massed and congregated millions, hides from
the gaze of his fellow-men longings and hungering aspira
tions which in the eyes of the angels entitle him to his
place in the cosmos?
One feels, standing at some central point in London,
and studying the incessant multitude of human beings, that
personality is blurred into some such sameness as one sees
in a flock of sheep, or in a procession of waves, or in an
ant-heap. And passing through a dreary street of inter
minable villas, one feels that a monotony similar to the
bricks and slates and window-frames must characterize the
lives of their occupiers, that the man who lives in Number 3
can be of no more interest to us than the man who pays
the rent of Number 27, and that all the children playing
on the pavements or shouting in the road are similar one
to the other as the leaves on the stunted limes behind the
garden railings.
But reflection tells us that every human unit in this
great mass of mortality has a silence and a solitude proper
PREFACE ii
to hrmself alone. His thought is separate. Fractional may
be his occupation or his idleness, his virtue or his vice, his
laughter or his tears ; but he himself, he in the silence and
solitude of his thought, the quintessence of the man, is
integral. One may classify him in a hundred ways, and
find that he fits perfectly into our tables of anthropological
statistics ; but the silence and the solitude in which his
thought dwells preserve the ultimate reality of his identity
from our research.
Possibly, then, every individual life apparently merged
and lost in the thick density of the mass, could we pene
trate to this solitude of the soul, would possess interest for
the gossip and information for the student of human nature.
More or less interest ; more or less information.
Yes ; this is probably true. The apprehension that every
unit in the multitude has his own individual silence of the
soul, his own impenetrable chamber of thought, his own
unbroken and incommunicable solitude, brings home to us
the knowledge that one's own pressing sense of personal
identity is the property of all mankind, that sameness is
ultimately impossible, that variation is the law, that the
swarm is composed of separate and individual ones.
And yet it still remains remarkable that all the won
derful biography of this book was discovered in a single
quarter of the town.
II
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, Professor
William James defines religion as ' the feelings, acts, and
experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as
they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what
ever they may consider the divine. ' This definition must
not be restricted to theologians and philosophers. Hamlet's
religion is more to humanity than that of Athanasius. The
12 PREFACE
religion of Crainquebille has its profound interest. Every
man who thinks at all, however noisy his public worship
of the no-God, does in his solitude feel himself to stand in
some relation to the universe. Every man has a religion.
This religion of the ordinary man must possess more
interest for the student of human nature than ' the second
hand religious life ' of the conventional formalist. It has
the attraction of diversity, the sympathy of drama, the
force of reality. It is ' the primordial thing.' ' Churches,'
says Professor James, ' when once established, live at
second-hand upon tradition, but the founders of every
Church owed their power originally to the fact of their
direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the
superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet,
but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this
case.'
Here, in this book, then, is a record of individual reli
gion manifesting itself in modern London among men with
whom a theologian would scarcely pause for a moment's
discussion, but who may seem to the reader, nevertheless,
of that very order of simple souls chosen by the Light of
the World for the central revolution of human history.
If there is aught in these men to shock our respect for
the normal, let it be remembered that profound changes in
character are not conventional. You cannot have upheaval
with platitude.
Professor James teaches the student of psychology to
expect something exceptional and eccentric in men who
have suffered a profound spiritual experience. He con
trasts such men with the ordinary religious believer ' who
follows the conventional observances of his country, whether
it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan ; his religion has
been made for him by others, communicated to him by
tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and
retained by habit.' He declares that it profits us little to
study this second-hand religious life, and says, ' We must
make search rather for the original experiences which were
the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and
imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in
PREFACE 13
individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit,
but as an acute fever rather.' As Seeley says in the phrase
which I have taken for the motto of this book, ' No heart
is pure that is not passionate ; no virtue is sate that is not
enthusiastic. '
Such religion as this book will contain is the strange,
individual, and elemental force which one finds in the Book
of Job, in the Psalms of David, in the Pilgrim's Progress.
It is the struggle of overmastered and defeated souls for
liberty, for life, for escape from hell. It reveals in the
hearts of men whom science and law would condemn as
hopeless of reformation, such possibilities of purity and
devotion as La Rochefoucauld would have us believe do
not exist even in the hearts of the best. It is religion
terribly real in men who have terribly suffered.
From this religion of my book flows everything else.
Ill
At the beginning is the revelation that the lost can be
saved. One listens too willingly nowadays to the path
ologist ready to pronounce physiological judgment upon
every soul of man. It is our avoidance of the miracle
which disposes us to the conviction that certain people are
beyond the reach of regeneration. Our fashionable support
of the Salvation Army is inspired largely by the success of
what is called its ' Social Work.' We think that a tramp
may be lifted from the gutters, stood upon his feet, put to
some task, and made a citizen ; we think that a family
sinking towards destitution may be emigrated to Canada
and saved to human society ; but, antipathy to the miracle
will not let us believe that a dipsomaniac of a sudden can
lose all desire for alcohol, that a criminal who has spent
the best part of his life in prisons may of a sudden turn
from his crime ; we are sceptical about these revolutions
i4 PREFACE
which pathology is inclined to pronounce impossible, and
as for ' conversions ' — as for the dipsomaniac and the gaol
bird becoming savers of other men in the name of religion
— as for this, we shrug our shoulders and inquire, Is it
true? or dismiss it as hysteria.
But to make a tramp a workman is commonplace.
Why are we interested in dull things? To convert the
worst of men into a saint is a miracle in psychology.
Why are we not interested in this great matter?
IV
What is ' conversion '?
According to Professor James, in whose steps we follow
with admiration and respect, ' to be converted, to be
regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to
gain assurance, are so many phrases which denote the
process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided,
and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes uni
fied and consciously right superior and happy, in con
sequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.'
Elsewhere he speaks of ' those striking instantaneous
instances of which Saint Paul's is the most eminent, and
in which often, amid tremendous emotional excitement or
perturbation of the senses, a complete division is estab
lished in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and
the new.'
These definitions, as all the world knows, are illustrated
in Professor James's book by remarkable and well-authenti
cated histories of personal conversion. The evidence for
the reality of these immense changes in character is over
whelming, and the only point where the psychologists find
themselves at issue is the means by which they have been
accomplished. As to that interesting conflict of opinion the
reader is referred to the combatants. The purpose of this
PREFACE 15
book, which I venture to describe as a footnote in narrative
to Professor James's famous work, is to bring home to
men's minds this fact concerning conversion, that, what
ever it may be, conversion is the only means by which a
radically bad person can be changed into a radically good
person.
Whatever we may think of the phenomenon itself, the
fact stands clear and unassailable that by this thing called
conversion, men consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy
become consciously right, superior, and happy. It pro
duces not a change, but a revolution in character. It does
not alter, it creates a new personality. The phrase ' a new
birth ' is not a rhetorical hyperbole, but a fact of the
physical kingdom. Men, who have been irretrievably bad>
and under conversion have become ardent savers of the lost,
tell us, with all the pathetic emphasis of their inexpressible
and impenetrable discovery, that in the change which over
came them they were conscious of being ' born again.' To
them, and we can go to no other authorities, this tre
mendous revolution in personality signifies a new birth. It
transforms Goneril into Cordelia, Caliban into Ariel, Saul
of Tarsus into Paul the apostle.
There is no medicine, no Act of Parliament, no moral
treatise, and no invention of philanthropy which can trans
form a man radically bad into a man radically good. If
the State, burdened and shackled by its horde of outcasts
and sinners, would march freely and efficiently to its goal,
it must be at the hands of religion that relief is sought.
Only religion can perform the miracle which will convert
the burden into assistance. There is nothing else ; there
can be nothing else. Science despairs of these people and
pronounces them ' hopeless ' and ' incurable. ' Politicians
find themselves at the end of their resources. Philanthropy
begins to wonder whether its charity could not be turned
into a more fertile channel. The law speaks of ' criminal
classes.' It is only religion that is not in despair about this
mass of profitless evil dragging at the heels of progress —
the religion which still believes in miracle.
Professor James, you notice, speaks of men consciously
16 PREFACE
unhappy becoming consciously happy. This phrase helps
one to understand that particular side of the Salvation
Army's methods which offends so many people — its bands,
its cheerful singing, and its laughing optimism. You
cannot imagine what effect these exhilarating bands, these
rejoicing hymns, and these radiant Salvationists produce in
streets of infinite squalor and abysmal degradation. Think
what it means for a sodden and degraded Miserable,
shivering some Sunday morning in his filthy rags on the
steps of a common lodging-house, hating himself, hating
God, and regarding the whole race of humanity with
hostility, to hear suddenly the jocund clash of brass music,
to catch words that challenge his wretchedness and despair
with exhilarating joy, and then to see among those
marching down the centre of his dreary street, happy, clean,
and rejoicing, the very men who once shared his dog's life
of misery and crime.
It is the rejoicing, singing, irrepressible happiness of
the Salvationist, which often makes him such a powerful
saver of other men. Such a spirit exists in these savers of
the lost as moved an American writer, quoted by Professor
James, to exclaim : ' I am bold to say that the work of
God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with
the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the
benefit and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of
God than the creation of the whole material universe.'
Such a phrase almost disgusts the cold-blooded. But at
the very heart of this mystery of conversion is a wild joy.
A soul consciously unhappy has become consciously happy.
A soul bound and in prison has been loosed and is free.
Does one expect a man whose entire being has suffered so
great, so pervasive, so cataclysmic a change, to walk
sedately, to measure his words, to take the temperature of
his enthusiasm and feel the pulse of his transport? The
enchanted felicity which sends this man singing and
marching into the slums is not only the token of the miracle
in himself, but is the magic, as my book shows over and
over again, which draws unhappy and dejected souls to
make surrender of their sin and wretchedness.
PREFACE 17
Does not Christ speak of a sinner's repentance actually
increasing the joy of Heaven?
I have walked with one of these converted Salvationists
— an ex-soldier and now a road-labourer* — through some
of the most evil and desperate streets in West London. I
observed how his handsome face, with its bronzed colour
and its bright eyes, the proud carriage of his vigorous
body, and the steadied cheerfulness of his voice, attracted
the notice and held the attention of the hundreds of dis
reputable people swarming in that neighbourhood. I
attributed this interest to his good looks and his air of
well-being; for my companion, on these occasions, was
not in the uniform of the Salvation Army ; fresh from his
work, fresh from his tea in a comfortable and happy home,
well dressed, smart, and attractive, he walked as an English
workman, consciously right, superior, and happy, through
streets filled with people consciously wrong, inferior, and
unhappy. But I discovered the reason for the attention
he attracted. I said that the people seemed to regard him
with wonder, and a little envy. ' You should see them,'
he replied, ' when we march down here on Sunday morning
in the red jersey; I, Tom This, Joe That, and Will Other-
fellow, all of us at one time the worst men in the whole
neighbourhood.'
The joy of the converted Salvationist, so attractive and
startling to miserable and abandoned wretches, is an
essential feature of reform by conversion. It is almost the
central force of the whole movement. But it, in its turn,
effects conversion by love of the highest order — love which
seeks out the lost and shows infinite tenderness to the
worst. Professor James has not missed this feature of
work by conversion. ' General Booth, the founder of the
Salvation Army,' he says, ' considers that the first vital
step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that
some decent human being cares enough for them to take
an interest in the question whether they are to rise or
sink.' The amazing work accomplished by the Salvation
Army — a work which I think is only now in its infancy,
* 'The Tight Handful,' p. 45
i8 PREFACE
and which will probably be subjected to endless evolutionary
changes without losing its essential character — is a work
of Love fired and inspired by Joy.
If psychologists would know the secret of this miracle,
working now in almost every country under the sun, they
will find that it lies in using men once consciously wrong,
inferior, and unhappy, using them to seek and to save,
with a contagious joy and a vital affection, those of their
own condition in life who are still consciously wrong,
inferior, and unhappy, and who are thus in despair about
themselves only because they believe that no one on earth
or in heaven cares whether they rise or sink.
The social work of the Salvation Army is as nothing
to its spiritual work, and that social work itself could not
exist without the miracle of conversion.
This psychological mystery of conversion deserves the
practical attention of the social reformer.
In this book it will be seen that all the punishments
invented by law for the protection of property and the
reformation of the criminal, fail absolutely of their purpose
in certain cases, and only render more hard and more
rebellious the lawless mind ; whereas that lawless mind,
apparently so brutal, terrible and hopeless, responds with
extraordinary sensitiveness to love and pity, and under the
influence of religion becomes perfected in all that makes
for the highest citizenship.
It would be a simple reform, and yet one of the most
humane and useful, if the State did away with the formality
of prison chaplains, men who too often perform their per
functory duties with little enthusiasm and with little hope
of achieving anything, and admitted, under proper authority,
some such organization as the Salvation Army, which has
PREFACE 19
in its ranks many men who have themselves suffered in
prison, who know the criminal mind, and who would
approach the most deplorable and hopeless case with the
certain knowledge that conversion is possible.
Few people, I think, after reading this book, will be
able to enunciate the prayer, ' That it may please Thee to
have pity upon all prisoners and captives,' without feeling
that divine pity will only manifest itself when human pity
has learned to make use of common sense in the matter of
its State prisons.
The strange revelations which this book makes con
cerning our prisons and our police, while they must shock
and surprise the reader, will lead, I hope, to some change
in administration which will prevent the manufacture of a
criminal class — one of the achievements of the present
system.
The police have many virtues, the prison system has of
late years been greatly improved, but, as this book will
show, for certain men, forming what is called the criminal
class, police and prison join forces to build a barrier against
their improvement. It is appalling to think that men who
once got into the black books of the police of their neigh
bourhood, were marked down by them for such cruel
harassing, such fiendish persecution, and such cowardly
bullying as hardly disgraced a man-o'-war in the worst
days of the press-gang.
However this particular attitude of the police towards
their enemies may have changed of late, for masses of
people in London the police still exist, not as the guardians
of public order, but as agents of the rich and enemies of
the poor.
Until one penetrates into the vast areas of destitution
which crowd on every side the little centre of London's
wealth and prosperity, it is impossible to realize how largely
this barbarous notion of the police rules the minds of the
multitude. Few things so sharply challenge our civiliza
tion deeply reflected on as this attitude of the poor towards
the guardians of public order.
20 PREFACE
VI
While it is impossible for one to say, after reading the
strange histories recorded in this volume, that any man is
hopelessly lost to religion virtue and self-respect, the ancient
conviction remains — a form of the adage which says, Pre
vention is better than Cure — that the business of all
reformation begins with the child.
In the first pages of this book I shall attempt to sketch
the neighbourhood in which I made the acquaintance of my
broken earthenware. London is made up of such localities,
few, perhaps, worse, many as bad, but all marked by the
one great damning shame of child waste. Wherever you
go in London you will find children living under the horrible
influence of parents who deny, with every commandment
in the decalogue, the authority of the moral sense and the
commonest laws of sanitation. To leave these children
under the domination of such parents is to imperil their
physical and moral well-being, is to bring up a posterity
unworthy of a proud and high-spirited nation, is to lay
upon our children an increase of that burden which is
already causing us to stumble in our march.
' One million people are living on the ratepayers,' says
a newspaper. ' Twenty-six millions of money are raised in
one way or another to support this host of paupers.' The
Salvation Army speaks of ' the vast army — numbering tens
of thousands — of tramps who prey on the public charity to
the estimated extent of three millions a year, who do no
work, and who cost the community an immense sum in
Poor Law relief.'
Is the burden being lightened or increased? Is it likely
to lighten or decrease while the children of the slums are
left with their abominable parents?
There is another aspect. Is it humane, has it the sanc
tion of the religious conscience of the nation, that children
should be left to live with parents infinitely below the moral
standard which exists among the negroes of Africa?
We have ceased to be sentimental. Such a ballad as
PREFACE 21
The Cry of the Children would fail to move the contem
porary world. But we are practical, we are anxious to do
well. Some appeal addressed to the religious conscience
of the nation in the name of this great army of soiled
innocence and poisoned childhood — if it showed a practical
way out — would surely meet with a response. The
Churches, who have divine reasons for conserving the
purity of the child, and politicians, whose responsibility to
posterity is the child, must feel if they give attention to
this subject that the necessity for immediate and drastic
action is at our doors.
In the meantime there is appalling waste, hideous ruin,
and unthinkable pain. One reads, for instance : ' Turn to
any town, and you find the officials saying, " There are
scores of little children in this town — nay (where the town
is a large one) hundreds — living under circumstances of the
most shocking depravity : living in conditions from which,
under existing Acts of Parliament, they ought to be rescued,
living in surroundings in which it is impossible for them
to grow up other than a burden and a danger to the State :
living in a manner which makes them a source of moral
defilement to all other children with whom they come in
contact, whether at school or elsewhere : living in what are
nothing else than human middens.'
At a low estimate the children of the worst tramps
number five thousand, a fragment of the army of childhood
doomed to unspeakable suffering and corruption from their
infancy ; in Great Britain there are thirty thousand children
' doomed to be criminals, doomed to be outcasts, to be even
worse than that.'
VII
Beyond seeking to interest the reader in the psycho
logical mystery of conversion, and beyond seeking to bring
home to practical men the immense value of personal
religion in the work of social regeneration, that is to say,
22 PREFACE
in the work of developing national character, this book
endeavours to create sympathy for two rational and eco
nomic reforms : a reform of our prison system, especially
in its educative and saving functions ; and a reform of our
administration as touching the children of iniquitous
parents.
The note of the book is not one of despair ; it is dis
tinctly one of hope. That is why action is so reasonable
and so compelling.
A PART OF LONDON
A TURNING from one of the great main roads on the
western side of London brings you into a district which
is chiefly famous for containing some of the worst streets,
and some of the lowest characters, known to the police.
The residents of this neighbourhood will point out to you,
with local pride, the public-house frequented by Milsom and
Fowler before their terrible murder in Muswrell Hill.
You would never suspect, while you pass down the main
road, the existence of so deplorable a quarter. On either
side of you are some of the finest private houses in London ;
the traffic of carriages and automobiles is incessant ; the
pavements are vivid and animated with a ceaseless proces
sion of humanity ; and everywhere one sees that flagrant
exhibition of great wealth which almost frightens those who
know the destitution of the poor. Presently the private
houses end, and shops begin. In the midst of these shops,
which are not of the first-class, stands a station of the
Underground Railway. Here there is noise, smell, and
shabbiness. Motor omnibuses, panting and vibrating, are
drawn up at the kerb ; dirty and ragged newspaper lads
toss for pennies and discuss horse-races ; flower-girls, with
the leather straps of their baskets depressing their shoulders,
exhibit bright flowers, whose contrast to their human ugli
ness is complete ; under the glass porch of the railway
station there is always a crowd of people waiting for an
omnibus or a friend ; and the traffic just here is heavy,
noisy, and continuous, for this point is the junction of
several roads.
The pavement is strewn with dust, dirt, and refuse.
You tread upon a carpet of omnibus tickets, scraps of news
paper, cigarette ends, matches, tissue paper from oranges,
24 A PART OF LONDON
hairpins, and that inevitable chaff of the London streets,
composed of broken straw, hay, and dust, which the lightest
wind can lift and blow into the eyes of pedestrians.
Disagreeable as this busy corner is, and that in many
ways, one still sees on every side women extravagantly
dressed, men of fashion, and a tide of pleasure traffic which
suggests nothing but wealth, ease, and festivity.
But with one step you are out of this cheerful vulgar
world.
The quarter of London which we are about to penetrate
is approached from the thronging pavements of the main
thoroughfare by a road even more densely packed. It is
the market street of the Miserables. The shops are faced
by an unbroken line of stalls at the kerb's edge. Between
the darkened windows of the shops and the brilliant stalls
of the gutter, passes a swarm of very dirty and brutal-
looking people, mostly women, the coppers of whose greasy
purses, acquired by sin and crime, are eagerly sought by
the hoarse-voiced stall-holders.
Apparently the tradesmen who pay rent and rates have
nothing to do but stand desolately at their shop-doors, and
watch the thriving business of their more than opposite
neighbours. Among these stalls, where you can buy the
best strawberries for three-halfpence a pound, meat and
fish for a few pence, corsets, caps, and shoes for next to
nothing, one observes with some astonishment cut flowers
and flowers in pots, pictures, and books. Is it not won
derful that the very poor buy flowers, and books, and
pictures? It is also interesting to notice that while the
customer stands in front of the fruit and vegetable, or fish
and meat stall, making a bargain, the wholesale merchant,
in his smart pony and trap, is at the back waiting to do
business with the retailer. The commerce of the great city,
flowing in from all the seas of the world, has these strange
and numerous backwaters.
At the end of this busy road, terminated by several
public-houses, one comes into the private quarter of the
neighbourhood. Here you find almost every kind of house
except the best. You find the large and comfortable villa,
A PART OF LONDON 25
once resplendent with the new paint and flower-boxes dear
to the prosperous citizen, and the straight line of neat, low,
one-storied houses dear to the working man. All are now
shabby, all are now stricken with misery. The large villa
is occupied by some more or less respectable workman, who
lives in the basement and lets off the other floors. The
front garden is uncultivated. The pavements and roadway
are filled with shouting children, who chalk wickets on
garden walls, and lines for hop-scotch on the pavement.
Many of these children, the great majority, are wonderfully
well clothed, beautifully clean, and appear far more happy
and vigorous than their anaemic contemporaries of Ken
sington Gardens. At one of these houses, rented and
occupied in the basement by a Salvationist, as many as
seventy beggars have called from the neighbouring street
in a single week.
One turns out of these respectable streets, where the
children are playing cricket, cherry-bobs, hop-scotch, hoops,
and cards, and suddenly finds oneself in streets miserable
and evil beyond description.
These are streets of once decent two-storied villas, now
lodging-houses. The very atmosphere is different. One
is conscious first of dejection, then of some hideous and
abysmal degradation. It is not only the people who make
this impression on one's mind, but the houses themselves
Dear God, the very houses seem accursed ! The bricks
are crusted, and in a dull fashion shiny with grime ; the
doors, window-frames, and railings are dark with dirt only
disturbed by fresh accretions ; the flights of steps leading
up to the front doors, under their foul porches, are worn,
broken, and greasy ; the doors and windows in the reeking
basements have been smashed up in nearly every case for
firewood — again and again one sees the window-space rough-
boarded by some landlord anxious to preserve his property
from the rain. Here and there a rod is missing from the
iron railings — it has been twisted out and used as a weapon.
In these streets, on a summer evening, you find the
flights of steps occupied by the lodgers, and the pavements
and roadways swarming with their children. The men are
26 A PART OF LONDON
thieves, begging-letter writers, pickpockets, bookmaker's
touts, totters (rag and bone men), and trouncers (men paid
by costermongers to shout their wares), and bullies. The
women add to their common degradation — which may be
imagined — the arts of the pickpocket, the beggar, the shop
lifter, and the bully.
A drunken man, who wakes up to find himself in one of
these houses, is given a few old rags wherein to make his
return home, but his purse, his watch, his pocket-book, and
his papers are not more tenaciously claimed by his terrible
host than every shred of his clothing.
Sunday morning witnesses the strangest sight in these
streets. The lodgers hold a bazaar. From end to end the
railings are hung with fusty and almost moving rags, the
refuse of the week's picking and stealing, which no pawn
broker can be brought to buy. Neighbours, barely dressed,
many of them with black eyes, bandaged heads, and broken
mouths, turn out to inspect this frightful collection of rags.
There is bargaining, buying, and exchanging. Practically
naked children look on, and learn the tricks of the trade.
If you could see these bareheaded women, with their
hanging hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths ; if
you could see them there, half-dressed, and that in a
draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible ; and if
you could hear the appalling language loading their hoarse
voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some
impression of their modes of thought, you would say that
human nature, in the earliest and most barbarous of its
evolutionary changes, had never, could never, have been like
this ; that these people are moving on in a line of their
own, that they have produced something definitely non-
human, which is as distinct from humanity as the anthro
poid ape. Ruth, or even Mary of Magdala, at the beginning
of the line ; two thousand years of progress ; and then these
corrupt and mangy things at the end ! This is not to be
believed. No ; they do not belong to the advancing line,
they have never been human. For the honour of humanity,
one rejects them.
Concerning the men, one thing only need be said. Every
A PART OF LONDON 27
woman — the oldest hag amongst them — challenged me with
a hating stare, the boldness and effrontery of which struck
me more than the enmity ; every man seemed to be ashamed.
There was cunning in their faces, there was every expression
of stealth and underhand craft, but they looked and lowered
their eyes. I was more impressed by this apparent shame-
facedness of the men than by the murderous hostility of
the women. They seemed to me ' consciously wrong,
inferior, and unhappy.'
But more than by anything concerning the men and
women of this neighbourhood, one is impressed by the
swarm of dreggy children playing their poor little pavement
games in the shadow of these lodging-houses. Some — can
it be believed? — are decently clothed and look as if they
are sometimes washed ; degraded mothers, sitting on the
doorsteps, may be seen proudly exhibiting a baby to their
friends, cooing over it, brushing its poor little pale cheek
with a black finger, suddenly stooping their foul faces to
cover the little mouth with gay and laughing kisses ; one
of my first experiences in these streets was to hear the
sudden opening of a top-story window, to see a frightful
woman thrust herself half out, and to hear her shout to a
toddling child to come out of the road and on to the pave
ment — although not a cart of any kind was in view ; but
this sentimental affection of the mother does not last very
far beyond the period of helpless infancy. The mass of
these children above five or six years of age are terribly
neglected. I have never seen children more dirty, more
foully clothed, more dejected-looking. In all cases, to use
a phrase which I am told is common in the district, these
poor children are ' lousy as a cuckoo.' I saw many children
with sores and boils ; I also saw some children whose eyes
looked out at me from a face that was nothing but a scab.
A mortuary chapel has had to be built for this neigh
bourhood. The rooms of the houses are so crowded that
directly a person dies the body must be moved.
Can the boys of these dreadful streets grow into any
thing but hooligans, or the girls do anything but earn money
in their mothers' fashion?
28 A PART OF LONDON
Let me put the common question, but with real
emphasis : Would we allow a dog to live in these streets?
Well, into these streets come day after day, and every
Sunday, the little vigorous corps of the Salvation Army
stationed in this quarter of London. The adjutant of this
corps some years ago was a beautiful and delicate girl.
She prayed at the bedside of dying men and women in these
lodging-houses ; she taught children to pray ; she went into
public-houses and persuaded the violent blackguards of the
town to come away ; she pleaded with the most desperate
women at street corners ; she preached in the open streets
on Sundays ; she stood guard over the doors of men mad
for drink and refused to let them out.*
It is to the work of this wonderful woman — so gracious,
so modest, and so sweet — that one may trace the miracles
whose histories are contained in the following pages. The
energy, resolution, and splendid cheerfulness of the present
corps — some of them her own personal converts — may like
wise be traced to her influence. She has left in these foul
streets the fragrance of her personality, a fragrance of the
lilies of a pure soul.
1 Ah !' exclaimed an old gaol-bird, showing me the photo
graph of this woman ; * if anybody goes to heaven, it'll
be that there little angel of God.'
They call her the angel-adjutant.
* On one occasion this little woman was walking home through evil
streets after midnight, when a drunken man asked her if he might travel
by her side. After going some way the man said : ' No, you aren't
afraid ' ; and then he mumbled to himself — ' Never insults the likes of
you, because you care for the likes of us.'
THE PUNCHER
T7TTHAT strikes one most in the appearance of this
* short, broad-shouldered, red-haired prize-fighter is
the extreme refinement of his features. His face is pale,
with that almost transparent pallor of the red-haired ; the
expression is weary, heavy, and careworn ; the features are
small, delicate, and regular ; one cannot believe that the
light-coloured eyes have been hammered, and the small,
almost girlish mouth rattled with blows ; he might be a
poet, the last role one would ascribe to him is that of the
ring.
Of all the men in this little group of the ' saved,' he is
the saddest^ quietest, and most restrained. He is the least
communicative, too ; one has to get his history more from
others than from himself. He speaks slowly, unwillingly,
in a voice so low that one must stretch the ear to hear
him ; he regards one with the look of a soul that does not
expect to be understood ; one feels that he is carrying a
burden ; at times one is tempted to wonder whether he
really does feel himself to be consciously right, superior,
and happy.
I account for this sorrowfulness of manner, first, by the
natural inexcitability of a prize-fighter's temperament, and
secondly, by the profound depths of his spiritual nature,
which keeps him dissatisfied with the results of his work
for others.
This man, whose fame as a prize-fighter still renders
him a hero of the first magnitude among his neighbours,
has been the means of saving some of the worst men in
the place. Unpaid by the Salvation Army, and devoting
every hour of his spare time to its work, the Puncher
hungers to save by the score and by the hundred. I
30 THE PUNCHER
discovered in his nature a mothering and compassionate
yearning for the souls of unhappy men, the souls of men
estranging themselves from God. One perceives that every
man so conscious of a mission for saving, and so conscious
of the appalling misery of London, must be quiet, and
silent, and sorrowful.
He is the son of fairly respectable people who came
gradually down and down, till their home was a loft in
some mews patronized by cabmen. It was here that the
consciousness of the Puncher received its first stimulus of
ambition. There was in the yard, working among the cabs
and horses, a young man pointed out by the denizens of
that dirty place as a wonderful hero. He had fought some
one in a great fight on Wormwood Scrubbs, and had beaten
him to bits.
' I remember distinctly, just as if it was yesterday,' said
the reflective Puncher, speaking in his low voice and look
ing sadly away from me ; ' I remember distinctly the feeling
that used to come over me whenever I looked at that man.
I don't remember life before that. It seems to me that I
only began to live then. And this was the feeling, I wanted
to be like that man. I wanted to fight. I wanted people
to point at me, and say : " There''s a fighting man !" I
never thought I should be as big a man as the cock of
our yard ; I only wanted to be something like him ; some
thing as near to him as strength and pluck could carry me.
But the day came ' — he added, with a touch of pride —
* when I stood up to that very man, a bit of a boy, I was,
too — and I smothered him. Yes ; I smothered him. Ay,
and afterwards many a man bigger than him ; a lot
bigger. '
While he was a boy, still stirred by these heroic long
ings, he started out on a career of wildness and daring.
He had all those virile, headstrong, and daring qualities
which in such a country as Canada or South Africa would
have made him a useful member of society, but which in
London drove him into crime. His first escapade was
sterling a duck from Regent's Park, for which offence he
made his appearance before a magistrate. Then one day
THE PUNCHER 31
he stole several bundles of cloth from a shop, sold them
to the keeper of a marine store, and once more, this time
with the storekeeper at his side, stood in the dock of a
police court. The storekeeper went to prison, the boy was
fined.
His animal spirits got him into trouble at school. There
was no master able to influence his character. He was
pronounced utterly unmanageable ; his temper was said to
be ungovernable ; the authorities said that he endangered
the lives of other boys by flinging slates about as if he
wanted to kill someone. He was turned out of nearly every
school in Marylebone.
He was still a boy when he stole a bottle of rum from
a grocer's barrow, shared it with some of his mates, and
made himself so hopelessly drunk that he fell into Regent's
Canal. At the age of seventeen he was put to work.
Work, it was thought, might tame his wild spirits. More
over, it was necessary for him to earn bread. He became
a porter at Smithfield Meat Market.
It was at this time that he began seriously to discipline
his fighting qualities. He trained under a man whom
middle-aged sportsmen will remember, the redoubtable
Nobby Thorpe. In a few months he was a hero, and a
man of substance.
He fought sixteen famous fights at Wormwood Scrubbs,
and won them all. Then came a challenge to meet Eycott
at the Horse and Groom Tavern in Long Acre. In those
days certain of the public-houses patronized by sporting
noblemen had covered yards at the back of their premises
for the purpose of prize-fights. It was in one of these
places that the young porter from Smithfield Market met
Eycott, a rare champion. The fight went through four
teen rounds, and the Puncher was declared victor. Eycott
objected to this decision. The Puncher was game, and
they fought again. In three rounds he had won easily.
This victory meant not only money, but fame and the
patronage of powerful men. The porter from Smithfield
became the flash fighting-man, a terrible type of humanity.
He swaggered with lords and shook his fist in the face of
32 THE PUNCHER
the world. He met his trainer at the ' Horse and Groom,'
and smothered him in eight rounds. Then came fights with
Shields, of Marylebone ; Darkie Barton, of Battersea ; Tom
Woolley, of Walsall ; and Bill Baxter, of Shoreditch. At
some of these fights at the back of London taverns, there
were as many as sixteen members of the House of Lords,
in addition to many of the most famous men on the turf.
When the National Sporting Club was organized, the
Puncher was chosen to open it in a great fight, still
remembered, with Stanton Abbott. One of his most
famous encounters was with Bill Bell, of Hoxton ; they
fought with bare fists, on Lord de Clifford's estate in
Devonshire.
The record of the Puncher is, that never once was he
beaten by his own weight.
In what state was he at this period of his life? Many
times he entered the ring so drunk that the referees
objected. He was one of those extraordinary men who can
saturate their bodies with alcohol and perform in a condi
tion of complete drunkenness physical feats requiring the
coolest brain and the deadliest cunning. It was the very
obstinacy of his body to break down under this terrible
strain which ultimately plunged him into ruin.
With his pockets full of money he married, bought a
laundry business, took a comfortable house, kept servants,
a carriage, and a pair of horses, went to race meetings,
associated as a hero with the rich and powerful, and lived
a life of racket and debauchery.
His body held out. He was perfectly strong, perfectly
fit. The truth is his whole system was singing with the
joy of success. His brain was on fire. He felt himself
capable of enormous things. He was drunk nearly every
day of his life. Nothing mattered.
When he began to feel the days of his fighting drawing
to a close, he looked about him for another means of earn
ing money quickly and easily. He had not far to look.
He started a racing business.
His name, so famous to the sporting world, was adver
tised as * A guarantee of Good Faith.' Under the cloak
THE PUNCHER 33
of this name he tricked and cheated in a hundred cunning
and disgraceful ways. He became the member of a gang.
A tip was given, and with an air of mystery was worked
for all it was worth by the touts and the prophets ; the
horse tipped was a certain loser. The men who gave the
tip profited by the wagers made confidently by their friends
and patrons. The gang did well, and prospered. The
Puncher's guarantee of good faith sold many a sportsman
what is called ' a pup.'
But suddenly some of these schemes, advancing in bold
ness, attracted the attention of the police. The Puncher
lost at a stroke his fame, his popularity, his good name.
He was designated a low blackguard, and fell from wealth
to poverty. His wife and her relations, who had sunned
themselves in his wealth, became scornful and antagonistic.
The Puncher felt this treatment, and it made him worse.
Again and again he went to prison ; each time he came out
it was to find his wife and children sinking deeper into
poverty, and showing him a colder and a deadlier hatred.
The old glory of an establishment and horses had quite
departed. His experience of Dives' splendour was short
lived. Destiny prepared for him a longer experience in
the role of Lazarus.
In one single year, from October, 1904, to October, 1905,
he was seventeen times convicted, chiefly for drunkenness.
His wife now left him for the third time, determined that
this should be the last. She had done with the wretch.
He was alone in poverty with his madness, an insatiable
passion for drink.
He told me something of the way in which he obtained
drink during this destitute period of his life. He used to
intimidate those of his old racing companions whom it was
perfectly safe to blackmail ; he would waylay the rich and
powerful, and what is called ' pitch a tale ' ; when absolutely
penniless and mad for drink, he would march into any
crowded public-houses where he was known, and demand
it. He was never refused.
These fighting-men, when they come down to poverty,
however weak and broken they may be, can live in a certain
34 THE PUNCHER
fashion on the terror of their past strength. They do not
cadge ; they demand. There are plenty of publicans who
themselves give drink to these terrible men — making them
first promise that they will go away — in order to prevent a
disturbance, possibly a fight.
The Puncher lived in this way. Food had no attraction
for him, indeed, he had a feeling of repulsion for anything
in the nature of solid nourishment ; everything was in drink.
He was a blazing mass of alcoholic energy. The state into
which he had sunk can only be understood by a medical
man. His body was supported by alcohol and nothing
else. Try and imagine the condition of his brain.
He lived now in the common lodging-houses of which
I have written — lodging-houses occupied by the lowest,
most desperate, and infinitely the most loathsome creatures
on the face of the earth. He found no horror in these
places. He was their king. No one dared to interfere
with him. He was more terrible in his rags and madness
than in the days of his splendour. Murder shone in his
eyes ; it was a word often on his lips. If he hit a man, that
man fell like a stone. The Puncher, fed by alcohol, was
something that spread terror through the district. As a
prize-fighter he had been an object of awe ; now he was an
object of fear. Then he had been a man ; now he was a
devil.
His brain was active and cunning in one direction — the
obtaining of money for drink. He devised a hundred ways
for raising the wind. This outcast in his rags was not an
ordinary cadging beggar ; he was a man who had known
wealth and comfort ; a pot or two of four-ale could not
satisfy the fiery longings of his body. He wanted drink
always and for ever. He wanted to sit at his ease, and
call for drink after drink, till he slept satisfied for a little ;
then to wake and find more drink waiting for him.
One of his tricks brought him into collision with his
wife's family. He managed to obtain a few pawn-tickets for
forfeited jewellery, which was to be sold by auction. Many
of the publicans in low houses deal in these tickets. The
Puncher bethought him of a young relative of his wife's,
THE PUNCHER 35
who had a good situation in an office. Thither he went,
and showed his tickets.
He asked for a loan of seven shillings and sixpence on
one of these tickets. He said that he knew a good thing
for Epsom on the following day ; meant to walk there that
night and back the horse if he found that his information
still held good.
The money was given.
It was a great sum to him in those days, but no sooner
was he out of the office than it maddened him by its mean
ness. He contrasted his miserable present with his glorious
past. He cursed fate, he cursed himself. What a fool he
had been to ask so little ! He would go back and get more.
But first he must drink.
When the silver had gone, he went back and got gold.
He was what is called ' drunk to the world ' when this
relation of his wife — who believed him at Epsom — came
upon him unexpectedly.
The news reached his wife and children that he had
begun to prey upon decent members of the family. The
news of what his wife was saying of him reached the
Puncher. It sank deeply into his mind, and with it he
himself sank deeper into the mud.
One day the Puncher's eldest son sought him out in
his low haunts. The prize-fighter loved this boy above
everything on earth, except drink. He looked up and saw
his son standing before him in the uniform of the Salvation
Army.
' What God's foolery is this?' he demanded, and
laughed.
The boy pleaded with his father. He spoke of getting
back from misery to comfort, of a return from wretched
ness and destitution to happiness and home-love. With
all the earnestness he could command, with all the anxiety
of a son to save his father, the lad pleaded with the
Puncher.
The Puncher laughed.
He had one form of expression for an answer. In his
rags, shame, and frightful beastliness, he looked proudly
36 THE PUNCHER
at his son, and exclaimed, 'Me! — a Salvationist!' The
contempt was complete.
That phrase haunted him and delighted him, long after
the son had retired discomfited. ' Me ! — a Salvationist !'
he kept on repeating, and every time he laughed with a
rich delight. It was the first joke he had enjoyed for a
year.
He got profoundly drunk, out of sheer joy, and was in
trouble with the police. That night he slept in a cell at
the police-court.
The next day was Sunday.
He was in his cell, tortured by thirst, mad with the rage
of a caged beast, cursing God for this long Sunday of
solitude and imprisonment, when suddenly he heard the
noise of a band through the little grating at the top of
his cell.
He considered, and knew it to be the band of the
Salvation Army.
He thought of his son.
As he sat there, dwelling on all the memories evoked
by the thought of his boy, he compared his wretchedness
and despair with the lad's brightness and goodness, and
suddenly melting into tears, vowed that he would at least
make an effort to live a decent life.
He spent that Sunday striving to prepare himself for
the great struggle. He endeavoured to see clearly what
it would mean. The temptation to drink, he knew well,
would continually assail him. The distaste for steady work,
which had always characterized him, would take long to
overcome. It would be a hard fight, the hardest he had
ever put up, but it was worth it. Instead of the lodging-
house, a home ; instead of the lowest companionship, the
love of wife and children ; instead of the prison, security
and peace ! Surely, this was worth a big fight.
On the following morning he stood in the dock. There
were plenty of officials to tell the magistrate the past record
of this prisoner. Unfortunately there was no one to tell
him what thoughts had been working in his brain all that
long Sunday in the terrible solitude of the cell. The
THE PUNCHER 37
sentence was a month's hard labour. No doubt many
people who read the case in the newspaper said that the
punishment was inadequate, and called the Puncher hard
names. One can only judge men by written statements :
the admission of anything else is impossible. The Puncher
deserved his month.
What did that month's imprisonment do fer him in
his new state of mind? It had a curious effect upon him.
It roused him into a new form of mental energy. Braced,
vigorous, and restored to something of his old glowing joy
in his strength, he looked with an equal loathing both on
hio life of horror and on his intention to reform it.
His soul was filled with a vague consciousness of some
unattainable superiority which he had missed by his past
life, and which he would have even further degraded by
his notion of a reformation. Only in the deplorable con
dition to which drink had reduced him, could he have
entertained the base notion of creeping back to his wife
with a plea for pity and forgiveness. He revolted from
himself. How low must he have fallen to contemplate the
cowardice of repentance ! God in Heaven, to what further
depths of infamous disgust might he descend, if it were
possible for him a few hours ago to think of religion !
Do you understand this condition of his mind ?
He was conscious of some unattainable superiority. He
felt himself infinitely above his degradation, and infinitely
above his pious son in the red jersey. He was conscious
of a great manhood, of powers capable of inexpressible
achievement, of some immense superiority just beyond his
reach, and of which the world — God curse it ! — had cheated
him.
No; not unattainable.
It flashed upon him that it was attainable.
He could attain it by Death.
This man, whose pale and refined face tells of a pro
found spiritual warfare, felt himself grow to the fulness of
his stature in the realization that death would save him
from himself.
When he left the prison his mind was made up.
38 THE PUNCHER
He would murder his wife, and end his life by dying
gamely on the scaffold.
This intention was perfectly clear and definite in his
mind. It was a fixed idea. So powerful was it, of such
extraordinary power, that it utterly destroyed his mania
for drink. Psychologists, interested to observe how a reli
gious idea will suddenly uproot a long-established habit,
will be equally interested to find how an idea of hate
destroyed the appetite for alcohol in the body of a man
literally saturated with the poison. The old-established
madness was exorcised by a single idea formed in the mind
during a period of enforced deprivation. One devil went
out, another entered.
The Puncher went straight from the prison to some of
his old sporting acquaintances. He borrowed a sovereign.
He drank with his friends till he was drunk, because they
pressed him, but he did not break the sovereign for drink.
With this money he purchased a butcher's knife and a
hamper of food. He concealed the knife on his person,
and carried the provisions to his wife.
The woman, who had suffered terribly at his hands,
but who had never helped him, received his advances chil
lingly. He proposed a reconciliation, presenting the food
as his peace-offering. Then he suggested a visit to the
local music-hall. Apparently out of fear of his fists, she
accepted his proposal. She accepted the proposal of a man
with murder in his heart, the means of murder on his
person, and a man who was drunk.
The Puncher's hatred for his wife was deep-seated.
Her personality jarred upon him at every point. On her,
too, centred the accumulated animosity he felt for her
relations, who had done so much, he considered, to break
up his home. To murder her did not in the least daunt
his mind ; the contemplation of the act did not unnerve nor
strike him as horrible ; rather it seemed to him in the nature
of achievement, delightful justice, getting even with all his
multitudinous enemies at one stroke.
They went out from the house.
As they passed down the street, a door opened, and a
THE PUNCHER 39
Salvationist, who knew the Puncher and knew his son,
came out and joined them. He asked if husband and wife
were coming to the meeting. The Puncher said, No. The
Salvationist — himself a converted drunkard and wife-beater
— turned and looked the prize-fighter in the face. He told
him simply and straightly, looking at him as they went
down the street, that he could never be happy until his
soul was at peace. He said this with emphatic meaning.
Then he said, ' God has got a better life for you, and
you know it.' The Puncher struck across the road and
entered a public-house. His wife waited at the door for
her murderer.
He says that while he stood drinking in the bar, feel
ing no other emotion than annoyance at the Salvationist's
interference, suddenly he saw a vision. The nature of this
vision was not exalted. In a flash he saw that his wife
was murdered, just as he had planned and desired ; that
he had died game on the scaffold, just as he had deter
mined ; the thing was done ; vengeance wreaked, apotheosis
attained — he had died game : he was dead, and the world
was done with. All this in a flash of consciousness, and
with it the despairing knowledge that he was still not at
rest. Somewhere in the universe, disembodied and appal
lingly alone, his soul was unhappy. He knew that he was
dead ; he knew that the world was done with ; but he was
conscious, he was unhappy.
This was the vision. With it he saw the world point
ing at his son, and saying, * That's young - — , whose
father was hanged for murdering his mother. '
A wave of shame swept over him ; he came out of his
vision with this sense of horror and shame drenching his
thought. For the first time in all his life he was stunned
by realization of his degradation and infamy. He knew
himself.
How the vision came may be easily explained by sub
conscious mentation. He had long meditated the crime of
murdering his wife, he had long brooded upon the glory
of dying game ; an explosion of nervous energy presented
him, even as it presented Macbeth, with anticipatory
40 THE PUNCHER
realization of his thought. In other words, we know all
about the mechanism of the piano ; but, the musician at
the keyboard? How did shame come to this man utterly
hardened and depraved? And what, in the language of
psychology, is shame? How does grey matter become
ashamed of itself? How do the wires of the piano become
aware of the feelings of the sonata? Moreover, there is
this to be accounted for : the immediate effect of the
vision.
That effect was ' conversion,' in other words, a re
creation of the man's entire and several fields of conscious
ness. And, he was drunk at the time.
Drunk as he was, he went straight out from the public-
house to the hall where the Salvation Army was holding
its meeting. His wife went with him. He said to her,
1 I'm going to join the Army.' At the end of the meeting
he rose from his seat, went to the penitent's form, bowed
himself there, and like the man in the parable cried out
that God would be merciful to him, a sinner. His wife
knelt at his side.
He says that it is impossible to describe his sensations.
The past dropped clear away from him. An immense
weight lifted from his brain. He felt light as air. He
felt clean. He felt happy. All the ancient words used to
symbolize the spiritual experience of instant and complete
regeneration may be employed to describe his feelings, but
they .all fail to convey with satisfaction to himself the
immediate and delicious joy which ravished his conscious
ness. He cannot say what it was. All he knows is that
there, at the penitent form, he was dismantled of old horror
and clothed afresh in newness and joy.
Whatever the effect upon himself, the effect of this con
version on the neighbourhood was amazing. The news of
it spread to every foul court and alley, to every beerhouse
and gin-palace, to every coster's barrow and street corner,
to every common lodging-house and cellar in all that quarter
of the town. There is no hero to these people like a prize
fighter ; let him come down, as the Puncher had come down,
to rags, prison, and the lodging-house — still, trailing clouds
THE PUNCHER 41
of glory does he come, and the rest worship their idol even
when he lies in the gutter.
When the Sunday came and this great hero marched
out of barracks with the band and the banners and the
lasses, there were thousands to witness the sight — a dense
mass of poverty-stricken London, dazed into wonderment
by a prize-fighter's soul. ' The Puncher's got religion !'
was the whispered amazement, and some wondered whether
he had got it bad enough to last, or whether he would soon
get over it and be himself again. Little boys swelled the
multitude, gazing at the prize-fighter who had got religion.
He had got it badly.
His home became comfortable and happy. He appeared
at all the meetings. No desire for tobacco or drink dis
turbed his peace or threatened his holiness. The neigh
bourhood saw this great fighter going every night to the
Army Hall, and marching every Sunday to the meetings in
the open air.
Then they saw something else.
The wonder of the Puncher is what Salvationist*- rail
his ' love for souls.' This is a phrase which means the
intense and concentrated compassion for the dnhappiness
of others which visits a man who has discovered the only
means of obtaining happiness. The Puncher was not con
tent with the joy of having his own soul saved ; he wanted
to save others. He did not move away from the neigh
bourhood which had witnessed his shame, but lived there
the life of a missionary. Every hour of his spare time,
every shilling he could spare from his home, was given to
saving men with whom he had companied in every con
ceivable baseness and misery. This man, as other narra
tives will show, has been the means of saving men appa
rently the most hopeless. To this day, working hard for
his living, and with tragedy deepening in his life, he is
still to be found in that bad quarter of London, spending
his time and his money in this work of rescuing the lost.
I never met a quieter soul so set upon this bitter and
despairing task of rescue.
And hear something of what he has gone through.
42 THE PUNCHER
After his conversion, and when it seemed quite certain
that he would never revert, a lady set up the Puncher and
two other men with a pony and cart, that they might
become travelling greengrocers. The business prospered.
The prize-fighter and ex-dandy was quite happy in his
work. Money came sufficiently for the needs of his home.
The work was hard and incessant, but it was interesting.
Then his wife gradually cooled towards the Army. It
was not respectable enough for her relations. She did not
gird at her husband, but she withheld sympathy. Probably
she wished him to remain a Salvationist, if that meant her
own immunity from his chastisement ; but she would have
been better pleased, from a social point of view, if the
Puncher had kept his morality and sloughed his religion.
Almost more difficult to bear, the son whom he loved
so greatly — the boy who had done so much to save him —
resigned from the Army and gave his thoughts to other
things. He did not become bad or vicious, or even
indifferent to religion, but the old enthusiasm, the old
energy which alone can keep a mind to this exacting form
of service, vanished. The Puncher was the only Salva
tionist left in his home.
One bitter winter's day he was on his rounds v/ith the
pony-cart in North London. The third partner in the
venture had gone out of the business. The Puncher was
on this round with the other man, his only partner.
' Puncher,' said this man, pulling up at a public-house,
' I'm going to have a nip of whisky; it's perishing cold.
You come in too, and have a glass of port — port's
teetotaller's drink.'
The Puncher said, No. The partner wheedled and
coaxed. It was cold.
1 Port's teetotaller's drink,' said the partner. * One
glass can't hurt a man like you; come on. I'll stand it.'
The Puncher fell. He was miserable, lonely, and
unhappy in his home. It was cold. His partner stood in
the tavern, calling him in. The Puncher followed him.
He thinks that the wine was drugged. He dropped like
a shot man on the floor of the public-house, and when they
THE PUNCHER 43
picked him up, and got him round, his partner had dis
appeared with the pony and trap. Such is one aspect of
the life of London. In the City the same kind of clever
ness is practised in other ways. The Puncher was still
drunk when he arrived back in his own neighbourhood.
People seeing him stagger through the streets did not
laugh nor mock ; they were genuinely sorry — even the
worst of them — to see this great-hearted man fallen back
into ruin. A kind of silence held the crowded streets as
the Puncher with sunk head and giving legs shambled to
his home, a terrible look in his eyes and jaws.
Then the tongues wagged. In a few minutes all the
neighbourhood knew that the Puncher's conversion had not
lasted. People talked of nothing else. They wondered if
he had already wrecked his home and smashed his wife.
Some of them slouched round to his street and hung about
in front of his house. A crowd assembled.
The door opened. The Puncher came out. He had
taken off his coat, and had put on the red jersey. He
walked straight to the Army Hall, went to the penitent
form, and prayed.
That was a brave thing to do. But the Puncher does
not see the courage of it. One thought stuck in his mind
when he came to himself, drunk, ruined, and alone in that
public-house in the North of London : the thought that he
would be safe if he could get into his uniform. It was
not the honour of the regiment he thought about, but the
covering protection of the Flag. He went to his uniform
for protection. This is a true story, and it seems to me
there is nothing more remarkable in the narrative than the
poor beaten fellow's fixed idea that if only he could get
into his jersey he would be safe.
From that day he has never fallen. The shadows have
deepened for him. His wife's lack of sympathy is an
increasing distress and discomfort in the home. The soli
tude of his soul there is complete. His children do not
care about their father's religion. He has to earn his
living among men who are not Salvationists, and who do
not show him sympathy. But in spite of this the Puncher
44 THE PUNCHER
remains in the neighbourhood of which I am writing, and
he is there perhaps the greatest force for personal religion
among the sad, the sorrowful, the broken, and the ' lost '
who cram its shabby streets.
' The Puncher,' someone said to me, ' has spent hours
and pounds trying to reach his old companions. He is
chiefly unhappy because he has not saved more than he
has. He seems to think of nothing else. He's always
talking about it, in his quiet, low voice, and with that
queer straining look of longing in his sad eyes.'
He receives no pay from the Army. He is not an
officer, he is a soldier — a volunteer. The time he gives to
the work is the t:me left over from an arduous day of
earning daily bread.
When I suggested to the adjutant* mentioned in the
preface, that it might be well for the Army to deliver this
remarkable man from the task of earning his living, and
set him free to ' testify ' all over the kingdom, she replied :
' He testifies every now and then at great meetings,
and wherever his name appears we get vast audiences, for
he is known all over England, especially in places where
there are race-courses. But the Army does not encourage
this idea, because a man who continually narrates the story
of his evil deeds is apt to glory in them ; that is a great
danger, and it is not conversion. You see, we do not
stop at converting people from crime and wickedness, we
endeavour to lead them on to the heights of character.
This man is quite lovely in his mind. His wistfulness for
the souls of others is almost feminine ; it is an intense
yearning. And the discipline of earning his daily bread is
far better for him than the excitement of continually nar
rating the story of the past, from which he is spiritually
moving every day of his brave life. I think we are wise
in this. To be converted is only a new beginning of
something greater. '
Does not this remark of the little adjutant give one
fresh ideas of the Salvation Army as a spiritual force?
* An officer devoting all his or her time to the Army's work, and in
this case in charge of a local organisation called a corps ; the corps
comprising a number of soldiers.
A TIGHT HANDFUL
T_TOW does science account for this man?
* His father was the best type of English soldier, a
man with discipline in the blood, full of self-respect, proud
of obedience, brave, upright, and orderly.
He had soldiered in the i3th Light Dragoons, now the
I3th Hussars, and rode with his regiment on the right of
the line at Balaclava. He was one of the six hundred who
charged the Russian guns with sabres ; he was one of the
remnant that rode back out of the jaws of death, out of
the mouth of hell. Steadier and better trooper of horse
never served his country. The man was clothed with some
mysterious dignity ; an aloofness of self-respect which was
pride in its highest manifestation showed in his manner,
his appearance, and his speech. He held himself proudly,
was inexorable in his duty, and only forsook taciturnity in
unwilling monosyllables. He was what Carlyle would have
called, a great, silent, inarticulate soul.
He left the army a hero, and became a policeman.
He was the Police Inspector of Charing Cross Station.
The home was in Deptford. It was comfortable, respect
able, and religious. The children were sent in best clothes
to Sunday-school, and were apprenticed to the Band of
Hope. On Sunday evenings company was received. The
entertainment was religious. They sang sacred songs and
hymns ; they discussed life from the religious standpoint.
Whisky and water helped this flow of soul, the men smoked
cigars in a deliberate and philosophical fashion. Many
great problems were left unsolved at these discussions.
There were several quite young children in this house
hold when the head died. The hero of Balaclava left behind
him, in addition to his medals and the record of a useful
46 A TIGHT HANDFUL
life, a wife and family who needed bread for their existence.
The burden of this responsibility fell upon the wife. She
went out to work, and became a cloak-room attendant at
Charing Cross Station. She is there to this day.
The long life of this woman's devotion is typical of
London. The number of poor women who go out to work
for the sake of their children, who toil from early morning
to late at night, and who manage, in spite of this, to keep
the home respectable and cheerful, to endear themselves
to their children and permanently to influence the characters
of those children towards honesty, uprightness, and self-
respect, is legion. Into whatever poor parish of the town
you may enter, the clergyman, the doctor, the district
nurse, or the local Salvationist will tell you that the best
of the inhabitants are working mothers, whose lives are
one incessant struggle for the mere necessities of existence.
With such blood in his veins, with such memories in
his young heart, with such noble and sacred influences on
his soul, the hero of this story left home at the age of four
teen to enlist in a line regiment, of which an elder brother
was one of the colour-sergeants.
The life of a boy in the Army at that time, particularly
a boy in the band, was hard and cruel. It took either a
genius to dodge its hardships, or a giant to withstand its
cruelties. The private soldier appeared to take a savage
pleasure in hardening the heart of a boy ; it was the tyranny
of a lad for a cat ; there was in it the element of sport.
It seemed to my hero, from the outset, that he must
fight for his hand. He was strong, proud, high-spirited.
Moreover, his brother was a colour-sergeant. In a few
weeks he was swearing, smoking, drinking, and fighting —
like a man.
At fifteen he went to Ireland ; at sixteen he was in India.
In India he was as good as any man in the regiment.
What does this mean? It means that he was smart in
his appearance, knew his drills, and could appear on parade
full of beer without detection. He was famous for this
ability, and he was proud of it. Much of the talk in a
canteen concerns the capacity of a man to carry liquor on
A TIGHT HANDFUL 47
steady legs. It is a useful topic of conversation. It makes
for pleasurable disputation, it leads to wagers, it creates
exciting contests. Who can drink the most, Jack or Joe,
A company or B, ours or the Shropshires? A man who
can stand up to beer is a hero who will certainly stand up
to shot and shell. Who fears one barrel will fear two. The
fanatic says that there is no barrel without an enemy. But
the soldier stands to his gun and his beer, able to pot in
two senses of the phrase — a man.
But there was something in the mind of my hero which
was not satisfied by beer. He does not know what it was.
It manifested itself, this unrest, in several ways. For
instance, he would go to the library and pore over Queen's
Regulations. He wanted to pick a quarrel. He was a
barrack-room lawyer. He made sure of his ground, and
then * raised hell.' He claimed his rights in the face of
colour-sergeant, company officer, adjutant, and colonel. The
trouble was, for these authorities, that the lawyer in this
case was perrr ps the best soldier in the regiment — exceed
ingly srmrt, nandsome, energetic, and keen. Furthermore,
he was :% -narksman — the company shot.
But f> icen's Regulations did not satisfy him any more
than success at the butts, or smartness on parade, or beer.
There was still something wanting. He was sufficiently
educated to feel dissatisfied with the scope of his existence ;
there was that in his nature which made him an inquirer,
a barrack-room lawyer considering the affairs of the
universe — a man whose grudge was not against the service,
but against life. Somewhere in the cosmos there was a
person or a thing he desired to meet face to face ; if
necessary with naked fists.
At Conoor he fell in with a corps of the Salvation Army.
The universe seemed at last to have answered his inquiries.
He was conscious of a call. He used to go down to the
services and prayer-meetings, always in a state of liquor,
sometimes very drunk, and throw out those of the wor
shippers who failed to reach the standard of that which he
deemed a seemly religious propriety. It was a curious
condition of mind. He felt himself to be protecting the
48 A TIGHT HANDFUL
weak, championing the derided, reproving the mockers.
He approved in a dull way the idea of God, and the thought
of heaven and hell, the religious thesis of a struggle between
good and evil. These great thoughts enlarged the boun
daries of existence. They gave his soul a little more room
in which to turn round, a little better air to breathe. So
he stood up for the Salvation Army in barrack-room and
canteen, pot in hand ; he rattled those who derided it with
a crackle of oaths ; he was ready to fight for it.
The mystery of this state of mind can be easily explained.
There is no subject in the world like religion for argument,
controversy, and dispute. The Bishop of London told me
that on one occasion in Victoria Park, when he was waiting
to answer an atheist lecturer, a little greasy-haired man
suddenly planted a box on the ground, mounted it, and
exclaimed, with a pathetic anxiety to be heard, ' Ladies
and gents, 'alf a mo' about that ole 'umbu°f General Booth !'
It is religion which draws the crowd ot listeners to the
parks ; it is religion which makes every man an orator.
On religion such born barrack-room lawyers as Charles
Bradlaugh and the hero of this story will always love to
hear themselves speak till the lights go out and the silence
falls.
Because he wanted to be in controversy with his fellows,
because he wanted to argue and orate and show his superior
knowledge, the Tight Handful became a champion of the
Salvation Army. If all the regiment had been pious Chris
tians, it is very probable that his fists and his oratory would
have been at the service of atheism. But he had found a
minority. This was enough. He put himself face to face
with the majority, fists raised, his brain singing with beer.
He left India a very much worse man than he arrived.
He was made a corporal, well on his way to lance-sergeant,
and the highest warrant rank might easily have been his.
But he had shipped a devil. His love of controversy had
opened a door ; one of the worst devils known to the student
of human nature had entered ; it was the devil of rage.
Men truly said of him, ' He has got the devil of a temper.'
This story is really a study in temper. The part played
A TIGHT HANDFUL 4$
by drink is quite subsidiary. The interest lies in the wild
fury which grew gradually in the character of this young
soldier till it became a demon uncontrollable, ungovernable
— his master.
To this day his prominent cheek-bones have that glaze,
and his eyes that shining fire, which are so often the
outward shows of a temper quick to take flame.
On the night of his arrival in England, he went out of
barracks and ' forgot to return ' till next morning. He
was made a prisoner.
This roused the fury of his temper. It was his first
crime. It meant the ruin of his career. He went before
the colonel, ready to fight for his life. But he was too
good a soldier to be punished. He went out from the
orderly-room with the shame of a reprimand burning in his
blood.
Three months afterwards he was back again, charged
with striking the police. This time a serious crime. He
was reduced to the ranks.
Ruin !
Consider him — quite a young man, well above the
standard of his fellows in education, one of the most
efficient soldiers in the regiment, a prize marksman, in
appearance handsome, proud, and scornful, a man physically
as perfect as any in the British Army — slim, tall, broad-
shouldered, deep-chested, long-armed, with true vision, and
a courage that feared nothing — one who by the exercise of
a little ordinary common sense might have risen to warrant
rank and in a few years retired from the service with a
comfortable pension ; such he was, and he found his career
ruined by temper in the very dawn of his manhood. Every
thing lost. The whole future closed against him.
The regiment tried to do for him all that was possible.
He became silverman in the officers' mess, an officer's
servant, even a policeman ; but every job thus found for
him to mitigate the bitterness of reduction to the ranks,
he threw away, one after another, in scornful bouts of
headlong drunkenness.
Nothing mattered to him now. He had thrown away
50 A TIGHT HANDFUL
his chances. He kicked forethought out of his path, and
went plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Twice he came near to murder.
In Manchester he found himself mixed up in some sordid
brawl between sailors and a public woman. Such a con
tempt as Shakespeare had for these creatures when they
unpack their hearts, took sudden possession of The Handful.
The street lamp fell upon her screeching face ; her hoarse
voice loaded with loathsome words struck rage out of the
soldier's soul — he sprang upon her, seized her by the throat,
bore her to the ground, and was throttling the poor life out
of her body, when an old tramp interfered, a man who had
served in The Handful's regiment many years before, and
whose appeal to the honour of the regiment — this ragged
old tramp's appeal to the honour of the regiment ! — broke
through the rage in the soldier's brain, and just saved him
from murder.
Later, at Aldershot, he discovered by an accident that
a girl with whom he was accustomed to associate had been
seen walking with a man of another regiment. This time,
not in hot blood, he deliberately plotted murder. He met
the girl, walked with her, taxed her with infidelity, and
then set upon her. He left her dying on the lawn, and
walked back to barracks to await arrest for murder. He
could hardly believe it when he learned that the girl was
still living.
Soon after this he left the service. His colonel appealed
to him, argued with him, to stay on and earn a pension.
He not only resisted these appeals, but suddenly brought
a charge against the regiment concerning his kit. A few
days before he had been served out with new things.
These things had been taken away by the colour-sergeant.
According to a new regulation, of which the colonel knew
nothing, the kit belonged to the soldier. The Handful,
blazing with indignation, claimed justice. It ended, this
strange scene of a soldier's departure from his regiment,
by the colonel drawing a cheque for six pounds, and giving
it to the ex-soldier, with apologies. The Handful carried
the cheque to the canteen and ' blew it ' in drink. When
A TIGHT HANDFUL 51
the cab, which had been waiting for him some hours, left
the barracks it was drawn by half the men in his company,
mostly drunk.
He became door-keeper at a public-house in Deptford,
close to his mother's home. In a single month he had made
five appearances before his master for being drunk on duty.
Finally, he took off his master's clothes — that is to say, his
uniform — in Deptford Broadway, threw them down, and
prepared to fight his employer. Then was a scene. And
he left.
It would be wearisome to follow him through all his
various short-lived employments at this period of his life.
He lost them through drink and temper. He could not
master his appetite for drink, and when he was censured
his temper blazed up and violence followed.
And yet there was something so likable and com
mending about him that in spite of his Army record, and
in spite of all his subsequent vagaries, he was able to
obtain employment as railway policeman at one of the great
metropolitan stations.
It was during this employment that he met his future
wife — a little, pale, soft-voiced, delicate blonde, with hair
the colour of pale straw, and eyes like cornflowers — one of
the meekest, gentlest, quietest little creatures that ever
attracted the admiration of a hot-pacing devil. On the
morning of his wedding-day he went to meet some friends
at Waterloo Station, who were coming up for the event.
He met some soldiers instead. They were men of his
regiment, and his regiment was going to South Africa.
They adjourned to a public-house, and a deal of the honey
moon money went into the pockets of brewery shareholders.
The wedding was in Marylebone at eleven ; the brider room
arrived at 12.30, so drunk that it was noticeable. After
the service the clergyman advised the poor little timid
blonde to take her husband home and reform him.
Some few months afterwards, while his experience of
a home and domestic happiness was still quite fresh, and
when the time that he would become a father was approach
ing, he wa* drunk on duty. A man occupying the rank of
52 A TIGHT HANDFUL
his father, an inspector of police, rebuked him and ordered
him off duty. The Handful knocked him down with a blow
in the face.
He arrived home that night in a cab, suspended from
duty. It was after midnight, nearly one o'clock. He pulled
his wife out of bed, made her dress, and took her out in
the streets. There he forced her to walk up and down
with him till four o'clock, when some particularly obliging
public-houses open their doors. He was like a madman.
A fortnight after his son was born.
It was now that the devil of rage began to possess his
whole nature and to rule every minute of his day. Hitherto
there had been spells of gentleness, interludes of cheerful
ness, in which he played the part of a merry and roystering
companion ; but now a settled sullenness, a brooding wrath,
a simmering exasperation occupied his soul ; he felt the
blood boiling, the gorge rising, always.
He was at enmity with the whole world, his violent
resentment was for life itself ; but there was in his dark and
wrathful mind one particular and individual animosity — it
was for his wife.
In the phrase of the street, this poor little woman ' got
on his neives.'
As he looks back upon that time, shamefacedly enough,
and yet with a certain intelligent interest of inquiry, he
comes to the conclusion that it was the exceeding meekness
of his wife which filled him with this irrational hate. She
never complained of his drunkenness or his idleness ; she
never replied to his taunts ; she never accused him of the
suffering he had brought upon her and their child. Very
quietly, this little pale-haired woman, who unlike most of
her class in England is a skilful cook and an excellent
housekeeper, performed the domestic duties with devotion,
and kept the home together as well as she could.
It was this mildness of her disposition that exasperated
the young husband.
He longed, he tells me, longed with all the fury of his
brain, to see rebellion flash from her eyes, to hear bitter
words pour from her lips, to feel the blow of her fist in his
A TIGHT HANDFUL 53
face. Then he might have emptied all the black displeasure
of his heart in one great excusable thrashing which would
have made him her master, and her his dog.
But her meekness cowered him with the feeling of
inferiority.
With hate and murder in his heart he made a hell of
that little home. His wife says to me, as she bends over
her cake-tins in the kitchen of their basement home, ' He
was just like a madman.' She does not look up from her
work ; there is no energy in her words ; she would say in
exactly the same tone of voice, ' He was not very well,'
or, 'The weather is trying.' And the young husband,
sitting on the foot of a sofa occupied by their baby at the
other end, laughs quietly, stretches his long legs, and says,
' I was a tight handful.'
How did he treat her?
It was a curious form of tyranny. He never once laid
hands upon her. ' I sometimes used to wish that he would,'
she says quietly. No ; his tyranny took another form. He
held over her head a menace — the menace that he would
murder her. Sometimes he would sit quietly in his chair,
regard her with eyes full of hate, and say, ' I'll kill you one
day, mark my words !' At another time he would come
smashing and swearing into the house, his face scorching
red, his eyes burning, and throwing things here and there,
kicking this and that out of his way, would swear by God
in heaven that he could bear this woman no longer. And
again, at other times, when the cry of the baby woke him
from sleep and he opened his eyes to see the mother tenderly
soothing the child, he would spring out of bed with an oath,
and drive her from the room to spend the night — no matter
how wintry — where she could. Sometimes he pursued her,
on the very brink of murder. On countless occasions she
spent long nights with her baby in the coal-cellar, in the
little chamber which has a bolt to the door, or in the houses
of neighbours, or in the streets.
The child became a cause of exasperation. He hated
it almost as much as he did its mother. Again and again
he was thrown into a paroxysm of fury by its little querulous
54 A TIGHT HANDFUL
cries. He longed to kill it. He had to hold himself back
from seizing it up and throwing it out of the window or
dashing it to the floor. He abused the mother because of
the baby. He fastened upon their baby all the blinding
animosity he felt for his wife. He cursed it ; set his teeth,
and stood over it with hands trembling in a passion of desire
to throttle it. The helplessness of the child filled him with
inarticulate fury. He wanted to hurt it, damage it, brutalize
it. When he came back at night from the public-house,
whose till he helped to load with the money of which his
wife went in sore need, and found the child restless and
peevish, he was flung into a fit of explosive irascibility which
always ended in driving mother and child from the room,
and held him in a madness of desire to murder them both
and make an end of it all.
This state of things endured for three years.
The woman was a Christian. All through those three
years of inexpressible horror she continued to pray for the
reformation of her husband. But there were times when
the burden was too great for her. Twice she attempted to
commit suicide.
It came to the husband, in the midst of his madness,
that the hour was approaching when he would infallibly
kill his wife. He lived with this thought, contemplating all
that it meant — to become a murderer. He became afraid
of himself. Tel menace qui tremble.
One night, after a storm in the house, he went out into
the streets. On his way he passed a hall occupied by the
Salvation Army. The door stood open. A sudden impulse
to enter took possession of him. The haunted man turned
from the streets and went in.
It was the first time he had entered an Army hall in
England. They were singing happy hymns, clapping their
hands in a rhythmic, almost mechanical^ manner, with that
strange abandonment of joy which is so difficult for common
place or phlegmatic people to understand. The room was
bright and cheerful. After the hymns followed an address.
It was an appeal to the wretched, miserable, and guilty
souls in the hall to come out and publicly confess at the
A TIGHT HANDFUL 55
penitent form their own helplessness to get right, their need
for the love and power of God.
The haunted man, afraid to what ruin this murderous
hate in his heart would lead him, yielded to the invitation.
He went to the penitent form, kneeled down, and covered
his face with his hands — waiting for the magic change in
his character, waiting to be dishaunted.
They came round him and counselled him, and then
inquired, with affectionate pressures of the hand upon his
broad shoulders^ ' Are you saved?' ' Do you feel that you
are saved?'
He answered, ' I am the same as I came in.'
That night he returned home, hating himself and loath
ing life. When he told me this experience we were in his
home, and his wife was ironing baby-linen on the kitchen
table. He paused in his narration to ask her, ' Where was
it you slept that night, matey? — in the coal-cellar, or with
neighbours?' Without pausing in her ironing, the little
pale woman answered, ' Oh, that night it was in the coal-
cellar.' The narration flowed on, the iron had not ceased
its journeys over the white linen.
He was worse than ever after this effort to be saved.
At this time he was working on the Twopenny Tube,
buried like a rat for long hours, and coming up to the
surface at the end of a long day's work with bitterness and
resentment and despair in his soul. Not an occupation
likely to relieve the oppression of his mind.
Once again he turned for help to the Salvation Army.
Once again he did the difficult thing of going publicly to
the penitent form. And once again he experienced no relief.
The blackness in his soul would not lift. He tells me that
at this time there was one insistent memory of the past
haunting his thoughts in the midst of a deepening despair.
The first watch he ever kept in India was at the prison in
Secunderabad, and while on that watch he had seen a man
flogged ; although at the time he was a hard, cold-blooded,
and defiant young dare-devil, the sight of that flogging so
took effect upon him that he almost fainted at his post.
And now the terrible impression revived, a trick of the
56 A TIGHT HANDFUL
subconscious self, and he went about envying with all his
heart the man who had been flogged.
He says, quite simply, but with the masterful energy of
his character, ' My thoughts lived with that man — if only
I could get it on my back ! I seemed to feel the same
stripes entering my brain.'
He was also haunted at this time, why he cannot say,
by some words in the Bible which he had learned without
comprehending their meaning, ' My spirit shall not always
strive with man.' They frightened him.
He was conscious, in the words of Professor James,
this ex-soldier, this guard opening and shutting doors on
the Twopenny Tube, of being wrong, inferior, and unhappy.
Is it not a holding thought to consider that some of the
servants of the public in London, of whom one takes so
little notice, and who appear to be such purely mechanical
things in the general life, are concerned with such matters
as this? — that in the solitude of their souls they feel them
selves to be related to the universe, responsible to God?
The Tight Handful, with his gropings into the infinite,
and the ungovernable fury of his temper, was now going
more confidently to beer for relief than to the penitent form ;
going more eagerly, and at the same time more desperately,
because it did provide him with the escape from himself
which alone averted madness and murder.
It was in a condition of drink that he returned one day
resolved to drive his wife and child out of the house, to sell
up all his furniture, and to go himself out of London, on
the tramp, anywhere and anyhow, he cared not what might
happen. That was the revelation brought to him by drink.
He was not to worry about his soul, but to kick responsi
bility out of his path, and live bravely, defiantly, to his
own pleasure. At all costs he must escape from the deadly
monotony of his unintelligent employment, renounce all his
domestic responsibilities, escape from the spiritual hauntings
which now distracted him, and taste adventure.
What ! a man with his vigour and energy and longings,
to be sunk all his days in an underground railway, to be
tied to a little pale-faced wife, to be forced to provide her
A TIGHT HANDFUL 57
with food and clothes, and food and clothes for her baby —
to spend his days tied to this wretched go-cart of domes
ticity — he who had soldiered in India and lived freely,
grandly, riotously, — like a gentleman !
So he drove his wife and child from his house.
When they were gone, he found that she had left for
him, on the mantelpiece, the money for the rent, with the
exception of a few shillings. This last service of faithful
love steadied him a little, made him think. He went back
to his duty on the railway.
And now we reach a point in the story where mystery,
unaccountable to the man himself, enters and hurries the
conclusion.
On his first journey that day, from the Bank to
Shepherd's Bush, this young guard heard a voice. He
tells you quite calmly, and with a resolution of conviction
nothing can shake, that as distinctly as ever he heard sound
in his life, he heard that morning a voice, which said to
him : ' It is your fault, not God's, that you cannot be saved ;
you won't trust/
It was the suggestion, which psychologists perfectly
understand, of surrender ; the clear, emphatic injunction of
Christ — the stressed idea expressed in so many forms — the
absolute necessity for losing one's life, laying down one's
life, losing one's soul — the new birth, being born again
— almost, one might say, the sine qua non of Christ's
revelation.
To yield, to cease to struggle, to be passive, to be as
clay in the hands of the potter — utterly to surrender the
will to some vast power dimly comprehended and vaguely
desired — this was the instant and poignant movement in
the mind of the man following the sound of the voice.
He surrendered.
' Do you know what it is,' M. de Lamennais said on
one occasion to his pupils, ' which makes man the most
suffering of all creatures? It is that he has one foot in
the finite and the other in the infinite, and that he is torn
asunder, not by four horses, as in the horrible old times,
but between two worlds.'
$8 A TIGHT HANDFUL
The whole struggle is there. It does not matter how
literate or how illiterate, how great or how ignoble, how
religious or how irreligious, every man according to his
degree, in the solitude of his thoughts and the silence of
his soul, is torn between two worlds. It is a struggle
universal and inescapable. I am persuaded that even in
the most abandoned and depraved of wretches this struggle
never ceases ; in some form or another, perverted enough
in some cases, the struggle between the one world and the
other goes on to the end. It really does not signify whether
we call it a struggle between two worlds or between the
higher and the lower natures, whether it is the immense
conflict of a Hamlet or the effort of a clerk to be more
industrious and honest at his duties ; the significance of
this duality is its universal presence in the human race, and
its inexplicable insistence — unless there is a spiritual
destiny for humankind. The man in this story had hated
the one world because his subconsciousness was aware of
the other ; he had come to loathe his life because he had
glimpses in the darkness of his soul of another and a
better ; he was consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy,
and however vaguely, however blindly, he wanted to be
consciously right, superior, and happy.
Directly this complete surrender of his mind followed
upon the voice, he was aware instantly of extraordinary
peace. It was as if a typhoon had suddenly dropped to
the stillness of a lake, as if a tempest of hail and snow
had become instantly a summer day. And in this peace
he heard not another voice, not someone from outside of
him addressing his conscience, but his own inner conscious
ness repeating the words, ' Him that cometh unto Me I
will in no wise cast out.'
These words, he says, repeated themselves with an
unbroken iteration, so that while the train roared and shook
through the darkness of the Underground he was aware of
nothing else. They ceased, only to begin again. They
did not set themselves to the rumble of the wheels, they
blotted out all other sounds. Standing on the oscillating
platform of the train between the doors of the two carriages,
A TIGHT HANDFUL 59
and penned in by the trellis gates of rattling iron, he heard
these words singing and ringing in his brain with a recur
rence which was not monotony, but joy, and with a meaning
that was neither a menace nor a despair, but wonderful and
emancipating. ' I only knew,' he says, ' that I was saved.'
The miracle had happened. Its effect was obvious
immediately. In ten minutes, from the moment when he
felt his soul leap suddenly into the light of understanding,
he was the centre of a group of mates asking what had
happened to him, so changed was his appearance. Curiously
enough the humorist, who is always to be found in such
crowds, put to him the question, ' Have you joined the
Salvation Army?' He answered, ' No, mate, but I'm going
to at the first opportunity, for I'm saved.'
The man was completely changed. The overmastering
passion for drink which had ruled him like a tyrant, the
frightful rage and resentment which had made him a.
demon, and the disgust and hatred of life which had
darkened all his outlook upon existence — vanished, ceased
to exist, passed out of his life as if they had never been
there.
He was filled with a delightsome joy.
Such an amazing revulsion, such a complete and total
transformation of character, is an achievement possible
only to religious influences. Hypnotism, as I know, can
undoubtedly, after many weeks of operation, cure some
men of their vices. Drugs are able in certain cases, after
a long and difficult treatment, to remove the taste for
alcohol. But it is only a religious force which, in the
twinkling of an eye, can so alter the character of a man
that he not only then and there escapes and stands utterly
free from tyrannical passions, but is filled full of a great
enthusiasm, desires to spend his whole life in working for
righteousness, and feels as if he had fed on honey-dew and
drunk the milk of Paradise.
This is the wonder-side of conversion which no theory
of psychology can explain. It is also the greatest force in
religion. Theology has no proofs ; religious experience
does not need them.
6o A TIGHT HANDFUL
In a few days this man had found his wife, told her his
story, and both were agreed to begin their life again, and
to begin it by entering the Salvation Army. On the Satur
day night of that week they went together to the hall
occupied by the Army in the district that knew the tragedy
of their former life, and at the form where twice before the
young soldier had kneeled half crazed with drink and rage,
they both knelt — ' not to get saved,' he says, ' but to signify
that we intended to serve God in the ranks of the Salvation
Army.'
That was six years ago. During those six years, this
handsome and striking-looking man — as good-looking,
shapely, and vigorous a man as you could wish to see —
has worked for the Army without pay of any kind, has
been the life and soul of his corps, and is now, with the
Puncher, perhaps the greatest force making for enthusiasm
in all its local activities. He does not preach, preaching
is not in his line, but when he is forced to it — though the
ordeal almost terrifies him — he will stand up before a crowd
and ' testify ' — that is to say, tell of his shame and of his
great deliverance. And his home, well furnished and com
fortable, its shelves filled with books that he has bought
for a few coppers on stalls in the gutter, is one of the
happiest and most respected in all that district. He has
advanced to a high place in the hard and laborious work
by which he earns daily bread. There is no one among his
mates, his acquaintances, or even the poor foul people of
the neighbourhood, who does not respect him, think well
of him, and like him. His happiness is infectious. His
old mother at Charing Cross Station thanks God that she
has lived to see the day of her boy's salvation.
He says to me, quite quietly, smiling and shaking his
head in perplexity, ' It 's a fair marvel ; there's no mistake
about that ; people can get away from a lot of things, but
they can't get away from conversion. No ! And see what
it does for a man ! It does give him a new birth. I've
still got faults, a lot of them, but I'm absolutely different
from what I was before conversion. I've got different
ideas about life, — everything. I'm happy. I'm keen about
A TIGHT HANDFUL 61
helping others. I love the work, I love my home, and I
can put up with a baby !'
There is in his little sitting-room, which you would
never take to be the room of a labouring man, a cabinet
full of a child's old playthings, spelling-books, paint-boxes,
and toy animals. It is sacred to these things. They
belonged to the child he so often drove from his sight.
' I was pulled up sharp,' he says, mournfully and with
tears, * when the little chap went. He was eight. And I
had hated him so in the bad time.'
On another occasion, when we were walking through
a street thronged by ragged, foul-faced, barefooted brats,
about whose souls nobody appeared to care a jot, he said
suddenly, ' When I used to see these children, just after
my boy was dead, I couldn't help wondering why he should
be taken and they should be left.'
Happily there is another child in the house now, and
although he confesses that he is still anything but a baby's
man, he does sometimes — anxiously overlooked by the little
pale-haired wife — take this infant, who is so much more
concerned for the present by teething than by salvation, on
his knee and attempt, if not to derive joy from her, at least
to relieve his wife of the nursing.
Certainly he will never drive that child and her mother,
however fractious she may be, out of his house. Certainly
he will one day love that child with all the force of his
charming character.
O. B. D.
TXT HEN a man becomes converted the Salvation Army
* ^ nurses him carefully until he is strong in the new
life ; that is to say, experienced officers visit him several
times in the day, encourage him in his new purpose and,
above all, deepen in his mind the conviction that someone
cares for him.
The conversion of the Puncher, which was so important
a matter to the corps in that quarter of London, was
watched over by the angel-adjutant. She paid visits to
him in his home, dropped in to see him at his work, and
waylaid him, with affection, on his way home.
He was at work in a carriage-builder's factory, and
the proprietor of the establishment was an infidel. But
between this man and the adjutant was one point in
common, music ; both played the concertina and loved it
above all the instruments. ' Oh, I only played in an ordi
nary way,' the adjutant tells me; adding with enthusiasm,
1 but he was a master.'
It was the concertina which made it possible for the
Christian to invade the premises of the infidel. Adjutant
and carriage proprietor had many pleasant and quite
amiable conversations. In this busy factory in the midst
of London, they talked of music, and the angel, watching
over the Puncher's conversion, softened the asperities of
the infidel's worship of the No-God.
One day she was talking to the Puncher in the carriage
factory, when he said to her, * I wish you'd have a talk
with the man who comes round here with the papers ; he's
proper low ; they call him Old Born Drunk ; and he looks
it. But I was almost like that myself, not so very long
ago. No one can be hopeless, after me. I wish you'd
64 O. B. D.
speak to him.' Thus early in his conversion did the
Puncher — that quiet and mysterious personality — manifest
what one calls his ' passion for souls.'
The little adjutant waited one day to see this man who
had a newspaper round, and who visited the carriage factory
to serve the workmen with betting news.
She had seen many of the lowest and most depraved
people in London, but until she saw Old Born Drunk never
had she realized the hideousness and repulsive abomination
to which vice can degrade the human body.
This man, the child of frightfully drunken parents, had
been born in drink, and was almost certainly, as his name
declared, actually born drunk. He had been taught to
drink and had acquired an insatiable appetite for drink in
earliest childhood. He was now, at the age of five- or
six-and-forty, habitually drunk — sodden.
The vileness of his clothing and the unhealthy appear
ance of his flesh did not strike the Adjutant till afterwards.
Her whole attention was held in a kind of horror by the
aspect of the man's eyes. They were terrible with soulless-
ness. She racks her brain in vain to find words to describe
them. She returns again and again to the word stupefied.
That is the word that least fails to misrepresent what no
language can describe. Stupefied ! Not weakness, not
feebleness ; not cunning, not depravity ; but stupor. They
were the eyes of a man neither living nor dead ; they were
the eyes of nothing that had ever lived or could ever die —
the eyes of eternal stillborn stupor.
These eyes were hardly discernible, for the flaccid lids
hung over the pupils, and the bagged flesh of the swollen
white face pressed upon them from below. There was just
a disc of glazed luminosity showing in each dwindled socket
— a disc of veiling existence, perishing life, of stupor.
For the rest he was a true Miserable, lower than any
thing to be found among barbarous nations, debased almost
out of humanity. He was short, thick-set, misshapen, vile ;
clothed in rags which suffocated those who blundered near
to him — a creature whom ragged children mocked with
scorn as he passed down the street.
O. B. D. 65
Civilization had produced this man. He had his place
in London ; repulsive as one may find it to contemplate
him, he was one of our contemporaries ; to the Salvationist
he represented a soul.
She said to him, ' You don't look very happy. Are
you?' He looked, in his dazed fashion, into her clear eyes
and kept silence, as though he had lost both the power of
speech and the ability to understand it. She said, ' Perhaps
I could be of some service to you; will you let me try?
Will you let me come and see you in your home?'
Old Born Drunk could not speak. She approached quite
close to him, bent her kind eyes towards those terrible eyes
of stupor, and said, ' I want to help you. I know some
thing about your life. They call you Old Born Drunk.
Well, Old Born Drunk, let me come and pay you a visit,
and make friends with you. There may be many little
ways in which I can help you. Let me try.'
She made him at last understand. He told her where
he lived. Soon afterwards she called upon him.
He occupied a single room, for which he paid seven
shillings a week, in a street more notorious for abject
destitution than for crime and degradation. She was not
in the least afraid of visiting this place, but when she
opened the door of the room — good and angelic as she is
— the little adjutant almost turned and ran away. Such a
smell issued from the den as stifled the lungs and made the
spirit heave and shudder with disgust.
Guy de Maupassant has described the odours of a
peasant's domicile, with a strength and power of truth
which are unforgettable. Something of the same old sour
reek, but intensified to loathsomeness by London squalor
and slum air, hung like a thick curtain in this den of Old
Born Drunk. Guy de Maupassant speaks of the smell of
milk, apples, smoke, and that indefinable odour of old
houses — smell of the earth, smell of the walls, smell of the
furniture, smell of ancient spilled soup, and ancient wash
ings, and old poor peasants ; smell of animals and people
living together, smell of things and of beings, a smell of
Time — the smell of the Past.
66 O. B. D.
In the den of Old Born Drunk there were all these
several smells, even the smell of animals, for the place was
like a menagerie.
A dog lifted itself up on the vile coverlet of an unmade
bed, and growled at the intruder. A litter of guinea-pigs
scuttered across the bare and filthy boards of the floor,
disappearing under the bed. Rabbit-hutches, with the
dusky shapes of their inmates dimly seen behind wire
netting, emitted a thick and stifling smell. There were
cats on a sack by the hearth. Hanging from the ceiling
in front of the closed window was a cage of doves.
This London interior was dark as well as stifling. A
fog seemed to pervade it from dirty wall to dirty wall,
from dark ceiling to reeking floor. A figure moved out of
this fog, while the dog growled on the unmade bed ; it
became gradually something that suggested a woman — a
creature thin, emaciated, woebegone, clothed almost entirely
in sacking. She stood before the Salvationist, in all her
wretchedness and squalor ; a thing really lower than the
animals among whom she spent her life ; a woman — the
woman who loved Old Born Drunk. Consider the miracle.
Imagine to what misery a woman can be brought th«t she
should marry such a man. Reflect that this woman
loved him.
The adjutant entered the room and talked to this miracle
— the woman who loved Old Born Drunk. The birds and
animals provided a topic of conversation. She discovered
that they belonged to the child of these two poor people.
Yes, they had a child, a new life had been born into this
den ; and these animals and birds were the boy's pets.
The mother fetched a photograph and handed it to the
visitor, not without pride. Astonished, the adjutant beheld
in this picture a bright, handsome, and well-dressed boy.
The intelligence in his face, and the self-respect in his
bearing filled her with amazement. She could hardly
believe that he was the child of these parents.
'This is your son?' she asked.
' Yes,' said the woman, in her weary way. ' He don't
look it, do he? But we've been very careful with him, and
O. B. D. 67
he's in a good situation, so perhaps he'll be all right. We
hope he will, at all events.'
Then the adjutant discovered that these frightful parents
— in the midst of their destitution and degradation — loved
this one child with a self-abnegation and devotion quite
wonderful in its purity and strength. For him the den
reeked, because when he visited them he liked to see his
old pets ; and for him those pets had been bought, in the
first place, out of coppers earned on the newspaper round,
and denied, God knows with what struggle, to a publican
by a dipsomaniac, by poor Old Born Drunk, who had this
one pure passion growing like a white flower in the
corruption of his soul. The drunkard and his wife loved
their son. The den was his home.
The Salvationist made this boy the lever of her appeal.
She came constantly to the vile den, and saw the parents
together. They were both easily convinced of her first
premiss, that life would be certainly more comfortable for
them if Old Born Drunk signed the pledge and kept it.
But even the wife, who was not a drunkard, appeared to
agree with her husband that such a consummation lay quite
in the realms of fantasy. * You see,' said his wife, ' he's
been used to it from a little 'un ; it's meat and drink to
him ; look at his name, Old Born Drunk ! I really don't
think he'd be good for anything if he was to give it up, I
don't really.' As for Old Born Drunk himself, he did not
argue the question ; he merely left it with a great silence
in the region of the impossible. He listened to the chatter
of the women as a philosopher might heed for a moment
the notes of quarrelling sparrows.
But the adjutant's kindness and humanity did so far
appeal to these two Londoners as to induce them to attend
some of the services at the local hall. They left their
menagerie, and in their poor vile rags came to the evening
meetings, and sat with the Miserables at the back of the
hall, listening to the band, listening to the hymns, listening
to the praying and preaching, feeling the warmth, bright
ness and cleanness of the atmosphere — thinking something
in their minds of which we have no knowledge.
68 O. B. D
Both of them appeared stupefied on these occasions.
Apparently the service had no meaning for them. In just
such a similar manner two owls in a belfry might listen to
church music. They came, they sat, they disappeared.
The adjutant began to feel that they had fallen below
the depths to which human sympathy can reach. Her
officers used to say, in despair, ' They don't seem to under
stand a word that is said to them.' It was this d-eep stupor
of the two Miserables which made for hopelessness and
despair. One did not feel their sins or their wretchedness
a bar ; but this terrible stupor of the understanding was
like a thick impenetrable curtain let down between their
souls and the light. No one could reach them. They did
not understand.
Just about this time the Puncher and the adjutant con
ceived the idea of a great and stirring revival. The
Puncher and those whom he had influenced — it must be
carefully remembered that these men were once the terrors
of the neighbourhood — agreed that they would make a public
exhibition of themselves in the worst streets, and after
wards confess the whole story of their lives, man by man,
in the hall. Do not let it be thought that any one of these
men contemplated the exhibition with delight. They had
to screw their courage to the ordeal ; remember, there were
their wives to be thought of, as well as a vast mob.
The Puncher — that quiet, pale-faced, sorrowful desirer
of souls — inspired the little Corps with fortitude. ' God
has done a lot for us,' he said ; ' we oughtn't to mind doing
a bit for Him.' The angel-adjutant listened to the ideas
of these men, and the revival was planned.
The first effort took the form of a procession through
the worst streets of the neighbourhood, at their most
crowded hour of the evening, a procession of horse-drawn
trolleys, with the converted terrors of the neighbourhood
posed in various attitudes suggesting their past lives — such,
for instance, as a man in convict's dress suffering the
penalty of his crimes.
The streets were thronged. While the trolleys made
their way through the multitude, the adjutant and her
O. B. D. 69
assistants passed among the crowd, inviting people to
attend the meeting in the hall. The result was such a pack
as never before had filled the large meeting-place. Among
this vast audience was Old Born Drunk and his wife, who
had come early on the invitation of the adjutant.
The meeting began with a hymn, a reading of the
parable of the Prodigal Son, a brief prayer, and then
followed testimonies by the converted men. One after
another they stood up, told how they had suffered, told how
they had sunk to the gutter, and how their homes were
now happy, their lives clean, and their hearts glad. In the
words of Professor James, these simple men of the people
told their fellows how they had been consciously wrong,
inferior, and unhappy, and how they were now become, by
the mercy of God, consciously right, superior, and happy.
The angel-adjutant then made her appeal. She declared
that anybody in that hall, never mind how vile and deserted
and shameful, could become in an instant radiant with
happiness and peace, by coming to the penitent form, kneel
ing there, and asking God to forgive him his sins. She
could point to the men on the platform as living proofs
of her assurance.
Several people rose from their seats, most of them with
that quiet dogged stolidity of the London workman, char
acteristic of his whole life, and advanced to the penitent
form, like men who had to go through with something
distasteful and hard. Some of them said, ' God be merciful
to me a sinner!' others bowed and were silent; many of
the women were crying.
At the back of these penitents came Old Born Drunk
and his wife.
The adjutant and her officers were more astonished than
all the rest of the people in the meeting. They knew, what
the others did not realize, the impenetrable stupefaction of
the man's mind, his total obfuscation of soul. For the
others, he was only a particularly dirty, particularly vile,
particularly drunken one-of-themselves.
The adjutant approached the poor old man as he reached
the bench. The small dulled eyes were wet with tears.
70 O. B. D.
She put a hand on his arm, and he said to her, in a crying
tone, ' Oh, I want to be like Joe !' — one of the men who
had testified.*
Afterwards he said to her, ' While I was listening to
Joe, thinking of what he's been, and seeing what he's
become, all of a sudden it took me that I'd find God and
get Him to make me like Joe. It took me like that. I
just felt, all of a sudden, determined to find God. Deter
mined!' he repeated, with energy astonishing in this broken
and hopeless creature of alcoholism. ' And,' he went on,
' while I was kneeling, while I was praying, I felt the spirit
of God come upon me. I said, " Oh, God, make me like
Joe !" and while I prayed, I felt the spirit come upon me.
I knew I could become like Joe. I know I'm saved.'
He was quite emphatic. But, the adjutant, knowing the
power of temptation, realizing the saturation of this man's
whole being by alcohol, feared greatly for the stability of
his salvation. She feared chiefly on one account. The
newspaper round by which he earned daily bread included
practically all the public-houses in that quarter. Unless
some other work could be found for Old Born Drunk,
surely he must fall some day, surely the temptation would
one day prove too strong for him. On the other hand, if
work of a different kind could be found for him, even this
sunken dipsomaniac might, by the grace of God, make fight
against his madness. It was just possible. She had seen
miracles almost as wonderful.
She went to discuss things with Old Born Drunk.
He sat and listened to all she said with the old dazed
stupor in his eyes, apparently not understanding one of the
kind and considerate words that were said to him. The
adjutant turned to his wife, ' Is there no other work he
can do? Doesn't he feel that he would like some kind of
work that he has seen other men doing?'
The wife looked at her husband, ' Do you, dear?'
He began to move his lips, considering how to express
his thoughts. Then he said, ' I don't want anything else.'
He paused a moment, glancing from the guinea-pigs on
* His story is told under the title of ' The Criminal '
O. B. D. 71
the floor to the grimy window. ' I must show them,' he
said, ' that I am converted.'
The adjutant endeavoured to make him realize his
danger. For weeks, for months, he might be able to with
stand temptation. But, if the moment came, some day in
the future, when, perhaps, he was not well, or felt unhappy
— might he not fail? She made him, or rather she tried to
make him, see that conversion is a long road. The first
glow dies away ; one sees beyond this lifting glory a long
straight road running to life's end. One rises from one's
knees to trudge that long road. First, one mounts up with
wings, like an eagle ; then one runs, and is not weary ;
finally, the grand climax — one must walk and not faint.
The adjutant laboured to bring this conviction home to the
understanding of the dipsomaniac.
The man said, ' I must show them that I am con
verted. '
The adjutant continued to watch over this brand plucked
from the burning. He remained firm. She asked him if
he ever felt tempted. He replied, ' The appetite has gone.'
They watched him go in and out of the public-houses — he
was unafraid. The other converts paid him visits in his
den ; they all asked the same question, Did he feel quite
sure that drink had no temptation for him? Always the
same answer, ' The appetite has gone.' It seemed true.
And yet, how inconceivable !
One day he entered a public-house crowded with work
men. It was Saturday afternoon. Pockets were full of
money. Wives and children were forgotten. The place
was a din of loud voices and coarse laughter. Old Born
Drunk approached the counter with his journals.
There is always a spirit of festivity and good-humour
in a public-house on Saturday afternoons. The workmen,
after a pot or two of beer, are inclined to horse-play. One
of the drinkers exclaimed, ' Hullo, God strike me dead, if
this isn't Old Born Drunk! Come here, daddy; I'll stand
you a pot. We'll wet the Salvation Army.'
Old Born Drunk served out his papers. The workman
called for a pot of beer.
72 O. B. D.
1 Here, drink, you old !' he exclaimed, forcing the
pot towards the convert.
Old Born Drunk shook his head.
' Come, drink it, like a man! What's a pot to you?
Gallons is your mark. Drink it !'
' No.'
' Look here, daddy; you're poor, aren't you?'
1 Yes. '
' Got the missus and the kid to feed?'
1 Yes.'
' A bob'd make a lot of difference to you, wouldn't it?
See here, daddy; I'll give you a bob, straight, I will —
ah, honour bright — if you'll drink this pot. Smell it.
Smell it, old cock. Ain't it good? Come along, drink it
and earn a bob.'
' Not me.'
' You won't?'
' No.'
' Not for a bob?'
' Not for thousands.'
' You mean it?'
' Yes.'
1 Then have it outside !' — and with that the mocking
workman flung the whole pot of beer into the old man's
face.
There was laughter at this, laughter, too, at the pitiful
figure of the old drenched man, blinking his eyes, shaking
the drops from his face, wiping the liquor from his mouth
and chin.
' Don't it smell good, daddy?' laughed the tormentor.
* Ain't beer got a lovely smell to it? You silly old fool!
Why didn't you take it inside, instead of out? Come here,
I'll give you another drop. I'll stand you one. You shan't
have the shilling, but you shall have the beer.'
' I don't want it,' said the old man.
His firmness, his quietness under persecution, moved
the rough men in the bar. One of them * took up a sub
scription. ' Old Born Drunk left the place with a pocket
full of money. Also, he left it as a hero.
O. B. D. 73
Weeks, months, years passed away. The old fellow
remained firm. And he made little economies, in spite of
subscriptions to the local corps of the Salvation Army. One
day he was rich enough to take a tiny shop in the neigh
bourhood. His wife and son moved out of the dreadful
den, and began a new life, full of happiness. They entered
the ranks of respectability.
It was the old fellow's steadfastness and lasting forti
tude which made both the wife and the son join the
Salvation Army. This represented the height of earthly
happiness to Old Born Drunk, because he had all along
nursed one great hope in the profound of his being — the
hope that some day his son would be an officer in the
Army, that is to say, would devote all his life to the work.
Old Born Drunk was not fit for such high work ; it was
necessary for him to earn his living ; all he could do
was to attend the meetings, march behind the band,
saying a word or two in private to those of his customers
who were sad and unhappy. But his son had book learn
ing, his son was good — he might perhaps be one day
an officer in this great, merciful, and universal army of
salvation.
This once ruined creature was now happy and whole.
His conversion appeared so extraordinary to the people
in the neighbourhood, extraordinary in its lastingness as
well as in its effects, that he became a power for right
eousness without exerting any missionary zeal. People
looked at him in the streets. Vicious and degraded
men at street corners, or at the doors of public-houses,
regarded the old man, born again and living in respect
ability and happiness, with something of the same stirring
in their brains as once had made him exclaim, ' I want to
be like Joe.' He advertised salvation.
Religion to these people is not a theology. It is a fact.
They are not mystical. They are incapable of definitions.
Old Born Drunk himself could not have told you anything
about the articles of his religion or his conception of the
nature of God. He only knew that God had saved him,
directly he sought salvation with a determined mind. He
74 0. 8. D.
only knew that instantly he had been delivered from abso
lute wretchedness. He only knew that he was now very
happy.
And this is also what the outcasts saw in him. They
saw that perhaps the very lowest man in the whole neigh
bourhood, the man, at any rate, most sunken in drunken
ness, was now walking in their midst, clean, happy, and
respectable. He had got religion. Religion had done the
miracle. Religion was a good thing, if only a man could
once make up his mind to take the step. Look at Old
Born Drunk. What a difference religion had made to him !
Before the miracle of Old Born Drunk the arguments of
tavern atheists melted into thin air. Facts are stubborn
things, and never more stubborn than when they walk the
street and breathe human air.
In this way Old Born Drunk made a profound impres
sion in that quarter of the town. Not, of course, such a
marvellous and staggering impression as that produced by
the Puncher's conversion, but a quiet and very lasting
impression. He was discussed in that locality, as a novel
or a picture in another quarter of the town. Never a
public-house argument about religion that did not end with,
* Well, anyhow, what about Old Born Drunk?'
One day the adjutant learned that he was ill. She went
at once to see him. He was dying.
She sat at his bedside very often while he was waiting
for death, and he talked to her then, not more fluently than
he had talked heretofore, but with more candour.
She said to him once, ' Well, you have fought the good
fight, dear old friend. You never looked back. You never
fell. It has been a great victory. It has blessed others
besides yourself. I can tell you now that many thought
you would not be able to last. They thought that the
appetite would return, and that it would prove too strong
for you. Many, many people have prayed that you might
have strength in that moment, if it ever came.'
He smiled wistfully, and said to her, ' You used to think
as how it was the drink that might come upon me again.
It wasn't that. God took all desire for it clean away from
O. B. D. 75
me. No; that wasn't the miracle. The greatest miracle
was — the pipe !'
Then he told her that all through those years, when they
thought the temptation to drink was tearing his soul, he
was putting up a tremendous fight with the one appetite
that would not leave him, the appetite for tobacco.
His struggle had been secret to himself. It had been
almost intolerable. At times he felt that he must go mad.
There was something in his brain which was like a devil,
urging him with the most pitiless and unceasing force to
the nulling narcotic of nicotine. Always. Never had it
left him. And he had fought it, not because he felt that
it was sinful to smoke, not even that he feared it might
re-create his appetite for drink, but because he wanted to
be as good a soldier as he could, to give up everything
for God.
And so, on his dying bed, this old Londoner, picked
from the gutter and restored to humanity, contemplated
as the great miracle, not his conversion, not his total and
mysterious freedom from alcoholism, but the ability with
which God had provided him to withstand the passion for
his pipe. Always the torture had been present, always
strength had been sufficient to withstand it.
Just before the moment of his death, the adjutant said
to him, * You are quite happy? You know that God has
forgiven you everything?'
He answered, ' I am without fear.'
In that neighbourhood people still talk about Old Born
Drunk, and they like to impress those who will listen with
the wonder of his funeral. He was given what is called
* an Army funeral,' that is to say, he was buried with the
military honours of salvation, just as a great soldier, a
national hero, is buried with martial pomp. Thousands of
people lined the streets and followed the procession to the
cemetery. The entire district turned out like one man to
see the last of Old Born Drunk — to stare, perhaps, at the
pageant, to be influenced, however, whether they wished
it or not, by the good end of a brave fighter. A stranger
entering that quarter of the town would have thought
76 O. B. D.
that the populace had turned out for the funeral of their
prince.
Such is the extraordinary parochialism of London, a
truth of the metropolis little realized by the casual observer.
A few hundred yards away from that particular quarter of
the town, no one had heard of Old Born Drunk. In that
particular quarter he was more famous, more watched,
more discussed than the greatest heroes of the nation.
His death was an event. His salvation was a profound
impression. The quarter of the town in which he lived and
died feels to this day, and will feel through many genera
tions, the effect of his salvation.
THE CRIMINAL
A GREAT step will be taken towards the abolition of
T* crime when the State recognizes that criminals are
human beings extremely like ourselves. It is quite a fair
thing to say of the mass of civilized mankind that their
primary objective in existence is money ; and it is no less
fair to say that the vast majority desire to get more money
than is necessary for their actual needs with as little labour
as possible. Indeed, the whole spirit of modern politics
and trade organizations, in its ultimate purpose, represents
this individual search after as large a reward as possible
for as little exertion as may be. Higher wages and shorter
hours of employment is the respectable and social formula
of that disreputable and anti-social energy which actuates
the criminal mind, and expresses itself in the familiar
formulae of thieves' philosophy.*
But there is something else. The criminal is often
heroic in his character, superior to the ruck, a man of
daring, romance, and adventure.
Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes endless authorities in his
book on The Criminal to prove that those whom we call
enemies of society are only following impulses which were
praiseworthy in another age, and which are even in this
age practised by a great many people who flourish in the
front ranks of our industrial civilization. ' Of a very great
number of modern habitual criminals,' says one authority,
' it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in
an age in which their merits are not appreciated. Had
* Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes in his book a few inscriptions made by
convicts on the walls of their cells. Such as : ' The Lord says it is good
to be here.' ' Cheer up, girls, it's no use to fret.' The philosophy of
the criminal is to bear punishment, and take care not to be caught next
time.
78 THE CRIMINAL
they been in the world a sufficient number of generations
ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a
tribe. . . . With the disposition and the habits of uncivilized
men which he has inherited from a remote past, the criminal
has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants
have learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded
more and more as an outcast as he strives more and more
to fulfil the yearnings of his nature.'
Another authority says, ' Some of them at least would
have been the ornament and the moral aristocracy of a tribe
of Red Indians.' Another, ' The criminal of to-day is the
hero of our old legends. We put in prison to-day the man
who would have been the dreaded and respected chief of a
clan or tribe.' Another exclaims, ' How many of Homer's
heroes would to-day be in a convict prison, or, at all
events, despised as violent and unjust?'
We may also see with but very little effort of observa
tion that there are a great many public men enjoying the
reward of fortune at the present day whose success in
financial jugglery has been won by methods exactly similar
to the criminal's more blundering attempts after the wealth
of other people. Every time a company-promoting case
occurs in the law courts, although by his knowledge of the
company-law and the difficulty of obtaining evidence in
such cases, the defendant may escape prison, every man of
affairs knows that he is a blackguard of the lowest kind,
a criminal set upon getting other people's money by dis
honest means, and a rogue as greatly deserving penal
servitude as any burglar or petty larcener in a convict
prison.
As to when criminal instincts first manifest themselves,
one who had visited juvenile offenders in Tothill Fields
wrote : ' On our return ... we consulted with some of
our friends as to the various peccadilloes of their youth,
and though each we asked had grown to be a man of
some little mark in the world, both for intellect and honour,
they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their
younger days many of the very " crimes " for which the
boys at Tothill Fields are incarcerated. For ourselves, we
THE CRIMINAL 70
will frankly confess, that at Westminster School, where
we passed some seven years of our boyhood, such acts were
daily perpetrated ; and yet if the scholars had been sent
to the House of Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge,
to complete their education, the country would now have
seen many of our playmates working among the convicts
in the Dockyards, rather than lending dignity to the senate
or honour to the bench.'
The story which I am about to tell in this place is the
narrative of a modern criminal which emphasizes every
thing; that has ever been written on the subject by anthro
pologists and criminologists ; but, as the end will prove,
it shows that even in a mind penetrated and interpenetrated
with anti-social instincts there is some one thing to which
appeal may be made, and by which such reform can be
effected as to lead to a complete spiritual regeneration.
Psychology cannot neglect this regenerating influence and
call itself a complete science of the human mind. Crimin
ologists and prison reformers can effect little for the
permanent improvement of the habitual criminal without
the employment of this force. One power, and one alone,
can make the habitual criminal a good man in the loftiest
and only lasting sense of that term, and that force is
religion.
Born in the slums of London, with parents rather better
than the average, the man in this story, whom we will call
Joe, found himself with the streets for his only playground,
and with bad boys for the only companions worthy of his
friendship. He was so enormously strong, so full of
daring, so conscious of restriction and limitation in the
narrowness of his circumstance, that he must needs fling
himself heart and ,soul into the dare-devil adventures of
boys hungry for a big life and bold enough to fight for it.
No Sunday-school could held such a boy ; no second
hand religion in a respectable church could impress his
mind with the reality of spiritual things. He found him
self surrounded by bricks and walls, and he wanted adven
ture. He felt himself capable of doing things worthy of
a novelettCj and he saw a policeman at the street corner.
8o THE CRIMINAL
It became evident to him that if he wanted to fulfil the
passion of his body, he must dare the police and find his
adventures in the streets. To every powerful impulse of
his nature society had set up circumambient opposition. It
was necessary to make war upon society.
He was in prison at nine years of age.
Before getting into prison he had encountered the social
law. He had stolen more clumsily than was his wont a
piece of meat, with the result that he got eight strokes
with the birch-rod. This punishment did not check him.
He aimed at higher game. To be a petty thief did not
satisfy his buccaneering ambitions. He conceived the idea
of a burglary. The respectable reader, shocked by the
thought of a child of nine committing burglary, must ask
himself whether at that age he was not stealing sugar
from the sideboard cupboard or candied-peel from the
larder. He must remember, too, that this child of nine
had been marched triumphantly to a police-court, had had
the honour of appearing before a magistrate, and had been
hardened by a birching. If, after this experience, he had
played the lamb, what would the young lions of the slums
have thought about him? Be it remembered that this boy
was lion-hearted, bold, daring, brave, strong, and indifferent
to punishment.
I tried to discover what had worked in his mind at this
time, and he could only tell me that he wanted to be daring,
wanted to feel himself big. The meek children of that
neighbourhood went to Sunday-school ; he regarded them
with contempt ; a certain section were neither good nor
bad, neither respectable nor disreputable, they did not
interest him, did not satisfy him ; others, the very elect,
brave, bold, dauntless, and tremendously masculine, roused
in his mind the greatest force in childhood — admiration.
He wanted to be like these fine fellows. He not only
wanted to feel that he was clever at stealing, but also that
he feared nothing, neither policeman, judge, prison, nor
hangman's rope — like these bloods of the slum.
It is necessary to know something of a boy's life in the
slums — its conditions, its dulness, its surrounding influences.
THE CRIMINAL 81
and its limitations — to understand the swift growth and
vigorous development of criminality in the minds of quite
young children.
Boys of a strong animal temperament — whose innocence
has long departed, and who inhabit often enough the same
bedroom as their fathers and mothers — find themselves in
streets full of shops and barrows where there is a
profusion of everything the body can desire, even a pro
fusion of things coveted by low and sensual minds — such
as the barrow of vicious photographs, the empty shop
employed as a penny-gaff for exhibiting the nude, and those
miserable penny-in-the-slot machines whose pictures are so
vile and so vulgar. To enjoy these things money is neces
sary, and the only romantic way of getting money is by
stealing ; the only way of getting food and tobacco and
pictures without money is by stealing them.
The homes from which these boys come into the streets,
where so much wealth is displayed, are bad enough as
sleeping-places, but as living-rooms they are quite horrible.
To a high-spirited boy conscious of desire for a full-blooded
life of adventure they are impossible. He must have move
ment, the excitement of danger, the enjoyment of forbidden
pleasures.
' Have you ever realized,' Mr. Thomas Holmes once
asked me, ' what it is to live below the poverty line? Not
in the family of the well-to-do mechanic, with his club and
his union ; but right down — down in the kennels and cellars
and gutters? Think what your manhood would have been if
your childhood had passed in a garret, where your mother
made matchboxes for fourteen hours a day, and at the end
of the week earned nine shillings. In that room you would
have eaten your meals — save the mark ! — toiled over the
paste-pot before you went to school and after you came
from school, and then you would have crawled into a
corner to sleep on a mattress with the rest of the family.
That dingy world would have been your world, your
environment. '*
Then there is this most important factor to bear in
* ' Master Workers '
82 . THE CRIMINAL
mind — the vanity of the daring child, the swagger of the
masculine boy which becomes so easily the well-known
vanity of the criminal. Hear Mr. Havelock Ellis on this
head:
' The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and
an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false
estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic
delight in admiration. They share this character with a
large proportion of artists and literary men, though, as
Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect.
The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal
element, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals
in them the weak points of a mental organization, which
at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in
the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive ; in
its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of
unbalanced mental organization, artist or criminal.
' George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men,
has some remarks on the vanity of criminals in regard to
dress : " There is not a set of people in the world more
vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a
figure whenever they have an opportunity, and of attract
ing the eyes of their fellow-creatures by the gallantry of
their appearance. The famous Shepherd of olden times
delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when
he appeared in public generally wore a silver-hilted sword
at his side ; whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later
day, were the best-dressed men on the pavd of London.
Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly decorated, and
the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of
dress ; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, the leader of
the cannibal gipsy band which infested Hungary towards
the conclusion of the century, was adorned with gold and
jewels of the value of four thousand guilders. Observe,
ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonize.
The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display
as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or
out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a
profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk
THE CRIMINAL 83
jauntily up and down." ' He then describes the principal
features of Spanish robber foppery.
' More significant and even more widely spread is the
moral vanity of criminals. " In ordinary society," said
Vidocq, "infamy is dreaded; among a body of prisoners
the only shame is not to be infamous ; to be an escarpe
(assassin) is the highest praise." This is universally true
among every group of murderers or of thieves, the author
of a large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows
as a hero, and he looks down upon the others with con
tempt ; the man who has had the misfortune to be imprisoned
for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society, disreputable
offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of
magnitude.
' A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family.
When he heard that all St. Petersburg was talking of him,
he said, " Now my school-fellows will see how unfair it
was of them to say that I should never be heard of." '*
The Abb6 Moreau, describing the arrival of a great
criminal at the prison of La Grande Roquette, says that he
is immediately surrounded, though the curiosity remains
respectful, and is a king in the midst of his subjects ;
' envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who
have succeeded in placing themselves near him ; they listen
eagerly for his slightest word ; they do not speak their
admiration for fear of interrupting him, and he knows that
he dominates and fascinates them.'
Essential to a true understanding of the young criminal
is the full apprehension of that immense respect with which
great crime inspires the daring members of society whose
blood clamours for adventure, whose bodies are insufficiently
nourished, and whose minds are insufficiently subjected to
discipline.
When Joe came back to his mates from that first birching
he was very little wickeder than the average schoolboy ; but
mark the swift growth of the criminal.
His vanity to appear a fine fellow in the eyes of his
rough mates led him not only to make light of his disgrace
• 'The Criminal, ' by Havelock Elli
84 THE CRIMINAL
and its sufferings, but to propose things a great deal more
daring and dangerous. He wanted to be a burglar before
he was ten years of age.
Before he committed burglary, in the technical sense of
that term, he shone as a hero among his fellows in other
forms of crime requiring swiftness of execution and no little
daring. It was one of his favourite tricks to enter a shop
which he had reconnoitred with the cunning of a Red Indian,
and to vault the counter, fill both hands from the till, and
make his escape before the shopkeeper had risen from his
chair in the back parlour. Another of his ways of getting
money was to obtain goods at various shops in his mother's
name, and to sell them at half-price to other people. He
made a habit of playing highwayman to boys sent on
errands by their mothers, forcing those poor frightened
children to deliver up either their money or their
packages.
To return tamely home after some of these escapades
not only was dangerous but dreadfully uninteresting. He
became one of a gang who slept out — slept either in common
lodging-houses or in the open streets. He was not in the
least ashamed when a policeman laid him by the heels and
he went to prison.
It was at the age of fourteen that he committed his first
technical burglary.
There was a jeweller's shop in the neighbourhood which
exhibited a tempting show of silver-plate in its windows.
This shop occupied a corner, and a garden wall alone
separated Joe from its back premises. To climb that wall
at night, to enter the house, and to get away with some
of the silver-plate, seemed to him a perfectly easy and quite
a delightful adventure. He worked it all out with some of
his mates, and dreamed great dreams of glory till the night
came round for the crime.
Everything favoured these wild boys — a dark night,
empty streets, an absence of police. Joe climbed the wall,
disappeared on the other side, and his mates waited in the
street to receive the plunder when he returned. As though
born to the job of housebreaking, Joe found it easy to force
THE CRIMINAL 85
a window, to raise the sash without making a noise, to
enter the premises, and find his way in the dark to the shop
and the silver. He made his haul — listened to hear if
anyone was stirring — and then stole out through the
window, crossed the garden, and climbed the wall. All
was perfectly still and silent. He saw figures in the dark
ness beneath him, descended into their midst, and found
himself held by four policemen.
He was not then fourteen years of age, and the law
sentenced him to fifteen months' imprisonment.
The birching was a light matter, but fifteen months of
prison fare, prison solitude, and prison discipline, this was
terrible to the boy. He did not feel any horror of himself,
any fear of hell, any desire for goodness, but in his prison
cell this London boy determined that he would give up his
mates, mend his ways, and live a life in which the police
could never interfere. He tells me he suffered terrible
remorse, and used to cry in his cell ; but when I question
him it is to discover that he felt only the inconvenience of
prison, the wretchedness of his fare, and the horrible, mad
dening deprivation of his liberty. A boy who has ever
endured three hours' ' detention ' on a half-holiday may
guess what this strong-limbed, daring lad of fourteen
suffered during those dragging fifteen months of
prison.
But when he came out, there was nothing in his heart
except bitterness and rage. Far from mending him, far
from creating in him any desire for goodness, uprightness,
and a life of useful work, prison had only made the lad a
deadly hater of law, and a sworn enemy of society. He
determined to plot against society and to beat it at its own
game.
Within three months of his release he was arrested and
sent to a truant school. This punishment also failed to
reform his character. He came out from it to receive in
quick succession nine sentences, each of a month, for thefts
of various kinds.
He was now marked down as incorrigible, ticketed by
the police as one of the criminal classes. People pointed
86 THE CRIMINAL
at him in the streets, policemen gave him a look as he went
by, sometimes followed him.
He now began to work as a real burglar, associating
with notorious cracksmen. He heard in one of the public-
houses he frequented of a man, the owner of a laundry,
who kept all his money in the breast pocket of his overcoat,
which he always hung at night on the peg of his bedroom
door. Sometimes, it was said, that pocket contained as
much as fifteen or twenty pounds.
Joe studied the house, made himself acquainted with its
plan, and one night set out to pick the pocket of that over
coat hanging from the bedroom door. His account of this
crime made one feel something of the terror associated with
desperate burglars. He is a man above the medium height,
of a thin and wasted frame, but with broad shoulders and
a large greyish face ; the forehead low, the head round,
the eyes big, searching, menacing ; the voice full of a quick
decision and a certain hard brutality.
' I slipped out one night from a public-house,' he told
me, * walked into dark streets until I had dodged all the
police that were watching me, and then made my way to
the laundryman's house. There was a wall that a cat could
climb easier than I could, but I nipped over it, and lay in
the garden, listening to hear if I had disturbed anybody.
Not a sound. I went to the back of the house, found a
window that was all right, opened it with only a creak or
two, waited on the sill for five or ten minutes to hear if
anybody was stirring, and then stepped quietly inside.
Quietly I I went bang into a bath of water, stumbled, fell,
and made such a clatter that I woke the people up. I heard
the wife say, " There's someone downstairs !" And I heard
the man say, " Go along with you; it's only a cat." The
wife persisted. The husband told her to shut up. I stood
where I was in the dark bath-house for a solid hour. Then
I moved, groping my way. I found the hall, crept to the
stairs, and listened. Nothing could be heard, except a
clock ticking. I waited, and then went softly up the stairs.
When I reached the landing I could hear the man and
woman snoring — like a couple of pigs ! I remember I felt
THE CRIMINAL 87
disgusted by the noise they made. Lor', I never heard
anything like it — upon my word, it was just like a couple
of pigs. I stood listening to them at that bedroom door —
less than an inch of wood between me and the overcoat —
for another hour. Then I put my fingers round the handle,
turned it very gently, and opened the door. The snoring
sounded much louder. There was no light in the room. I
hadn't disturbed them in the least. I waited for a few
minutes, then slipped my free hand round the door, felt for
the overcoat, found the bag of cash, drew it out, slipped it
in my pocket, and shut the door as quietly as I had opened
it, waited a few minutes to be certain I hadn't disturbed
them, and then very slowly went down the stairs. I gave
the bath a wide berth, got out of the window, and made off.
' There was twenty-one pounds in the bag, and I went
large. I bought myself a new suit of clothes, gave the
money to a pal to keep for me, and kept just enough for
drinks and cigars till the affair should blow over. But four
days afterwards a policeman came to me. " Joe," he said,
" where did you get that suit of clothes from?" " My cousin
gave it to me," I answered. Not a bit of use. They had
me, and I got a stretch.'
A few days after he came out he was standing one day
looking into a jeweller's shop, when a policeman gripped
his arm suddenly from behind and marched him off to the
station. In his pocket were found some housebreaking
tools. He was sent to prison.
All that he suffered in these imprisonments, so far as
his inarticulate subconsciousness can express itself, appears
to have been a remorse of the stomach. Every Sunday,
half-starved, forsaken, and silent in his prison cell, he
reflected on his brothers at the family dinner-table in his
father's house. They were not only at liberty; they were
enjoying a Sunday dinner. His imagination brought into
his cell the rich odours of beef gravy, the flavour of baked
potatoes, the taste of white bread, the pleasant smell of
hot roast beef fresh and sputtering from the fire. He tells
me that he was not maddened by this memory, but saddened
to tears. He used to cry softly to himself, swallowing
88 THE CRIMINAL
great lumps in his throat, and thinking of all that he
missed by being in prison. There are many tears shed in
gaols ; these places indeed are houses of weeping, and tears
for a Sunday dinner are not perhaps in the sight of the
spirits vastly different from tears of a more religious con
trition. When this man wept for roast beef and fried
potatoes, he wept for his past life, just as Verlaine, with a
greater gift of expression, wept in the cells of his French
prison :
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme !
Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,
Berce sa palme.
La cloche dans le ciel qu'on voit
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau sur 1'arbre qu'on voit
Chante sa plainte.
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est la,
Simple et tranquille.
Cette paisible rumeur-la
Vient de la ville.
— Qu'as-tu fait, o toi que voila,
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu as-tu fait, toi que voila,
De ta jeunesse?
Weeping almost without ceasing, and thinking of his
brothers in their father's house, the London burglar, like
the Parisian poet, was really weeping for his wasted youth.
He got so far in his remorse as to pray, and so real was
his bitterness — even if inspired by a Sunday dinner — that
his prayers were always for death. He wanted to get out
of a world which seemed to have no use for him, a world
whose affairs appeared to be governed by policemen who
had a ' down ' on him. All through his imprisonment he
had these fits of remorse, and prayed to die.
Never once — and in this all the prisoners I have ever
talked to bear him out — never once did a prison chaplain
visit his cell, make an appeal to his higher nature, or show
that interest in his life, whether he swam or sank, which
an expert like General Booth tells us is the very first step
THE CRIMINAL 89
towards the reclamation of the outcast. I asked him his
opinion of the Church services, and he said that they were
regarded as opportunities for conversation, that the words
of the prayers sounded like a mockery, that singing hymns
was pleasant and popular, that the sermons were unintel
ligible. In the interviews which a prisoner is supposed to
have with the chaplain before release, he was addressed
always in the same words (others bear him out in this, too),
' Well, I suppose I shall see you back here in a month or
two?' Once he turned round on the chaplain and said,
' Yes, and it won't be your fault if you see me back here
all my life.' He was conscious that the chaplain ought to
have been able to help him. A strange conviction in the
mind of such a man.
We have now to relate something concerning the police
which we must preface with a caution to the reader. It
is not intended here to argue that the treatment experi
enced by Joe, and some others, is in the least typical of
the London police. Many of these men help old prisoners,
and are kind to them in divers ways. But this is truth —
let a man inspire two or three of the police in his neigh
bourhood with hate, and that man may be marked down
for ceaseless persecution and most cruel tyranny. When
ever men of the class of policemen get a ' down ' on a
man — as for instance, rough-riding corporals in a cavalry
regiment on some unfortunate recruit — they sometimes use
their power, and exert their authority to make that man's
life a hell — in their own phrase, to break him. I do not
say in the case of the police that they have not some excuse
for this conduct — they are brave men exposed to most
cowardly and brutal assaults — but their vengeance is cer
tainly a danger and a great expense to the State. I fear
that this private execution of vengeance still goes on ; I
am sure that the criminal class is made worse by it ; I
am convinced that the heads of police are unaware of it;
moreover, I feel that the police who do these things con
sider themselves justified in their action, and believe that
in executing private vengeance they are furthering the
cause of law and order quite as much as getting even with
90 THE CRIMINAL
their oppressors. One is not by any means making a
general attack upon the London police.
When Joe came out from prison he went, with the
money he had earned by prison labour, and asked his
father to come for a drink. The old man refused. Joe
went to the tavern, bought himself a drink, purchased a
little gin for his mother and a few cigars for his father,
and returned home with these peace-offerings. Half an
hour afterwards he was taking the air, and enjoying the
sweets of liberty.
A policeman crossed the road and stopped him. ' Joe,'
he said, in a kindly voice, ' an old gentleman has had his
watch pinched ; the description given answers to you ; the
inspector thinks you can clear yourself all right, but wants
you to step up to the station and give an account of your
movements.'
* Why, I've only just come out !' said Joe.
' I know; but the description answers.'
Joe walked easily and cheerfully beside the policeman,
laughing at those who turned and stared, thinking that Joe
was caught again. As he entered the station the police
man suddenly gripped his arm, and ran him before the
inspector. * I charge this man,' he said, ' with drunkenness
and begging.'
When he was in the cell two or three constables entered.
Joe had not handled the police force gently in the past, and
he had experienced before police retribution in the station
cell. But now he was innocent.
The policemen set about him with their fists and feet,
and did not leave him until he was bleeding, bruised, and
almost unconscious.
I asked him why he did not hit back, or insist upon
seeing the inspector. His answer chimed exactly with the
comment of another old gaol-bird who was present, ' What
would have been the use?' They both smiled at my
innocence in asking such a question.
Then these two men told me of how on many occasions
they had been the victims of police ' justice,' of how on
many occasions the door of the station cell had opened,
THE CRIMINAL 91
and two, three, and four men had entered to pound them
unmercifully, — many occasions. Those nights in the cell
of the police-station are dreaded by the marked man as
much as any part of the prison treatment, except ' solitary.'
The utter uselessness of complaint, the necessity of taking
the punishment ' lying down,' the feeling of its injustice
which stirs in their blood — this makes them bitter against
the police, and there is no bitterness in the world like an
old convict's for the force of law and order.
When Joe came out from imprisonment which followed
upon this shameful arrest, he was a man with but one
thought in his soul — murder. As he ' came down the
street ' he encountered the policeman who had put him
away. The man laughed, and said, ' I did you nicely, Joe,
didn't I? Cheer up! I'll have you again before long.'
' Not without cause, you !' said Joe, and walked on.
He waited till dark, and then went to a street with
iron railings in front of the areas. A blow with his knee
broke a railing in the middle ; a wrench with his strong
hands at the spike, and he had drawn it out from the cross
bar. This weapon he slipped inside his trousers, and went
to meet the constable who had put him away.
The man came along ; Joe hid in a doorway. The man
drew level with Joe. Out came the iron bar, and with one
smashing blow, as the constable passed, one blow which
broke the helmet to pieces and cracked the man's skull like
an egg-shell, Joe's enemy lay senseless on the pavement.
For this crime he received a long stretch at Dartmoor.
He told me that he has never suffered so much in his
life as he suffered during solitary confinement. He said
that no words can express the torture of that punishment.
A flogging is bad, very bad, but it is not to be compared
with the maddening horror of solitary confinement. A diet
of bread and water wastes the body to the point of extremest
weakness ; and in this pitiable condition of physical collapse
the mind has to endure solitude, silence, semi-darkness.
One day of this punishment is hard to support, but two,
three, four — the hardest brute in the world is reduced to
whining for mercy.
92 THE CRIMINAL
I asked him what a man does in solitary confinement,
and never, so long as I live, shall I forget his answer. It
was an answer given not in words, but in a posture. He
sat forward on the edge of his chair, rested an elbow on
his right knee, placed his fingers against his cheek, and
stared at nothingness.
' It's like that all the time,' said another gaol-bird, who
was present, studying Joe's attitude with a critical and
approving glance; 'and sometimes it's like this.' He let
his body lean forward, set both elbows on his knees, and
with his hands on either side of his face, the fingers almost
meeting over the head, stared down at the floor.
Joe said to me, ' All day long like that — on bread and
water. No light, no air, no sound of a voice, no sound of
a step, nothing ! I reckon a man would rather be hanged
than go through solitary.'
This man, whose story will disclose a nature very far
from indifferent to kindness and sympathy, whose brain is
acute, observing, and reflective, and whose whole life is
now given to saving the criminal classes, assures me that
every fresh imprisonment only hardened him, and declares
that no one who has really studied prisons, with a know
ledge of prisoners, can believe that imprisonment has any
other effect than this terrible, cruel, and costly effect of
hardening and making worse.
He speaks with authority. This man who is grey and
looks so old is four-and-thirty. Out of his thirty-four years
of life, seventeen have been spent in prison.
This seems a suitable place to quote Thomas Holmes
on our prison system : ' It is the most senseless, brutal,
and wicked of all human schemes for checking crime.
Appallingly stupid. When I think of men I know sitting
in their dark cells at night — they put them to bed at eight
o'clock ! — I can almost cry with the pain of it. If the idea
is simply to punish, the present system is admirable ; it is
so supremely devilish. But, I take it, the State, when it
gets hold of a man who has broken one of its laws, desires
to send him back to the work! as speedily as possible, to
work honestly and truly for the nation. But what does the
THE CRIMINAL 93
prison do? It crucifies the man, and hardens him past
redemption. It intensifies his bitterness against society,
and adds a horrible darkness to the chaos of his moral
nature. Do you know these words of a prisoner? — they
are worth remembering : "I know how many nails there
are in the floor within reach of my eye, and the number of
the seams also ; I am familiar with the stained spots, the
splintered furrows, the scratches, and the uneven surface
of the planks. The floor is a well-known map to me — the
map of monotony — and I con its queer geography all day
and at night in dreary dreams. I know the blotches on the
whitened wall as well as I know the warts and moles on
the hopeless faces opposite me. My mind is a mill that
grinds nothing. Give me work — work for heart and mind
— or my heart will lose its last spark of hope, and my brain
its last remnant of reason."
* Think of those words for a night or two, as you move
freely about the rooms of your home. And think of them
when you wake to an open window and the freshness of a
new morning. Think of them. And there are thousands
of men penned in like this — whose minds are a mill that
grinds nothing — every day in a Christian year. It is not
sentimental rubbish; it isn't hysterical. Because, don't
you see, a criminal is a human being, and in many instances
of a most amazingly complex and bewildering fashion.'
Sir Oliver Lodge, who is interested in this question of
prisons, and has made some study of it, asks, * Are we
satisfied with our treatment of criminals? Are we, as a
civilized people, content to grow a perennial class of
habitual criminals, and to keep them in check only by
devices appropriate to savages : hunting them, flogging
them, locking them up, and exterminating them?'
At Dartmoor, Joe found something which mitigated the
horrors of his existence. In prison there is rather more
thieving, I am told, than outside. Every convict is on the
look out for * pinching ' something ; it breaks the monotony
merely to look out for the chance of stealing, just as a
fisherman will cheerfully go all day without getting a bite.
But seldom is the convict's look out unrewarded. He can
94 THE CRIMINAL
steal in the kitchen, in the shops, in the cells. Also he can
trade with warders, many of whom (the great majority, I
am told,) either out of goodness of heart or to add to
their wages, smuggle in food and plug tobacco for the
convicts. All this, as I say, breaks the monotony of
prison routine.
One day, as he was working in the corridors of the
prison, Joe saw a handkerchief in one of the cells. He
' pinched ' it. Some little time afterwards that handkerchief
came in useful. He was digging with a gang of convicts
on the bogs when he caught sight of two little mice,
huddling away to escape detection. Swift as thought — I
have never seen man move his hands quicker than Joe —
he bagged the mice ; wrapped them in his handkerchief,
and stuffed the booty under the back of his shirt. He got
back to his cell with his find undetected.
For sixteen months they delighted the life of this habitual
criminal — those two little mice. In the loneliness of his
cell he tamed them, taught them tricks, made them fond
of him. For their sakes he stole from the kitchen and
saved crumbs from his own meals. Their sleeping-place
was a bag hanging from the wall of his cell. In this bag
they produced a family, soon necessitating greater thefts
from the kitchen, and the entire family was removed from
prison when Joe got his liberty and taken back to his
father.
Some of the prisoners tame starlings, crows, and
sparrows.
One other means Joe discovered to alleviate the dul-
ness of his lot. He instituted a telephone service with the
next cell. By the removal of one brick, easily replaced,
prisoners can speak to each other in whispers. What they
find to talk about can be imagined. It is the gossip of the
prison — the cruelty of one warder, the kindness of another,
the funk of a third, the theft of this convict, the mutiny
of that, and what each man means to do when he
gets out.
Joe came out of his sentence more hardened than ever,
but more or less out of love with the life that had got him
THE CRIMINAL 95
there. He found someone waiting to meet him. It was
the converted Puncher.
The Puncher had set himself upon the conversion of this
man, the chief terror of the neighbourhood. When drink
had brought him down to common lodging-houses, the
Puncher had made acquaintance with the Criminal. Both
men were big in their own way. The Puncher was a great
fighter ; the Criminal was a great burglar. The Puncher
treated the Criminal as an equal. They drank together,
plotted certain villainies together, and in a way consorted.
But {here was always something which kept them separate.
Joe respected the Puncher as a fighting-man, but he thought
nothing of him as a criminal. Joe, it must be remembered,
had risen so high in his profession of burglar as to work
with men like Milsom and Fowler, who thought no little
of his cunning, and had the highest respect for his courage.
A sentence of twelve months mercifully, for Joe, broke up
this partnership just before the famous murder. Another
of the men he worked with was high in his profession —
Dick Coombs, now serving a life sentence for the murder
of his mistress. And another was a notorious criminal
with the romantic name of Brighton Slasher, who is now
serving his third term of seven years, to say nothing of
other terms.
Joe was a first-class burglar, and a man trusted and
respected by the best brains in his profession. The
Puncher did not, therefore, stoop when he associated with
Joe in common lodging-houses, and Joe was not without
reason when he held himself at a certain distance from
this prize-fighter, fallen into mere drunkenness and stupid
violence.
It was of Joe the Puncher thought most longingly after
his own conversion. He knew how the wild spirits in that
neighbourhood respected Joe. He knew that Joe was
looked upon as the most dangerous man in the place. If
only this king of the local terrors could be caught, could
be made to fling oft evil, and stand up clean and straight
for right living, what an effect it would produce, what a
glory for religion 1
96 THE CRIMINAL
So the Puncher waited for Joe, and the two men talked
together — Joe hearing what the Puncher had to say, and
leaving him with the promise to think it over.
What the Puncher said was merely to point out the
discomforts of evil and the comforts of goodness. He
asked Joe to compare prison life with freedom, the lodging-
house with home, crime with human affection. He could
say, ' Look at me now, and remember what I was once.'
Joe could certainly see a great difference.
But Joe was in the net of crime. His companions came
about him. It was quite impossible to escape from them.
Soon he was living in the lodging-houses of this dreadful
quarter of the town.
One pays fivepence a night in the houses frequented
by Joe. You get for this money a single bed in a room
containing six ; lights are turned out at half-past twelve ;
and you must leave your bed before nine o'clock in the
morning. If you have the ' clods ' for the next night's
doss, you can stay in the kitchen all day. These kitchens
can be seen through the street railings ; the doors are kicked
to pieces, the windows have gone, the interior is lighted
chiefly by the fire. Here hangs a general frying-pan beside
the fireplace, always dirty. You take your food, cook it,
hang the frying-pan up, still dirty, and then eat either on
a backless bench or at a filthy table, often surrounded by
the lowest creatures in London. This is the general
kitchen, and it is here that the police come when they
want a particular criminal.
Joe discovered that this environment was too strong for
him. He remembered what the Puncher had said to him ;
he saw the common sense of it, but it was not, he felt,
possible for him. He could not get away from his mates.
The Puncher stuck to him. One evening he took Joe
back with him to his home.
' I shall never forget that night,' says Joe, with
profound feeling.
There was no vision, no conversion. I expected to hear
that Puncher had got him to pray, and that the vision
had come. No. What the poor hunted, harried, and
THE CRIMINAL 97
desperate criminal will never forget is the brightness and
happiness of the Puncher's home.
' And he took me there!' says Joe, opening his eyes;
' me, fresh from prison, and bad if ever a man was bad. I
shall never forget that evening.'
But before the Puncher could proceed with his humaniz
ing, Joe was back in prison.
This time he prayed to God nearly every night of his
sentence, and this time it was not for death.
A new idea had come to the criminal. He was per
suaded that if he could get a good woman to marry him
he would be able to live a straight life. With this fixed
idea in his head, this desperate terror of the police knelt
down in his prison cell night after night, and prayed that
God would give him a wife. Among all the strange behests
that go into the infinite from the souls of kneeling mortals,
this human cry of the burglar in prison must seem to
some the very strangest — for he was praying for his idea
of a Saviour, the only Saviour who could help him, a good
woman — ' that not impossible She.'
When he came from his praying and his prison labour,
he found the faithful Puncher waiting for him. This time
the Puncher begged him to come straight to the Salva
tion Army hall, but the Criminal said no to that, and went
on his way. If there was a God, He would answer
that prayer of the prison cell, and send a woman to
save him.
A night or two after there was a dispute in a public-
house. The two disputants adjourned to fight it out. One
of them was Joe. He nearly killed his man, but he him
self suffered frightfully — his head was half split, his cheeks
were cut, and his face was so smashed about that he
was scarcely recognizable. He went from the fight to a
chemist's shop and had his head bandaged, his wounds
dressed. While this was being done, he felt the hopeless
ness of his case — his own utter hopelessness, and the
strength of the net of crime which held him like a bird.
He went straight from the bandaging to the hall of the
Salvation Army.
98 THE CRIMINAL
At first no one recognized him. He sat there, with
his bruised and blackened eyes, his swollen lips, and his
bandaged head, listening to what they had to say. Then
one of the Salvationists came to him, recognized him,
and said :
' Aren't you tired of your life?'
* I am.'
1 Wouldn't you like to begin again?'
' I would.'
Then followed the usual invitation, and Joe got up and
marched to the penitent form. He knelt down, and some
of them knelt beside him. They counselled him. They
prayed for his soul. He got up saying that he was saved.
What happened nobody knows. Joe himself is unable
to explain. He knelt there and prayed ; he rose feeling
that he had sufficient strength to make a fight for a clean
life. He says he felt himself quite free of the net of
crime.
Subconscious mentation? The working of the mind,
fed by a suggestion from the Puncher? Yes, this is quite
a likely theory ; but why the man should go to his prayers
straight from a fight, why his head singing with blows
should hold the idea of prayer, and should be capable of
receiving peace — this is difficult to explain. More difficult,
too, the explanation of his complete conversion, the instant
and complete conversion of a criminal called habitual — so
that he rose up with no desire to steal, and, as the sequel
has proved, with strength to withstand the temptation of
his former associates, with courage to march in the very
streets frequented by those men under the banner of a
ridiculed salvation.
Even the Puncher could not believe that the Criminal
was completely saved. He said to the adjutant, with
anxiety, ' I'm not happy about Joe; I can't help thinking
he ought to have another dip.' To begin with, Joe had
never done a day's work in his life. It was difficult to
see how he would accustom himself to daily toil for a
small wage ; and he showed no particular enthusiasm in
his conversion.
THE CRIMINAL 99
But Joe was waiting for his prayer to be answered.
They got him employment in a laundry. He received
no wages at first, only his food, but he worked well and
never once gave occasion for anxiety. The whole neigh
bourhood marvelled to see this cracksman, this friend of
Milsom and Fowler, at humble work.
One day he was painting a cart, and looking up from
his job saw a girl looking at him. He felt that his prayer
was answered. He felt convinced that this was the wife
for whom he had prayed.
He managed to strike up an acquaintance, albeit
diffident of himself and terribly conscious of his bad record.
One day, when they were friends, and had discussed
many things, including their ideas of a happy home, Joe
said to her, ' Do you think you could marry a man
like me?'
' I don't know,' she answered. ' Why?'
1 Because when I was in prison,' he said, ' I asked
God to give me a wife, and I can't help thinking you are
the one.'
But before she could reply, all that he had been
crowded on his mind, and he compared himself with this
good, pure, sensible girl, and felt unworthy. He told her
all this, and said that while he could not help asking her
to be his wife, he did not expect that she would marry
him. He frankly and finely said that he might drift back
and be what he was.
The girl said, ' I know the risk. But I tell you what.
I'll marry you, providing you join the Army and become
a regular soldier. '
Was that the moment of Joe's conversion?
It was at that moment he felt suddenly and supremely
exalted ; his poor troubled soul was flooded with light, like
an answer to prayer, and he felt assured that he was under
the mercy and protection of a God Who cared. ' How
happy I was ! — and how happy I am !' he exclaimed.
It is interesting or surprising, as you like it, to see the
part played by the Salvation Army in this man's love story.
The girl wanted a security. In all London she knew no
ioo THE CRIMINAL
other than the Salvation Army. If he became a soldier,
she would become his wife. The very poor, swept by an
ocean of irresistible oppugnance, have a refuge. It is the
Salvation Army.
This man — one of our habitual criminals — is now as
much respected in the neighbourhood where he was once
the chief terror, as any man living a good, honest, and
unselfish life. His devotion to his wife is an adoration.
And people laugh when they tell you about Joe's tenderness
to children, and how he loves to nurse a baby.
It seems to me that at the back of this conversion is
the force we call, rather slightingly, respectability. The
man wanted to be respectable, wanted a home, wanted
to be free of prisons and police, wanted to have a Sunday
dinner and a clean conscience. Well, but what is all this
except a desire to be better than he was, to be consciously
right, superior, and happy, to reach the height of his
character?
After all, respectability is only another name for desire
for betterment. And it must be seen that his conversion
did not stop at respectability. He is supremely happy after
three years of married life ; he works for his living ; it is
a job to make both ends meet ; there is sometimes an
anxiety about the future ; but in the midst of this happi
ness, respectability, and harassing anxiety, the soul of the
Criminal is directed, like that of the Puncher, to saving
other souls. He is one of the Salvationists in that bad
neighbourhood who works with all his main to convert the
wicked, the evil, and the profitless, and quite simply, quite
genuinely, without fee or reward, and with a fine manful
earnestness he talks bravely to the worst of his former
companions about the love of God.
If respectability is the cause, the fruits of respectability
in the character of this criminal are the fruits of religion.
A COPPER BASHER
YX7HEN he was fourteen years of age he deliberately left
* ^ a comfortable home and gave himself to the London
streets. From earliest childhood he had manifested what
is said to be the unmistakable trait of a criminal — resist
ance to educative influence. Now, in the fifll lustihood of
boyhood, he went to the streets. He went deliberately.
He liked them. He wanted them. There appeared to be
no power which could train him for social life.
It is interesting that this thoroughly bad and criminal
man has never been the slave of sensual appetites. He
has never smoked, he never had the smallest desire for
tobacco, has never even been anxious enough to make
experiment of this habit. Again, he has never been a
drinker. Public-houses have been useful to him in the way
of business ; he has made them rendezvous for the concoct
ing of crimes ; but he has never had the least craving for
alcohol. As regards other sensual temptations, he appears
always to have been equally immune.
One powerful passion possessed his being from child
hood, and left no room for anything else ; this was the
passion for crime. And, not crime on the grand scale, not
valorous burglary nor carefully projected forgery or murder,
but mean, savage, beastly, cowardly, and odious crime.
The reader is now making the acquaintance of a human
monster who occupies a middle place between the felon
and the hooligan ; a man despised by the great criminal
and feared by the rough — a ruffian and a cur.
He sits before me, talking of his past crimes in a way
that makes me shudder. I do not know any man who has
at times so filled me with loathing and aversion. He is
short of stature, with great breadth of high shoulders, the
brief neck fat and spongy. His hair is black and grows
102 A COPPER BASHER
in a silly fringe over his forehead ; his heavy face is the
colour of dough ; there is deadness to human feeling in the
blue eyes ; the cruel mouth, which is never closed, shows
teeth which never meet, and has a tired expression, a little
contemptuous and indifferent. He speaks in the manner
of one whose tongue is too big for the mouth, thickly,
slowly, drawlingly. Sometimes he laughs, and the sound
is thin, heartless, metallic. The impression he makes upon
me is one of horror.
And yet the mind of the man compels interest. One
feels that here is an aspect of the human soul full of
extraordinary suggestion. He gives one fresh ideas con
cerning evil. He makes iniquity take new shapes before
the mind. One contemplates him with curiosity and baffled
wonderment.
His family is of Irish origin. The father and mother
were respectable people occupying a more or less decent
house, and following as well as they could the religion of
their forefathers, a Roman Catholic priest occasionally
visiting them in their home and encouraging them in
ordinary respectability. The brothers and sisters responded
to this training. They went obediently to school, they
attended church, they said their prayers, they grew up
with the idea of getting the best employment they could,
and submitted, without question, to the routine of civiliza
tion, and the necessities of their situation in the social
world.
Danny was the black sheep of this humble family. He
was like a stone to his schoolmasters, imbibing nothing,
and indifferent to chastisement. He played truant from
church. He refused to say his prayers. He regarded the
whole life of the home with contemptuous disfavour
Never once, he says, was he conscious of any desire to
learn, to be good, to work and get on in the world. Always,
from his earliest remembrance, he resented discipline and
loathed effort. He regarded both with impatient contempt
Why should one be careful of behaviour? Why should
one try to get on? The whole of his being supplied no
answer to these questions.
A COPPER BASHER 103
At the age of fourteen the home-life became insuffer
able. Its monotony irked him. He hated it and despised
it. Although in that home he was assured of a comfortable
bed and a sufficiency of food, he preferred the hazard of
the streets. He went out one day with his hands in his
empty pockets, and he never returned.
He became a slinking animal of prey, a human stoat,
with the streets of London for his hunting-ground. His
great physical strength made him welcome to a gang of
youths who had taken to the streets, most of them at any
rate, on account of brutality and starvation at home. This
gang lived by crime, and were seldom so hard put to it
as to sleep in the open. Their headquarters was a common
lodging-house. Danny, who knew them all, and had often
joined them in their devilries, announced to them his
intention of living free. They welcomed him gladly. He
became their leader.
When this gang had made enough money by crime for
food and lodging, they would turn, for diversion, to the
local hooligans, and use them brutally. The Londoner who
wanders into the poor quarters may often have noticed a
gang of vagabond young men hurrying through the streets
as though with some definite and pressing purpose in view.
He may, perhaps, have thought them to be hooligans. In
reality they were probably the dreaded enemies of hooligans,
young criminals whose passion for savagery drives them
every now and then to fight those for whom the police do
not trouble to interfere. Apparently, a young criminal is
often visited with this overmastering impulse to fight, and
as soon as he has earned enough money for his needs and
has eaten his fill, an hour's idleness at a street corner will
end in one of these sudden sallyings out to fight the
roughs.
Danny took part in endless battles of this kind, many
and many a time half murdering his enemies. It was his
sport — his cricket and football and physical culture. The
gang to which he belonged was powerful, savage, and
desperate. Nobody dared to interfere with it. Let Danny
and his mates swing suddenly round a street corner, and
io4 A COPPER BASHER
women drew back from the gate to the doorsteps, children
were called from the gutters, and the hooligans ran for
their lives. During the fight, men looked on from the
doors and windows of the houses, never daring to interfere,
even if their own sons were among the hooligans. And
this was merely the recreation of Danny and his gang of
thieves.
This savagery took another form when Danny advanced
in strength and brutality. It was a favourite occupation of
theirs to waylay a policeman at night, to club him from
behind with a piece of iron, and while he lay unconscious
and silent on the ground to kick him from head to heel,
Danny became what is called a ' Copper Basher.'
Perhaps this cowardly scoundrelism was inspired by
hatred of prison. Very soon after Danny had taken to the
streets he was arrested for felony, and disappeared from
society for three months. His crime, of which he will not
speak, and which he proudly insists was a ' felony,' may
possibly have been the theft of twopence or threepence from
a child sent to fetch a loaf of bread from the baker's.
Whatever it was, Danny went to prison for three months,
and those three months made him infinitely more cruel,
infinitely more savage, infinitely more dangerous than ever
he had been before. Three years might have broken his
heart, three months hardened it.
A few instances of the way in which he earned his living
will suffice to give the reader an idea of his mind. As a
boy he learned to let a mate snatch his cap from his head
and fling it among the boxes displayed outside a grocer's
or a fruiterer's shop; while the mate ran away in pretended
fear of Danny, Danny, apologizing to the shopman, would
recover his cap with an egg or an apple, or a pound of
sausages inside it, and rush off to punish his accomplice
Later on he became an expert shop-lifter. For months,
even for years, one may say that this man lived by stealing
from shops. He was not content with snatching goods,
but coveted the money in the till. This was one of his
favourite dodges : He and a mate, having chosen their
shop, and seen that it was empty, would enter swiftly from
A COPPER BASHER 105
the street ; while Danny vaulted the counter and filled his
pockets from the till, the other lay full length in front of
the door leading to the parlour ; if by chance Danny was
so long at the till as to give the shopman time to rise from
his chair, on opening the door and rushing out upon the
thief, the unfortunate tradesman would trip over the
accomplice's body, and come a cropper.
It can be imagined that blackguards of this type would
soon discover the shops kept by poor old women with no
man to protect them.
Another very profitable ' lay ' was that of stealing from
drunken men. It did not matter whether the drunkard was
a poor man or a rich man, whether he was discovered by
day or by night ; Danny always went for him and left him
bare. One story, illustrating the coldbloodedness of these
young criminals, will show the reader how calmly robberies
of this order can be executed in the streets.
One night, ranging the better quarters of London in
search of prey, Danny and a mate noticed a well-dressed
man sitting on the doorstep of a house in one of the best
London squares. They immediately made for him, and
found him sound asleep. There were people in the neigh
bourhood, but not near them. They took the man's money,
his pocket-book, his watch and chain, his studs and links,
and handkerchief. During these operations he roused, and
they mothered him with great tenderness, professing their
willingness to see him safely home. Then, when the robbery
was complete, they looked about them. No one was to
be seen. The man was quiescent, dozing back into huddled
sleep. Will it be believed that these two savages turned
round, set about the man they had robbed, and half
murdered him with their fists and boots — out of sheer
devilry? The man was an Irishman, and a wild one; he
made an attempt to fight ; and even when smashed and
kicked and broken he collapsed on the ground, he still
kept up a gurgling shout for help. The two blackguards
walked quietly away, their hands in their pockets. At
the corner of the square they encountered a policeman.
1 Gov'nor,' said Danny, with a cheerful smile, ' there's a
io6 A COPPER BASHER
wild Irishman down there, mad drunk; it'll take two of
you to hold him.'
Another story illustrates the depravity of this type of
mind in another aspect. From all I can gather the popular
notion is not altogether true that there is honour among
thieves. Thieves prey upon each other, give each other
up to the police, rob and steal from each other. Certainly
the type of thief represented by Danny never experiences
a single scruple. That is what makes this man's story so
interesting. He was of brutes the most brutal, of savages
the most savage, of liars and traitors the most lying and
the most treacherous ; and throughout it all he never
once felt that he was doing anything base or mean —
the more mean, indeed, the more it tickled his fancy.
He did the most scurvy things imaginable without a
moment's twinge of conscience, and laughed over them
afterwards.
What does the reader think of minds capable of such
a scheme as this? The story got about that a bad woman
had ' pinched ' a purse and was treating two of her friends
in a public-house. Two thieves immediately set out to get
the stolen purse. When they reached the public-house,
one of them boldly asked for a share of the plunder. It
was refused. He then told the other two women by signs
that it meant five shillings each if they cleared out. They
emptied their tumblers, and departed-^with loving fare
wells to the bemused friend who had ' treated ' them.
When they were outside, the thief filled himself a glass of
water, grabbed the purse, passed it to his mate, and at the
same time flung the water full in the face of the woman as
she rose to pursue. The water struck her in the mouth,
and she stumbled back choking ; the thief filled another
tumbler and shot the water, with tremendous force, between
her gasping lips, sending her down. While she lay on the
floor, he poured more water down her mouth and over her
face. Then he calmly called the landlord. ' Here's a
woman in a fit,' he said; 'give us some more water.'
The landlord hastily passed a heavy carafe, and the thief
poured it over the woman till she was nearly suffocated.
A COPPER BASHER 107
1 She'll be all right in a minute or two,' said the thief, and
got up. The woman staggered to her feet, choking and
purple, and made her way out of the house in a vain quest
of the thief.
Danny laughs over that story to this day, and I do
not think that even now, while he hates the act and could
not do it again, he realizes the full measure of its cruelty
and abomination.
But while he was following a life of crime, living with
criminals in common lodging-houses, and never doing an
hour's honest work, there came constant and increasingly
long interruptions from the police. Again and again
Danny was arrested, again and again the police got even
with him in the cell at the station, and again and again
he ' went up the street.' If he laughs at the memory of
his crimes, he laughs good-naturedly at the punchings and
kickings which the police gave him in the cell. He says
he never got so knocked about in his life. ' They'd punch
me in the nose,' he says, smiling; ' and when I went down
wallop, one of them would hold me up for his pal to have
a smack at my mouth. And then they'd all set about
me with their boots. Cruel !' he says, tossing his head
and laughing good-temperedly. He calls these private
punishments of the police ' having it done upon me.'
Of course, Danny was well known as a cowardly
assaulter of police. One understands that retribution in
the cell of the station. But it was not the way to make
this savage enemy of society a useful and a virtuous
citizen. Every time Danny ' came down the street ' he
was worse.
' I'll tell you what prison does for ,a man.' Danny
leans forward, rests both forearms on the table, and regards
me fixedly, with bitterness evident in his loose mouth. ' It
hardens him. Ask any man who has done time. I don't
care who it is, nor what his offence was, nor whether he
was hard or green when he went in. It's bound to. It
can't do no otherwise. It hardens a man.' He sits back,
and continues in his drawling voice. ' Another thing it
does is to learn a man more tricks than what he knew
io8 A COPPER BASHER
before he went in. Prisons see more thieving in one day
than the rest of the world sees in a fortni't. It stands to
reason. Lock up a lot of men, treat them like animals,
half starve them, and never make any attempt to teach
them, and what's the result? They do you all round
You'd never believe how much plug tobacco gets into
prison. There's precious few warders who don't do a bit
of private trading on their own account. And the cook-
shop tempts starving men, and sharpens their wits. Well,
I learnt more clever dodges in prison than ever I learned
outside, I know that.'
Certainly the moral instructions had no effect upon his
conscience. Like others I have questioned, this man tells
me that never once in all the long record of his prison
experience did a chaplain enter his cell or speak to him
in private. Never once did a single person, governor or
chaplain, make any effort to awaken and stimulate the
sleeping conscience of this criminal. As a representative
of society the governor received him, and locked him up ;
as a representative of religion the chaplain read prayers
and preached a sermon to him on Sunday. The taxpayer
in his home, confidently hoping that the poor wretches in
prison are being reformed and regenerated, likes to think
that posterity will escape the heavy charge of punishing
the lawbreakers. And in his cell Danny plots more vil
lainies and rehearses new crimes against the hour when
he will go ' down the street.'
Once only did Danny ever have private words with a
prison chaplain. After serving a term he went before the
chaplain, who had expressed no wish to see him, and
asked for the suit of clothes provided by the Prisoners' Aid
Society. The chaplain looked at him, shook his head, and
replied, 4 Not for you. You'll be back again in a week
or two.' Like the Criminal whose story we have told,
Danny's blood fired up. But he checked. ' That's giving
a bloke a good heart to go down the road with !' he
exclaimed, and laughed. If the representative of religion
could have realized it, that laugh was his indictment.
Consider, in passing, how the story of this chaplain
A COPPER BASHER 109
illustrates the truth of Professor James's remarks about
second-hand religion. Directly you put a man within a
gaol, as the official representative of religion, as the official
deputy obeying the divine injunction to visit those in prison,
be sure that Christianity becomes there as much a matter
of routine as the rest of the penal discipline. One has
sympathy with the chaplain ; to visit hardened, ignorant,
and perhaps abusive criminals all the day long is a dreary
work ; but one has no sympathy with those of them at any
rate who, being paid to do this saving work, stay at home
saying that it is useless. I do not think that any reason
able man believes an official representative of religion
capable of accomplishing the regeneration of criminals ;
while a great number will perhaps hold the view that
missions to prisoners, conducted by missionaries who have
themselves suffered and repented, might make religion even
in a prison the true and vital thing which saves the soul.
Danny, as I have said, represents the lowest type of
criminal. When one reflects upon the utter baseness of
his mind it seems impossible that he should ever have
turned from his wickedness and lived. Before telling how
that happened, I must narrate an incident of his prison
career which will show how very base and vile was his
character.
Have you ever thought that a prison warder may suffer
from nerves? I remember some years ago going over the
prison at Wormwood Scrubbs and seeing a single warder,
unarmed, in charge of a number of men in the carpenter's
shop all handling more or less formidable tools ; it struck
me, then, that a good story might be written of a convict
whose eyes succeeded in breaking down a warder's nerves,
so that he dared not to be alone. Danny told me of an
incident that shows my imagination had reason.
' There was a warder,' he said, ' who got the jumps,
and tried to cure them by being extra strict. He was
particularly funky of one man. Somehow or other, I was
always a favourite with the warders, got soft jobs, and
was treated lenient. Well, this bloke came to me one
day and said, *' Look here, if you'll say that so-and-so,"
no A COPPER BASHER
naming the man he was afraid of, " set about me, it'll be
worth something good to you.' I said I wouldn't say
nothing of the kind ; but sure enough the prisoner was
put away. When I was taken before the governor, and
he said that I had behaved well in rescuing the warder
from the prisoner, that the poor man might probably have
been murdered but for me, and that in consideration of
this act he would see that my sentence was shortened, I
was so taken aback that I couldn't speak.'
One feels that Danny might have spoken if he had
chosen ; one does not believe that he ever lost power of
speech or was ever astonished by anything. No ; he was
the type of man who would * give anyone away. ' But
Danny is ashamed of certain things in his past ; the farther
he gets away from that past and the more settled he becomes
in happiness and peace of soul, the more is he inclined to
blurr the blackest things in his memory. He tells you his
first crime was a ' felony ' ; he prefers that you should
form the impression of a terrible burglary, not pence-
snatching from a poor child. He says he was taken aback
so that he could not speak ; he does not want you to think
that he gave a man away. If he lies in this way, one can
forgive him.
I am convinced, from what I have heard, that this man
had in his soul all that is most dastardly, base, scurvy, and
vile ; I do not think there was any imaginable mean thing
that he would not have done. And the more one realizes
this utter and horrible baseness, the more wonderful appears
the revolution of his character.
It came about that Danny was arrested and sentenced
to a long term of imprisonment soon after the conversion
of the Puncher. Of course, he had heard of that miraculous
event, and, of course, he had laughed over it with some
of the Puncher's old mates in the lodging-houses. But
in prison, realizing the weary time of monotonous suffering
ahead of him, the conversion of the Puncher stuck in his
mind and haunted his thoughts. He knew that the Puncher
was better off as a saved man than as a drunkard. He
imagined the Puncher's home, his fare, his good meals,
A COPPER BASHER in
nice clothes, his liberty unshadowed by fear of police.
Then he considered within himself how bad and low the
Puncher had been, a ' hopeless ' drunkard. It seemed to
him a wonderful thing that a man so abandoned to drink,
and such a man, should all of a sudden give it up. He
was quite dazed and staggered by the thought. What a
drunkard, what a frightful drunkard, the Puncher had
been ; and now he was clean and respectable !
For days the prisoner fed his mind upon this thought
in the solitude of his cell. Alone in that little cramped
space of stone, locked in, and without sight of tree, sky,
or moving creature, the hardened criminal reflected upon
the ' fair marvel ' of Puncher's conversion.
And one day revelation came to this base and savage
mind. It came suddenly, without miracle, and it did not
in the least stagger him. He started up with the
thought in his mind, ' If God can save Puncher, He can
save me !'
The revelation was too clear and staring to stagger
him. This thing, which had never before occurred to him,
was obvious, plain as a pikestaff. And yet it was won
derful. ' If God can save Puncher, that awful and
degraded sinner, He can save me — I who love myself and
know, therefore, that I am not so bad as other people.'
Why on earth had he not thought of this before?
In Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize there is this
question and answer : Boisberthelot said to La Vieuville,
' Do you believe in God, chevalier?' La Vieuville replied,
' Yes. No. Sometimes.'
Sometimes all men believe. Danny's ' sometimes ' had
now arrived. Hitherto God had never occupied his mind.
He had thought nothing about religion, one way or the
other. ' God ' was a term convenient to round off an oath
with. ' Hell ' meant something bad. As for ' heaven,' it
was too soft even for an oath ; he had never been interested
in that place ; it seemed to him something unmanly and
young-ladylike ; he certainly had no objection to going
there after death, if hell was the only alternative ; but he
reckoned it as bad as a Sunday-school.
ii2 A COPPER BASHER
All these years Danny had lived in modern London,
which spends millions of pounds a year on religion and
morality, and his ideas of God were what we have said.
Surrounded on all sides by churches, charitable agencies,
rescue societies, and educational machinery ; brought by
prison discipline to a willy-nilly consideration of formal
religion on many a crawling sabbath day, this man had
yet never formulated to himself any ideas of God, exist
ence, immortality. His phrase concerning religion has a
penetrating significance: ' I never gave it a thought.' He
had thoughts, plenty of them, for crime, scoundrelism, and
lowest rascality ; but not one, not one, for life, its meaning,
its responsibility, its great issue.
And now the first idea of God which occurred to his
mind was that of a Rescuer, some indefinable Power capable
of turning his unhappiness into happiness. Without any
question as to the ability of this Something to help and
save, Danny surrendered himself. But in a manner char
acteristic of the man. If the phrase may pass, this wretched
prisoner put God on His mettle. And there was an element
of self-righteousness in his idea. ' If God can save
Puncher, He can save me.'
To reach God, he understood, prayer was necessary.
So he got upon his knees in the prison cell, and offered
his first prayer. He was a young man, and twelve whole
years out of his short life had been passed in gaols ;
he had never had an opportunity of understanding
religion ; he had never given the idea of God a moment's
thought. But he knew just enough of the matter to
kneel. In what spirit he knelt one cannot exactly say ;
the important fact is that this depraved brute did kneel,
and did pray.
He says that he prayed throughout his long sentence,
and hoped that when he left prison fortune would smile upon
him, that it would be ' all right.'
He came out and was met by the Puncher. An answer
to prayer.
The Puncher talked to him in his quiet, sensible fashion.
What a rotten life he was living ! Life passing, middle
A COPPER BASHER 113
age approaching, and twelve years of prison ! Was the
game worth the candle? Was he happy?
Now this reasoning is powerful enough, because so
obvious and sensible, in the case of a drunkard ; but Danny
was a man without carnal appetites ; he was a brain con
centrated on crime. Could it convert the thought of this
man, could it change the grey matter of his brain, habitu
ated from infancy to cunning and rascality? Its one effect
was to draw from Danny the admission that certainly he
did not want to be ' copped ' again.
Then the Puncher moved from morality to religion. He
spoke of spiritual peace, the pleasant feeling of a life lived
rightly, the power ot God to wipe away sins and give a
soul a new birth. He told Danny that there was no
other way.
Danny was impressed. He said he wanted to be saved.
He said he wouldn't mind giving religion a chance. But,
what about work? He would have to work; that wasn't
nice to begin with; and, where was he to find it?
Puncher said, ' Leave that to God.'
The answer was a fine one ; it manifested a profundity
of spiritual experience. For the Puncher knew that while
in his present state Danny was incapable of prolonged and
monotonous work, and was inclined to give himself to
religion only to escape prison and get a ' soft job ' ; never
theless, let him be converted and his whole attitude to work
and to religion would suffer a revolutionary change. Let
him be converted, and he would welcome any work, the
most arduous and dreary, so long as it was honest; let
him be converted, and he would rather starve than live by
the religion which had given him such pure joy.
Such was the Puncher's faith in conversion ; such to him
was the reality of the new birth.
And this is really what happened to Danny.
Danny came to the Salvation Army meeting ; he felt a
light of illumination break through his soul at the adjutant's
assurance of God's love for the worst of men ; he realized
all of a sudden the need for love in his own barren heart,
and in that spirit — the spirit of a broken and contrite heart
n4 A COPPER BASHER
— he knelt at the penitent form, and for the first time really
reached into the infinite. He prayed for mercy ; he prayed
for strength.
He rose from his knees a changed man.
This change was absolute and entire. From being cruel,
he became as tender as a woman. From being a cunning
thief, he became scrupulously honest. From being a loafer
and unemployable, who had never done a single day's work
in his civil life, he became an industrious workman. From
being basely selfish, he became considerate for others,
giving both himself and presently his money to the service
of religion. ' The greatest change in Danny,' said a friend
who knows him well, ' is his gentleness. He couldn't hurt
a fly now, and any tale of cruelty or suffering, especially
where children are concerned, fairly breaks him down.'
What a revolution in personality ! What a new
birth !
Danny has risen to be foreman in his employment,
trusted and respected by his masters, and obeyed by those
under him with the scrupulousness which inferior natures
observe in their relations with a powerful will. He has
married a religious w7oman, who would only accept his
proposal on condition of his remaining always a soldier in
the Salvation Army, and they both work for the Army,
heart and soul, in their spare time. The home is one of
the happiest in the district; Danny's bargaining in the
matter of old furniture astonishing the whole neighbour
hood. Such muslin curtains in the windows, such flower-
boxes on the sills, such carpets, pictures, easy chairs, and
mantelpiece ornaments, are not to be matched for miles
around. ' Oh. yes,' said one of his friends; ' he's a daddy
for home.'
In spite of his appearance, which repels me, in spite
of his manner, which repulses me, this cnce low brute has
reached from vileness to goodness, and is a force on the
side of religion. He loves his children very tenderly, he
would no more whine or cadge than maltreat a drunken
man, and he is never too tired to do a service, never
unwilling to help in any good and noble work. Conversion
A COPPER BASHER 115
has not altered his appearance or his manner ; but it has
given him a new soul.
Let this incident show to what point in spirituality such
a base nature may be brought by religion. Not long ago
one of his sisters, a flaming Roman Catholic, who seems
to loathe her brother more now for his Salvationism than
ever she did for his crimes, came to the open-air Sunday
meeting of this corps, openly reviled and mocked her
brother before the whole street, and finally struck him a
stinging blow across the mouth.
All that Danny did was to cross to the other side of the
ring. His look was very ugly ; he was as white as a
sheet, his eyes hardened and expressed that which almost
frightened some people ; but he restrained himself, held his
peace, and kept his hands off the virago.
When you think what this man had been, you realize
the merit of his conduct, and the miracle of his new
character.
LOWEST OF THE LOW
"JV/TRS. BURRUP had her troubles from the earliest days
•*•*-*• of her marriage. But when her husband died, leaving
her with a baby, their troubles* began to be desperate, the
common condition of the troubles of very poor people. She
could earn sufficient money by charing and laundry-work
to keep the wolf on the mat, but the vista of her life
promised no departure of this menace.
On occasional visits to the tavern she took her baby in
her arms, so that he began to see something of life at an
age when other children of other classes are restricted to
a mere view of the sky from their backs on the cushions
of perambulators. He was still little more than an infant,
but, no doubt, subconsciously a very knowing one, when
Mrs. Burrup took a second husband. The man was of a
cheerful disposition and liked a glass. The happy couple
drank together, and the knowing infant looked on. Who
shall declare the thoughts of this child of poor London,
or measure the effects upon his consciousness of this
convivial infancy?
Something definite may be said of this emerging con
sciousness. When he was old enough to understand things,
he perceived that the prevailing character of human life
was trouble. The relations between his mother and step
father were strained. From morning to night the voices
of these two grown-ups, so inseparably connected with his
life, were in a loud key. Occasionally their arms whirled
and one of them would fall to the floor, rising with a
reddened eye to shout fierce-sounding words after the
departing figure of the other. The child had some know
ledge of what whirling arms signified. Occasionally he
came in for a cuff, a shaking, or a peremptory smacking.
n8 LOWEST OF THE LOW
Later the boy discovered that he was generally hungry.
This discovery swallowed up interest in all other pheno
mena. A hungry child inhabits a world of which we
know nothing. He was quite young when he learned to
look after the cravings of his own stomach. He did not
steal, as so many boys in poor London do steal, merely
for the sake of adventure and the love of danger, but
rather in the rude, barbaric, and honest fashion of our
ancestors, to satisfy the demands of his body. He stole
persistently. He stole because he wanted something to eat,
Hundreds of children all over Europe are stealing to-day
at the same inexorable instigation of nature ; it does not
do to think about it. One may seek to escape from the
depression of such a thought, by considering the excite
ment of such a life to a child untroubled at present by
scruples of conscience. The little boy, creeping up to
shop doors or diving in and out of costermongers' barrows,
with a sharp eye for policemen, could have told the sport
ing world something original and two-sided about hunting.
He was fox and hound. He experienced the dangers,
delights, and difficulties of running with the hare and
hunting with the hounds. He hunted and was hunted. It
is not to be expected that a little ignorant boy could prey
upon respectable and law-abiding tradesmen with impunity,
could outwit the watchfulness and sagacity of that immense
force which society has raised for its protection against
thieves, villains, pariahs, and outcasts. Again and again
the poor little creature was laid by the heels, that is to
say, had the lobe of an ear caught between the thumb and
index of a policeman, and found himself marched thus
ignominiously home to the rebuke of parental authority.
If he managed to elude the police, seldom a day went by
when some watchful young tradesman at his shop door did
not ' fetch him a crack on the head,' just as a warning
not to steal from that particular shop.
The boy's life consisted of more kicks than ha'pence.
If he was not one of those shivering, dirty, and neglected
little creatures who creep about the streets on naked feet,
with the rain wetting their mat of hair and the wind driving
LOWEST OF THE LOW 119
at their ragged jackets — forlorn, famished, and wretched,
at least he presented a picture to the religious conscience of
England sufficiently disturbing. If someone had caught
him early in those cruel days, had taken him from that
wicked environment, taught him habits of cleanliness and
self-respect, given him some idea of good and honour,
placed him in a position where he could see life as a
pleasant thing and reasonably understand the metaphor
which calls Providence a Father, he might have grown into
a manhood worthy of civilization and religion, he might
have been saved from infamy. But no one did this. None
of the numerous charitable agencies to which humanity
subscribes what it can afford out of its plenty rescued this
stray little child exposed to the cruelties and temptations
of the London streets. Beaten by a drunken stepfather,
kicked and cuffed by tradesmen, hunted and arrested by
the police — this mite in the midst of vast London was
utterly without friend or helper, except for his mother.
Is it not terrible to think that we can devise nothing to
save such suffering as this?
He was caught at a bad piece of stealing when he was
just beginning his teens, and was taken to the police-
station like a criminal, locked up in a cell, and tried on
the following morning by a magistrate in the police-
court. His sentence was three months in a reformatory
school.
Either the methods of that school were not good, or
the boy's bad habits had struck too deep a root in his
character. He did not, at any rate, encounter such affec
tion or deep interest in his career as to turn his heart
He left the school with some faint notion of discipline and
order, but his heart was not touched.
Sick of himself and his own freedom, he left his parents
at the age of sixteen, and after wandering about the world
till there was nothing better to do, he enlisted as a soldier.
He welcomed the Army as a sure and fairly decent ' doss.'
He had clothes, a bed, almost enough food for his
needs, and sufficient money at the end of a week to buy
drink. He put up with the drills and discipline for these
i2» LOWEST OF THE LOW
advantages. As for fighting, patriotism, honour of the
regiment, and martial glory of a soldier's career, he thought
no more about those things than any anarchist in Soho.
But as the monotony of a soldier's life more and more
soured on his stomach, he imitated more and more suc
cessfully the example set to him in infancy by his step
father. He became a hard drinker. The little boy who
had suffered in the London streets was now a tall and bony
man, six feet in height, small of head, with a fierce and
quarrelsome face always aflame with alcohol. Continually
he found himself in trouble over drunkenness ; but he bore
his punishment without shame or regret, not having the
smallest ambition to rise in the service. However, as drink
laid an ever stronger hold upon him, he more and more
relaxed his hold upon himself, more and more resented
discipline, correction, and punishment. He became choleric,
mutinous, and fierce. His temper was every day more out
of control. When he was not in trouble with his officers
he was in trouble with his messmates. He had the world
against him, knew it, and opposed the world to the extent
of his poor disdain and the fierceness of his anger.
At the end of five years' troubled soldiering he had a
dispute with a corporal. Voices rose, words became violent.
In the heat of this argument the corporal fell back upon
authority. He gave his antagonist an order. The soldier
refused to obey it ; he was drunk, and the command of a
smaller man goaded his rage to madness. The corporal
threatened. At this the drunken soldier seized his rifle,
and swearing that he would murder the other, made so
good an attempt that he was arrested, tried, sentenced to
six months' hard labour, and given ' his ticket ' — that is
to say, discharged with ignominy.
When he came out from prison and found himself at
large in the civilian world, he was wise enough to look
about for employment before making a return to settled
drinking. He got a decent job in some waterworks with
fair wages, but took to drinking immediately he felt himself
certain of wages at the end of the week. He hated his
work. He appears to have been constitutionally incapable
LOWEST OF THE LOW 121
of finding pleasure or interest in any employment. He
honestly disliked all physical exertion. It irked him, irri
tated him, bored him. But nothing really pleased him,
except drink. Life did not interest him in the least. He
drank to drown his sorrow, to forget life. What a world ! —
where it is necessary for a man to go to work six days out
of seven !
This man was weighed down by an immense ennui.
Drink lost him this good employment, and he went from
the waterworks to a distillery — a change for the worse, from
water to whiskey. It was not long before drunkenness lost
him this second job, and in a tipsy rage at being dismissed
he had a row with the police, and was sent to prison for
three months.
When he came out from prison he descended to the
depths of infamy.
It is impossible in this book to tell the story of his life
at this point in his career It can only be hinted. Coming
out of prison in rebellion against the world, determined that
never again would he do a day's work, Burrup went to a
public-house, where he fell in with a woman earning her
own living by evil ways. He does not appear to have
realized at once, or to have contemplated for some time,
the nature of the proposal made to him by this woman
He was attractive, and he thought she admired him. He
knew that she was aware of his homeless condition, and
thought that her invitation to lodge with her was just a
woman's kindness born of admiration. He accepted it,
and for some days lodged in that fashion. Then he found
himself provided with money by this woman. A little later
and he was called in to assist her in her business. Of a
sudden he found himself the lowest of men.
Did his conscience ever smite him? Yes. To this
extent : When the woman's earnings were not sufficient for
their needs he went out and thieved for her. That was all.
Apparently he soon got over the contempt which even low
people in low neighbourhoods openly show for such men.
He avoided the half-decent population, and consorted with
men engaged in the same horrible parasitism. All this time
122 LOWEST OF THE LOW
he was drinking hard. Alcohol, a doctor would have said,
was destroying the very fibres of reformation.
Presently he seems to have contracted a spirit of
bravado. He became definitely and resolutely a criminal.
He found crime a sport. He went out into the streets, not
as a hungry boy, but as a thirsty man, and set himself to
make money without work, for very joy of the undertaking.
He was drinking hard, and his brain seemed to be on fire
with criminal ideas. He supported his mistress in this
fashion for some time ; but was soon a marked man, and
therefore from that moment was in trouble with the police.
He was arrested time and again, and always he made such
a fight of these arrests that it took as a rule six constables
to strap him down on the ambulance and get him to the
station. Once, when they caught him stealing boots, he
so ' bashed ' the police about that the mounted patrol had
to be called, and he was tied to the horse and dragged all
the way to the station. He was generally half-murdered
during these arrests, being known as one of the worst
' copper-bashers ' in London. On such a man as he was
then only God could have mercy.
Twelve years after his discharge from the Army, Burrup
looked back on three years of immoral freedom and nine
years of prison. Nine years out of the twelve spent in
prison ! A bad retrospect. What could the future hold ?
He began to think. His character and the manner of
his life had long been so notorious that everybody in the
whole of that neighbourhood knew about him, knew
about the woman. Among those who knew, and
who thought about him, were the angel-adjutant and the
Puncher. They tried to reach his soul, tried to lift him
from infamy, but he shook them both off with an angry
impatience.
A time came, however, when misery made him willing
to hear them. His mistress was in gaol ; he was hungry,
thirsty, and ashamed ; he was thinking of the nine years
out of twelve spent in prison ; he was beginning to feel that
the future held no hope for him ; that his to-morrow meant
the prison ; that for ever he would be harried and maltreated
LOWEST OF THE LOW 123
by the police ; -ije was at last so broken and wretched and
defeated as to desire some escape.
He thought about the Puncher. He compared that
man's past and present. He saw how marvellous was the
change in that life, and brooded upon it. While he was
thinking, some force in his brain began quietly urging him
to follow the Puncher, to do as he had done, to get religion.
He was aware that no one in the whole world could do
anything but despise him. He knew that he was vile,
degraded, infamous, friendless. He knew that the police
were against him, that magistrates were ready to send him
to prison with bitter words of contempt, that his physical
strength was powerless against the forces of law and order,
that his hatred of society was a vain fire in his brain, that
he had muddled life and had the whole universe against him.
If he told the world that he wanted to live a better life, the
world would spurn him. Not a soul would believe him
He had asked his prison visitor, a Roman Catholic priest,
during his last term if someone could not help him to go
straight ; and he had received not only no help, but no
encouragement to desire a better life. He felt that there
was only one hope for him, the Army that had made the
Puncher a decent, good man with a comfortable home.
That was the illumination of this sunken and degraded
soul. ' I had watched the Puncher's life, I had seen it
running clean and straight ; and I resolved all of a sudden
that if God could do such a miracle as that, I could have
' a cut at it too. ' The diction is of the smallest moment.
This man's desire to have ' a cut at it,' translated into
the most wistful phrasing of an exquisite mysticism,
would still beggar the words. The desire was the, miracle.
It was a movement of the soul in the spiritual sphere.
When he felt a longing to try religion, his soul said, ' I
will arise and go to my Father,' and he had come to
himself. His mind, blundering with words and con
cerned with material things, must not obscure for us
the hidden movements of his spirit waking from death,
turning to the light, and desiring rest. This man, with
all his abomination thick about him, was subliminally
i^4 LOWEST OF THE LOW
moving towards God. Whatever the spring of his desire,
whatever the cause of his awakening, he desired to be
better, that is to say, he turned his face to the light.
He went straight to the hall of the Salvation Army, sat
by himself at the back of the room, listened to the hymns,
prayers, and readings, heard the preaching and the invita
tion, rose from his seat, marched to the platform, knelt
down at the penitent form, and said in a low voice, ' God
be merciful to me a sinner.'
The past dropped from him like a ragged garment. He
was conscious of a great cleansing. A yearning of his soul
carried him far away from the hall, the Salvationists, and
the congregation of prayerful people. He was caught up
into a glowing region of light and intensest satisfaction.
Dumb and breathless, he knelt with his face in his hands,
conscious only of the radiance, the peace, and the joy. He
did not think, * I am forgiven,' or ' I am saved '; he only
knew vividly and yet in a state of dream that he was at
last perfectly happy.
He came out of this ecstasy to the mothering tenderness
of the adjutant and the paternal kindness of the Puncher.
What a revelation to a soul plunged in wretchedness !
He was surrounded and supported by pure affection. If
the delirious joy of his ecstasy had passed and faded like
a dream, at least he was not left alone ; he was with good
people, who, knowing his old vileness, showed him love,
who, knowing the desperate record of his past, showed
him trust.
He felt a strength come to his limbs and a power to
his mind. He would be worthy of these friends. He said,
' I know what has happened to me.' They asked him
what? He said, ' I have been given a second chance.'
In a conversation with the adjutant, it was decided that
he should marry his mistress when she came out of prison,
and make it a part of his life's work to save her soul. The
Salvation Army does not make repentance an easy and a
pleasant thing ; they certainly do not let a man buy an
indulgence for his past. If man or woman comes for
salvation, and being saved, confesses to some undiscovered
LOWEST OF THE LOW 125
crime, the Army insists upon confession to the wronged
person and to absolute reparation This is not done here
and there, occasionally, it is a fixed rule, obligatory upon
all penitents throughout the world. Many who come to
the penitent form go straight to prison to prove repentance
real, suffering for felonies undiscovered and now impossible
of discovery.
Burrup began his new life by hawking flowers. He
got sufficient money to buy two pots of flowers, and walked
about the streets till he had sold them. The purchaser of
the last pot, taking compassion on the man, talked to him,
and gave him temporary employment. A lady of title
interested in the Army gave him an engagement for six
weeks. In both cases he received the very highest reference
for honesty, sobriety, and painstaking industry.
But before the second employment came he had had his
last meeting with the woman. He and the adjutant went
to the prison to receive this poor creature on the threshold
of her freedom. She started at sight of the Salvationist,
and stared first at the adjutant, and then at Burrup, silent
and perplexed. The adjutant told her that Burrup had
determined to live a clean and respectable life, that he
wished to begin that new life by an act of duty by marry
ing the woman who had been his mistress, and that before
they could become man and wife it would be well if she
would place herself in one of the Salvation Army's homes.
The woman fired up at this suggestion. She not only
resented the idea of entering a home, but mocked Burrup
for wishing to marry her. The adjutant pleaded, the
woman grew more violent and contemptuous. It was not
until she saw how hopeless was her mission that the adju
tant gently reproached the woman for her evil. At this,
curses and blasphemies took the place of contempt. The
adjutant and her convert moved away. The woman fol
lowed them. Through the crowded streets the convert
had to march at the Salvationist's side with this virago
following at his heels, shouting out to all the world what
he had been, cursing him, spitting on him. The man
endured it, very white of face, and grim, without a word.
126 LOWEST OF THE LOW
It would have been easier for some people perhaps to face
a den of lions.
' I hailed a bus,' the adjutant tells me, ' compelling her
to stay behind, and we left her, feeling that we could not
do anything with her, as she was not willing to leave her
life of sin. ' That is the test, without which help is of no
avail. Until a soul hates evil, little can be done ; until it
desires good, nothing.
For some little time the woman martyred the poor man
struggling to lead a clean and virtuous life. She haunted
his lodgings and insulted him in public. She did all she
could to drag him down, to break his heart, to drive him
mad. But he stuck to his work, suffered her annoyance,
and never once looked back.
He set himself another task. This woman refused to
let him save her. There was another woman to whom he
felt himself responsible. His mother.
Look quietly and steadily at the effects of conversion,
the fruits of repentance, in this man's soul. I think they
are worth considering. Remember what he had been, the
lowest of the low, consider the privation, destitution, and
crime of his earliest childhood ; see him as he was all
through his life, a thief, pander, bully, and abandoned
drunkard ; and then mark him, after momentary conversion,
continuing his hard work, quietly maintaining his honesty
and sobriety under the mocking persecution of his former
partner in crime, and, above all things, setting himself to
discover the whereabouts of his mother.
The more one thinks about Burrup, the more one appre
hends the tremendous power of religion. Conversion did
not make him merely a sober and industrious man. That
alone would have been a miracle, for he loved drink as he
hated work But conversion did more for him. It washed
away from his soul at a single stroke all the obstructions
of ingrained habits, cleansed him from every impulse of
his moral madness, and made him at once tender, loving,
considerate, and pure. He was not content with saving
his own soul ; conversion would not let him rest in personal
security or in flattering self-righteousness, he was driven
LOWEST OF THE LOW 127
by the Spirit, gladly and rejoicingly, to make others aware
of spiritual peace.
And, as we say, he had one overmastering impulse —
to seek out his mother and be a son to her. Hypnotism,
possibly, might have cured him of drink ; but what power
could have made him this seeker of his lost mother?
He found her in great wretchedness. The step-father
had abandoned her, and she was exposed to all the priva
tions and cruelties which beset a solitary poor woman at
the threshold of old age. The son told her of his life,
told her of his conversion, and asked if she would not
come and share his home and his happiness.
This is a new version of the Prodigal Son. Nobler
story of its kind, noble in all its simplicity and humility,
can hardly be conceived. This prodigrJ did not return to
the shelter and love of a rich and righteous parent, ready
with rewards ; but, when he had come to himself, he set
out to save that which was lost, set out to offer his shelter
and his love to a mother whose care was parted from his
memory by years of wildness and crime ; and truly may it
be said that when he was yet a great way off he saw her,
and ran and fell upon her neck and kissed her — so eager
and passionate was the desire of his soul.
Happiness came to him in the response made by the
broken mother to his offers of affection. She was like one
raised from the dead, and clung to her strong son with
beseeching and heart-breaking pleadings not to be left
again, not to be left in misery and despair. Her cry to
him was like a cry to God. The son saved by God, in
God's strength saved his mother. In their first embrace,
they realized to the full the need for religion, and both
experienced at least some of the satisfactions of spiritual
peace. Only religion could have saved her son, only
religion could have sent the son to save the mother. They
had both lived without religion, and they had both suffered.
Now, in the awakening of spiritual consciousness, they
perceived that only religion made life pure, sweet, and
sacred.
She could hardly believe that it was indeed her son who
128 LOWEST OF THE LOW
came to lift her up. She could hardly believe that the
terrible nightmare of her dark life had really come to an
end. And she was like a character in the Arabian Nights
when he led her away from her destitution and showed her
the home that his love had prepared for her. Religion \ as
these earthly enchantments.
Burrup's home is one of the brightest and happiest in
London. It is full of the decorations and showiness with
which a London workman loves to manifest both his
prosperity and his domesticity, and all these fine things
are kept in a state of glory by the saved mother who now
has no thought but of showing her gratitude to her son
with duster and broom and serving him all the days of her
life. She is converted to his religion, and son and mother
are as loyally and devotedly attached to each other as any
pair of human beings in the world. He loves to put by
his savings to give his mother little treats and little sur
prises — oh, quite little treats and surprises, for they are
poor people ; and she, on her part, loves to make him some
tempting dish for his supper, and, by her labour, to keep
his linen and his wardrobe in apple-pie order, to show her
gratitude for his love and her pride in her son. They are
quite beautiful in their love, and if Burrup is proud of
anything in his life, it is that he can support his
mother.
One thinks that this man is not completely happy ; that
the memory of the past still haunts his peace ; and that he
will never wholly escape, as he did in the radiance of his
conversion, from the black shadow of his dead iniquity.
There are those in the world, to this very day, who like
to remind him of what he was. You have no idea, perhaps,
how difficult it is for a man to live out his repentance in
poor London.
He said to one of his friends the other day, after talk
ing over the dark days behind him — suddenly drawing
himself up to his full height and assuming the look of
dignity which becomes his proud, silent, and soldier-like*
face : ' Several would like to see me go back ; ah, several !
But there is nothing to go back for. I know, as God
LOWEST OF THE LOW 129
knows, that I am far from perfect. But — I am better than
I used to be.'
Do not mistake this clear assertion for self-righteousness.
Burrup said, and says to this day, that his conversion was
a second chance. He does not talk about the love of God.
He thinks that he has yet a long way to go, and he is
watching himself. God has given him a second chance.
He stands firm on that conviction, and marks carefully his
conduct under the mercy of this chance. Quite truthfully
and honestly he says, ' I am far from perfect.' With a
profound gratitude, a London workman's sursum corda, he
says, ' I am better than I used to be.'
THE PLUMBER
11JE made a bad start of life. At the age of six he was
•*• •*- running every morning to a public-house for his
mother's ' livener. ' To get even with this mother for
routing him out of bed before the day was aired, he used
to drink some of the beer, occasionally some of the gin.
The curiosity of a child's mind may be seen in this, that
he arranged these revengeful sips for moments when he
would be observed by other children. It was a piece of
swagger, as well as the savage action of revenge. Such
can be the mind of a child of six.
A recent Act of Parliament has put an end to what was
once a common incident of the London streets in early
mornings — little half-dressed, bare-legged children creeping
along close to the houses with a pot of beer in their hands.
Many people have wondered to what ends such children
would grow. This is the story of a man who began life in
that fashion.
His father was a hard and brutal-minded man, but not
a drunkard. His mother, on the other hand, was ' addicted
to drink.' Her addiction began at the moment when she
woke from her sleep, it lasted through the day, and was at
its fullest power at the hour when publicans close their
doors and count their takings. She was one of those
women typical of street corners, court entries, and the
bench of the public bar. A hat was seldom on her head,
her hair hung in a loose knot over her neck, her face —
which was fat, pink, soft, and shining — cleaned itself when
it felt hot with the dirty end of an apron. She was a big
woman, huge-armed, immense in the bosom, broad in the
hips, round-shouldered, and firm-necked. There was a
sullen savagery in her small eyes, a bitter ferocity in her
i32 THE PLUMBER
lips ; her voice was harsh, fierce, and vigorous. A typical
mother of the London slums thirty years ago, and a typ*1
still to be seen among the little white-faced rats and ferrets
of the present generation. She did no work. The children
were given halfpence to get their meals at barrows, coffee-
stalls, and fried-fish shops. This habit of taking one's
meals in restaurants has since spread to the fortunate
classes, one of many fashions which the upper class has
borrowed from the lowest ; in the case of this woman the
habit grew from a branch of the servant problem, her own
constitutional and impatient disgust for domestic work ; it
is a spirit common in the slums — contempt for work. The
father, a navvy, tried to cure his wife of her addiction. He
tried with both hands. The impression he made upon her
was visible to the naked eye, but the addiction still
flourished in the grey matter beyond the reach of fists,
hob-nails, and straps. Disappointed in the failure of his
persuasive powers, and occasionally vexed to find no food
in the house, the navvy eased his ruffled feelings by
' strapping the kids.' He was a man with a troubled brow,
a sad eye, and a voice that growled curses on God and
human life with a dull monotony. It was not a happy
home, and not in the least original. It was one of thou
sands and thousands of precisely similar homes in London.
Cupid, when he descends to the London gutter, appears
to delight in the wanton mischief of making these unequal
marriages — the sober man yoked to the drunken woman,
the drunken man yoked to the sober wife, with always the
drunken party in the ascendant. The parents of the man
in this story were very like the parents of tens of thousands
of children now playing in the streets of London, or carry
ing their penny for dinner to the gaudy barrow of the
Italian vendor of ice-cream.
And I do not think the child was abnormal in the earli-
ness of his cunning. It is common to find quite small
infants in shabby districts adept at tricks which in their
elders are crimes. This child was naturally quick-witted,
intelligent, bright, and humorous. To this day he has the
roguish, pleasant face of a comic singer. It struck him
THE PLUMBER 133
as a relief from strappings and other home discomforts to
practise sharpness in the world outside. He was one of
a great swarm of little hungry, dirty-faced boys wandering
through the streets of London looking for what they could
pick up. He was a really smart boy when he went out to
work, so smart, indeed, as to begin at once making money
on his own account. He served a milkman. A very simple
facility in sleight-of-hand earned him threepence or four-
pence a day. By spilling his dipper as he took the measure
from the can, and giving an extra drop afterwards which
appeared even more than he spilled, but which was care
fully less, he always had milk for sale at the bottom of
his can on which his master had no call. In this way he
flourished, earned the reputation of being a singularly smart
and cheerful boy, and was soon able to get a place in the
shop. It was so easy to steal in this place that he was
found out. He was sent to prison.
A check of this kind makes some impression on a sensi
tive boy, however immoral his upbringing. He came out
of prison with the idea of never going back there again if
he could help it. Reformation having appeared, he was
assisted to learn a trade. He was apprenticed to a firm
of plumbers and gasfitters.
' Of all the trades in this world,' he says, with emphasis,
1 the plumber's is the thickest ' ; that is to say, the worst
from a moral point of view. ' I don't know what it's like
now, I hope it's better ; if it is, it's a marvel. But my
experience is this — there isn't a bigger set of thieves than
plumbers. How it comes about, I don't know; carpenters
are different, every trade is different, but plumbers seem
as if they can't help being what they are, which is hot,
and no mistake. I'd as soon have a burglar on my premises
any day as a London plumber. That's a strong thing to
say, isn't it? That's a rum thing to say of a whole trade?
Ah, but it's true.'
His first experience of this trade with a bad name was
the hardening process. The boy apprentice comes in at
once for that brutalizing tyranny which throughout the
poorest quarters of London, even among respectable people,
134 THE PLUMBER
seems to regard all politeness, cleanliness, and affection as
signs of an evil effiminacy. If you go into any of the
London parks, the Regent's, for instance, and stand where
poor children are playing in a swarm, you will never hear
a sweet or gentle voice. Sisters shout across distance at
each other as though they were challenging to a fight :
1 Come here, can't you?' ' Emmy, d'you hear what I
say ! — come here at once !' ' Shut your noise !' ' You're
a liar !' Cries and calls such as these, and all uttered in
voices of ferocity, are the common language of London
childhood. And it is only a part of a very wide and potent
force in the national character — the hard sternness which
makes the poor endure their miseries in silence, the unyield
ing fortitude which supports them in an abject poverty and
a vile destitution which they believe natural, inevitable, life
in the real. I have heard scores and scores of working
people speak about the upper classes as people who are
unreal, a nursery of children playing, with dolls '-houses.
The real life is the hard life of poverty.
' They were very warm to me,' says the Plumber. ' I
tell you it was no fun to have a two-foot steel rule walking
round your ribs. Anything not done just as they wanted
it to be done, anything blundered over in the very slightest
— swish ! — down came the rule, and it was hell for days
afterwards. I've seen men in these shops take up a pot
of hot metal — solder — and sling it at the head of a boy
that had done something a bit cock-eye, or given a back
answer. We had to look pretty slippy, I can tell you.'
Such was the hard and brutalizing start at his trade
experienced by the Plumber. But he was quick in the
uptake, his eyes were sharp with the cunning of their child
hood, he learned quickly, did well, and had that in his
nature which made him less objectionable in the eyes of
his masters than some others — he was cheerful, amusing,
wicked. There was no occasion in his case to teach the
drink habit. Some apprentices have to be forced to the
pot. He loved it. He loved it, perhaps, as much for its
swaggering manhood as anything else, but still he loved
it for itself. He got a feeling of comfort from it, and a
THE PLUMBER 135
touch of daring which exhilarated his spirits. He was
quite a hard drinker all through the days of his apprentice
ship. He was often manfully drunk, early in his teens,
to the great delight of the plumbers.
4 Up to sixteen years of age,' he said, ' I would pinch
anything, and it all went in booze. After sixteen I pinched
as a plumber, with discretion, and that, too, all went in
booze. '
About his boyhood's pinchings we need not inquire;
sufficient is it that the training of his childhood ruled his
mind with the idea that to steal was to be clever. He was,
practically, entirely without the moral sense. His idea
was to get money anyhow, and to spend it in drink. But
after sixteen years of age — his apprenticeship left behind
him, and his wages secured — he stole with discretion, he
stole as a plumber.
There is one particular material used by plumbers which
has a ready sale ; it is sheet lead, or, in their parlance,
' pigeon,' occasionally ' bluey. ' It is a part of a plumber's
day — or shall we say it was a part of the old plumber's day?
— to steal sufficient sheet lead to pay for the night's beer,
and a bit over. No man was called a plumber who could
not ' carry the pin,' or ' carry the pony '; that is to say,
who could not carry a good part of a hundredweight of
sheet lead inside his trousers, suspended from a belt round
his middle. This was no easy task. To steal the ' bluey '
was not always easy, to store it quickly away was some
times a job, but to carry it undetected, to walk and work
without crying out when the sheet slipped — this was heroic
work. The Plumber at sixteen years of age proved himself
a hero at this work.
To give you some idea of the extent to which this
thieving is practised, let me narrate a single instance. A
branch office of a well-known bank was erected near Hyde
Park, and my Plumber was one of the many expert thieves
employed on the job. Detectives were engaged to stand
in the street, not only to watch the men at work, but to
follow any of them who walked home in a manner that
aroused suspicion. Now, in the contract there was an
136 THE PLUMBER
item of seven tons of sheet lead for the roof. In spite of
foremen, detectives, and extra precautions in every way,
only two and a half tons were used, and not a single man
was caught.
Many a time my Plumber came down the long ladders
with three-quarters of a hundredweight of sheet lead under
his trousers' belt, and walked to his public-house, pipe in
mouth, bag over his shoulder, like an honest British
working-man, ready to floor any detective who aspersed his
honour.
This sheet lead was carried to what plumbers call ' sand
shops.' It is a clever phrase. It signifies ' shiftiness,'
and stands for those shops known to every plumber in the
trade as places where stolen lead is bought at current
market rates. Not a working plumber in London who
does not know the market price of * pigeon ' ; it forms a
topic of conversation in public-houses throughout the town.
The list of ' sand shops ' in London would surprise the
polite world.
At the first job to which the Plumber went he had an
experience which gave him a * bit of a turn.' It was a
building ninety feet high, near the Strand. When he had
climbed the ladder and reached the roof, the men employed
on the job suggested that he should cry * beer-o ' — pay his
footing by standing a pot of beer. My man said * No,'
with a Cockney's indignation at being suspected of any
greenness. * You won't, won't you?' ' No,' he shouted,
* I'll see you in hell first !'
In an instant they were round him. He was pinioned,
a rope was passed under his arms, and he was dropped over
the side of the roof. Down he went, in sickening jerks,
for thirty or torty feet, and there he hung. ' Will you cry
beer-o?' they shouted from the top. And at last he had
to yield. On the next day that same rope snapped with
a small load of sheet lead, which fell sixty feet to the
pavement below.
At eighteen, in spite of frightful waste in drink, the
Plumber had sufficient money and sufficient patrons — for
he is a most likable and pleasant fellow — to start in a little
THE PLUMBER 137
business of his own. He was now habitually drunk. He
looks back to days when, not occasionally, but as a regular
thing, he was working at the top of a ninety-rung ladder
which was not tied to the roof, or crossing in hob-nailed
boots iron girders stretched across nothingness eighty feet
and more off the ground, quite drunk.
He never went to a job at which he did not look for
something besides his work ; and the proceeds of this
pinching always went in drink. He tells me that the con
tents of a plumber's bag would astonish old gentlemen
interested in museums. Let us hope that to-day it would
be a monstrous thing to swell the statistics of the criminal
classes with the rank and file of the plumbing trade.
* One day,' he says, ' I was sent for to a toff's house
to look for an escape of gas. Me and my mate found the
escape, and it took some finding, too, for it was behind
a wainscot ; but while we were looking for the escape, we
found something else — a box of Havannah cigars. Into
my bag they went, sharp ; and at that minute in comes
the toti himself.
' ** Well, have you found it?"
4 " Yes, sir, we've found it, sir, and a nasty one,
too, sir."
' *' Here's a shilling for yourselves, you've done well."
' " Yes, sir, I think we have; thank you, sir," and we
walked out, two splendid specimens of the honest British
working man ! But it was always like that. And never
once a feeling of shame.'
Money easily earned, he quotes with emphatic convic
tion, is money easily spent, which means beer. He earned
pounds every week, and sometimes on Saturday afternoon
he was pawning his tools for the evening's finish-up.
' Ah,' he says, ' to give you an idea of the jolly friends
a man gets in that way ; not once, but many times, my
pals have said to me, " Put your tools up the spout, old
boy, we'll see you through, we'll get 'em out for you,"
and after having drunk the money away, when I came to
ask them for help, " Get 'em out yourself," they'd answer;
" you put 'em up, you get 'em down." Later on, when
138 THE PLUMBER
I was starving — yes, starving ! — those men wouldn't give
me a crust, not one of them.'
He got married before he was twenty, and he vowed
soon afterwards that if his baby was a boy he'd get really
drunk to celebrate the event. But he was impatient, and
couldn't wait. He began three months before the child
was born, and for seven years after he was always pro
foundly drunk. He lost job after job. In two houses
they found him flat on his back in the cellar with the taps
of the wine-casks spurting over his face. Ferocity began
to manifest itself in his temper. He was strong, and
handy with his fists. He fought many a fight with the
naked fists. He picked up a foreman who corrected him
one day, and threw him through a glass window. He was
always in trouble. His private business vanished altogether.
He had to go about looking for work.
Then this man, bred from infancy to drink and to
steal, uninstructed in the first letters of morality, educated
only in sharpness, cunning, and clever dishonesty, but who
had preserved all through this base and scurvy career the
natural good-humour and cheerfulness of his temperament,
became one of those wretches who play the tyrant in the
house that they have ruined. The Plumber took to flog
ging his starved children — one of them, a little girl, said
to him in my presence, looking up into his face with a
cunning smile, ' We've often felt the buckle-end of your
belt, haven't we, daddy?' — took to flogging, kicking, and
striking these poor starved children, so that at the first
sound of his footsteps on the stair they would run for
cover under the bedstead. His wife withstood him. He
fought her. He proved himself her master. He went out
from the room where she lay, beaten and half stunned, a
proud man. But his wife was not cowed. She nagged
him. He never came home but she reproached him for
his brutality, his drunkenness, his abhorrent cruelty. One
day in a fit of ungovernable rage, he seized her, flung her
down the flight of stairs, raced down after her, and aimed
a blow at her head, which split the top of the banister
and scarred his wrist for life. He all but murdered her.
THE PLUMBER 139
And for drink, everything he could lay his hands on
was sold. The furniture went from his home, his tools,
the clothes of the children — everything.
He got to the lowest depth but one to which drink can
bring a man. He reached that horrible stage where the
wife stands with her children at the door of a public-house
waiting for the husband to come out. He spent money on
beer while the children of his body starved and shivered
and cried at the door. He never experienced one pang of
remorse. Never once did his conscience upbraid him. He
got beer by hook or by ' crook ' ; there for him the universe
ended.
One day the news reached him that his oldest mate,
and the closest companion of all his early depravity, had
joined the local corps of the Salvation Army. It made no
difference to the Plumber. Drunk at his work, he went
straight to the public-house, delivered there on occasion,
for the diversion of the company, mock sermons or sang
comic songs, and only went out at closing-time, followed
home through the rain and the darkness and the cold by
his wife with a baby at her breast.
He was in one of his favourite public-houses when his
wife opened the door one day, entered, and said to him,
1 Come out, or give me money for the children's food.'
He took no notice. She waited, looking at him —
watched by the publican and the potman — and then retired
to the door. The Plumber's mates began to say, ' I
wouldn't have the old woman follow me about.' He
lifted his face from his beer, turned his head and shouted
to the woman at the door to get out, like a dog.
She said that she should wait there till he left.
' Will you?' he cried, with an oath, laying down his
pot. And in a clumsy stride or two he had delivered a
running kick with his hobnail boot at the mother of his
children. She moved away, and escaped a fatal injury.
He followed her to the door. ' God !' he cried, ' if
you don't leave me aJone, I'll ' He had exhausted
blasphemy and menace. He paused for a moment, and
concluded, * I'll sign the pledge.'
140 THE PLUMBER
' Oh, you've often done that,' she retorted, * and
wetted it every time !'
Now what actual spring worked in his mind at these
words it is difficult to say, difficult to conjecture. One can
find nothing in the man's past to suggest a thesis. But
the words of his wife produced an extraordinary effect in
his mind. He did not return to the public-house ; he did
not go home with her ; he walked away like a man in a
dream. He only knows that he was impelled to walk away.
As he passed the big hall occupied by the Salvation Army,
he says he suddenly felt himself grow stiff through all his
joints, his feet appeared to strike root into the ground,
he was unable to move. There he stood, this drunk man
— dazed, bewildered, quiet — like a sleep-walker.
While he stood there the thought occurred to him of
his old mate who had joined the Salvation Army. Whence
came this idea, he does not know ; but it came. A desire
to see this man made itself felt in the Plumber's heart, and
with the desire the tension of his limbs relaxed. He
walked forward and made his way up the stairs to the
hall door. The only officers present at that time were
women. When they saw this terrible drunken man
approaching, they were afraid, and chained the door
against him. He looked like murder.
* Don't be afraid,' he said. ' I only want to know
where lives. '
They told him over the chain, and he walked away.
He found his friend in his room.
' Charlie,' he said, ' I want to get out of what I am.
Do you think I can do it?'
' Not alone,' said the other.
1 Tell me, for Christ's sake !'
1 Do you mean it? Are you in earnest?'
4 If ever I was in my life.'
1 Well, then, you've just got to tell God what you've
told me. Do it now. Kneel down. Tell Him.'
And the Plumber knelt down and uttered his first prayer.
He rose dazed, confused, shaken. He was trembling
like a leaf.
THE PLUMBER 141
The other said, ' You must come to the meeting to
night, and you must go to the penitent form, and say
out loud that you're sorry, that you want the new life,
and that you know you can do nothing yourself to get it.
How do you feel now?'
' All of a twitter,' said the Plumber.
He went out into the streets alone. He was conscious
of some great change in himself which seemed to affect
the world outside of him. He was glad in himself, and
the outside world seemed glad. The pavements shone with
fire, the distance was a haze of bright light, the leaves of
all the trees in the road, he says, seemed like hands waving
to him. He felt that he had come out of nightmare into
a dream. He was aware that Something had gone out of
him, that he had no desire for any of the things which
hitherto this vanished Something had driven him to seek ;
he was aware of a swimming and hovering brightness
inhabiting the place in his thought from which this Some
thing had been expelled. He was so happy that he could
have shouted for joy. He was so frightened of losing this
ethereal happiness that he dared not think about it. The
drunken man walked in a shining light on pavements of
fire, with the trees waving to him, with his soul dazed
by ecstasy.
That night he went to the meeting, made his public
confession, and rose up with a deepened conviction that
he had got a new life.
On the following morning, for the first time in his life
untormented by a craving for alcohol or tobacco, he yet
found himself with insufficient courage to face the service
in the open-air, dreading the mockery of the world. But
he went to the evening meeting, and returned home past
many a public-house without the smallest desire to enter.
He went to his work next day, guessing what welcome
he would receive from his mates. He spoke to no one,
and went straight to the unfinished room of a great building
in which his work lay, and began his job.
In a few minutes the door opened, and a group of his
old friends entered, plumbers by trade and plumbers by soul.
14* THE PLUMBER
' Morning, Alf.'
' Morning.'
' Ain't you dry?'
1 No. '
* Ain't you got a thick head?'
' No.'
* Wouldn't you like half a gauge now?'
1 No.'
' What, not just half a gauge to oil the works?'
4 No.'
After a pause, ' See your friend on Saturday, Alf?'
1 Yes.'
1 Go to the Salvation Army?'
1 Yes.'
' Did you find Jesus?'
* Yes.'
They burst out laughing. * What ! And you a mock-
preacher, proving there isn't no God? Stow it, Alf!
Look here, you take it quietly by yourself, when no one
is looking ' — and they put a bottle of beer on the floor
by his feet, and went out, closing the door.
At twelve o'clock they came back. The beer was not
drunk. They examined the cork. They tasted the liquor
to see that water had not been put to it. Then they turned,
and with filthy words, vile phrases, and horrible blasphemies
assaulted the poor soul that had been born again. Brutal
as they were, one must not judge them too harshly. The
change was made suddenly, and only a saint really believes
in repentance for sin. The best of us are suspicious of
the prodigal son; we never believe that the lost sheep
prefers in its heart the fold to the mountain.
For two or three days the Plumber suffered bitterly at
his work. He was mocked, taunted, teased, and insulted
with studied and incessant cruelty. He bore it without
reproach. Before the end of the week was reached a day
came for the ' rhubarb,' that is to say, a subsidy, or an
advance of their wages. This was paid in a public-house.
The Plumber went with the rest. While he waited for the
foreman he was offered beer and chaffed unmercifully about
THE PLUMBER 143
salvation. When he received his money, they told him,
with a savage satisfaction, that a score was against him on
the slate for fifteen shillings. He paid this money — a small
part of the price of his past sins — and walked out of the
public-house.
He went home.
When he entered the room where his children had
suffered so terribly, and where absolute starvation had
only been kept at bay by the toil of his wife, he realized
that this was his first home-coming as a penitent. The
woman and the children knew that some change had
taken place in him ; the woman believed that in a drunken
moment he had joined the Salvation Army. She expected
that he would be drunk on the day of the ' rhubarb ' ;
none believed in the miracle.
They stood amazed, gaping at him, because he had
come back straight from work. The children looked
frightened, the woman dazed.
He went to his wife, and said, ' You want a bit of
money, I expect,' and gave her a sovereign.
She stared at him, and then looked down at the gold
coin in the palm of her hand. The children glanced
nervously at each other, and held their breath.
There was a silence in the desolate room for a
moment, the man awkward, the woman dazed, the children
confounded.
At last he said, ' The kids would like a bit of dinner,
wouldn't they? Shall we go along and buy a piece of
meat?'
She continued to look from him to the coin, from the
coin to him.
' I'm ready to go, if you are,' he said.
She raised her eyes to his, and studied him. ' Alf,'
she said, ' do you mean it?'
' Yes,' he said, and, getting rid of nervousness, he
kissed her.
It was the first time he had kissed his wife, literally,
for years. It was the first time since their first baby was
born that he had come home not drunk and not tyrannous.
i44 THE PLUMBER
All the bitter suffering of the long past, all the cruel blows
and torturing neglect, all the hunger and ache, the poverty,
wretchedness, shame, and despair of her life crowded the
woman's brain, and she broke down under the overpower
ing contrast of this new thing in her life — affection and
kindness.
Was the hard past really at an end? Was the long
monotony of cruelty, starvation, and despair to which she
had now become habituated, truly broken?
For that day, at any rate, there was happiness in the
home.
In the morning the Plumber returned to his work. He
was not subjected to mockery, but he was given all the
hardest and dirtiest jobs. He was so happy that he did
not resent this treatment. He began to sing Salvationist
hymns.
The foreman approached. ' Stow that music,' he said.
* Why?'
1 The other men object to it, and I don't wonder, either.'
The Plumber worked in silence. Presently the other
men in his vicinity began to sing. They sang all the vilest
songs they could think of, songs that parody pure love,
religion, and even elementary refinement, with the lowest
and most abominable filthiness.
The Plumber was not a man to take persecution of
this kind with meekness. He went to the foreman, and
said, * If I mayn't sing hymns, these chaps mustn't sing
beastliness; you've stopped me, stop them.'
He carried his point, and the others left him alone.
The last tyranny of fellow-workmen now fell to his
experience. He was put to Coventry. No one spoke tp
him. Among all those men, his former mates and com
panions, he worked in silence and in isolation, his presence,
his existence ignored by everybody, both by men and boys.
A French friend of mine said to me the other day, ' I
do not think the Salvation Army will ever be so great a
success in France as in England ; in France one is more
sensitive to ridicule, more obedient to public opinion.' This
remark made me think of the Plumber. Consider his
THE PLUMBER 145
stubborn courage, his masculine endurance under persecu
tion. He was one against many, in an employment which
necessitated the closest companionship; and the opposing
majority were men with whom he had thieved, drunk,
blasphemed, and jested for many years. It must not be
supposed either that he was so carried away by religious
exaltation as to make tyranny a small matter to him, or
that his nature was too coarse and his sensitiveness too
blunt for suffering. He was a London workman making
a fight for his soul. The first uprush of spiritual freedom
which had swept him out of all his old habits had now
departed. He was left to fight his battle with normal
powers. He was an ordinary man fighting for decency,
respectability and holiness, in the midst ol men who knew
every letter in his iniquitous and depraved past. He felt
their cruelty sharply. A companionable man, fond of comic
songs and hilarious bar frolic — he felt keenly this loneliness,
isolation, and neglect.
For a day or two he endured the cruelty of Coventry
Then came the end of the week. He received the remainder
of his wages in a public-house, and was told that the job
was postponed tcr a week or two, and that no one would
be required on the following Monday.
He went home.
It seemed to him a hard thing, just when he had made
this fresh start and the desolate room was beginning to
put on the appearance of a home, that the means of daily
bread should be taken from him. The workman who is
told on Saturday that he will not be required on Monday
loses the feeling that Sundiy is a day of rest ; he carries
home with him a load heavier than sheet lead.
The Plumber did not say anything to his wife about this
end of the job. He read a little cheap New Testament
which he had bought, and experienced a sense of comfort
from the words, ' I am the Vine, and ye are the branches.'
He thought that if he trusted to Christ all would go well
with him. The family spent a happy Sunday. There was
food in the house, the father was sober ; there was money
enough to last with care till the next ' rhubarb.'
146 THE PLUMBER
On the Monday morning he woke early, and went out
as if to go to his regular work. When he found himself
in the street something urged him, before looking for a
job, to go to the scene of his last employment, the place
at which work had so suddenly terminated on the Satur
day. He was prepared for what he found there. The usual
operations were going on, all his mates were at work; the
sound of their toil filled the morning air.
He stood looking at the busy scene for a few moments,
listening to the familiar sounds, watching the well-known
figures, and feeling in his heart a certain bitterness which
almost stirred him to the violence of anger. He walked
away, teeling that the hand of every man was against him.
Here at the very outset of a new life was the world's
oppugnance. His world would receive him if he came
drunk and disreputable ; while he remained religious and
upright it closed its gates against him. The hatred of
religion has many forms ; none is so cruel as that which
takes away the daily bread of the workman trying to be
a better man.
Now began for the Plumber a martyrdom which searched
his soul. Wherever he went he found that the story of
his life had preceded him. There are, apparently, few
trades in London more closely knit and with ramifications
more far-reaching and swift than this trade of plumbing.
A story concerning the trade flies to all corners of the
metropolis ; a man who gives offence becomes instantly
known to mates whom he has never seen and whose
names he has never heard. The poor Plumber discovered,
wherever he went, that no one had work for him.
Very often he felt as if his heart would break, but
never once did the temptation either to drink or to smoke
visit his mind. Hungry, he felt no longing for the lulling
stupefaction of tobacco ; dejected and in despair, he felt
no craving for the oblivionizing magic of alcohol. But a
deepening melancholy settled on his mind, and again and
again he had to remind himself of the words, ' I am the
Vine, ye are the branches,' to keep alive in his heart the
faith that God cared.
THE PLUMBER 147
I want to make this picture clear and vivid in the
reader's mind. Many times the out-of-work Plumber rose
at five o'clock in the morning, and with nothing to sustain
his physical energy except a glass of water, started out
to tramp all day in quest of work. These tramps carried
him sometimes as far as Harrow and Watford, well out
side the boundaries of London ; and he went steadily forward
all the long day, with no other support than his glass
of cold water and his religion. Sometimes, weary and
heartsick, glancing forward and behind to see that he was
not observed, this poor fellow would sink on his knees in
the middle of a country road, and make his prayer, ' O
God, don't forsake me !' And when his feet dragged and
his body seemed about to collapse, he would lie down in
a ditch, take his Testament from his pocket, and read some
of those parables which declare that God does care, and
cares greatly, for man and his sorrows. What a picture
this presents to the mind ! The professional tramp has put
us out ot sympathy with the respectable workman genuinely
seeking employment ; but consider this man, converted from
depravity to self-respect, this poor London workman trying
to be a good man, kneeling in the dust of a country road,
and reading the Galilaean parables in a Buckinghamshire
ditch.
The home was only kept together during these difficult
months by the incessant labour of the wife. Starvation was
always at the door. The man himself certainly lived in a
state of starvation. And yet — how can science explain the
matter? — in spite of mental misery and the terrible state
of a body reduced to extreme weakness by starvation, not
once did this ex-dipsomaniac feel any desire whatever either
for tobacco or alcohol.
If ever a man was tempted to drink, if ever a man had
justification for drinking, surely it was this poor hungry
animal, tramping the roads and streets, day after day,
week after week, month after month, and always in vain,
seeking for work.
He tells me that he was not in the least conscious of
religious exaltation. He derived comfort from singing
148 THE PLUMBER
hymns as he trudged along1 the road, and he was always
aware of support when he repeated the words, ' I am the
Vine, and ye are the branches,' but never did his heart
sing with a great joy, never did he feel inclined to laugh
at his troubles ; never did ecstasy take him out of himself
and make terrestrial life appear a small matter. Always
he was a hungry man asking for work. He was now so
devoted to the children, who had once feared him, that he
could not prevent occasional bitterness at the reflection of
his present lot ; he wanted, God knew how he wanted, to
make his home happy and bright ; he would work hard
from morning to night, he would save money, and never
again waste a penny in drink, tobacco, gambling, and other
vices ; but — there was no work for him. Alas, such is the
fate of thousands of good men and capable tradesmen in
modern civilization !
At last he saw that he must abandon his trade and its
high wages.
He might have gone to the ' Starvation Army ' and got
work, but something prevented him from bringing himself
to live in this manner. Thousands and thousands of men
working for the Army never have received a penny from
its funds ; they will not let their mates say that they turned
religious in order to get work ; they are very loyal to the
honour of the religion which has saved them.
This tradesman, used to high wages and interesting
work, hired himself out at last as what is called a common
labourer. He ceased to be a plumber. It was a hard
step, but once taken he was glad. By hard work, careful
economy, and enthusiasm for the home, he now lives a
happy and contented life free of all regret, and only occa
sionally darkened by the anxiety of penury. He says,
speaking of his home, ' Pictures hang on the walls — they
used to hang on the wife's face.' Every day his eldest
little girl goes to meet him at his work, and walks home
with him ; she was one of those who rushed under the bed
for cover at the first sound of his step on the stair. He
is a labourer, a sweeper of the London streets, and he is
happy. The man's face is a Te Deum. His gratitude to
THE PLUMBER 149
God, his enthusiasm for conversion, his certain conviction
that it is only religion which can reform the individual and
the State, make him a tremendous worker among the lost
and unhappy.
And it was this man — here, I think, is the romance of
religion as a force in the strange lives of a shabby London
quarter — who, coming happy from his home for a meeting
in the Salvation Army hall — by a chance word to the
Puncher, fresh from prison, turned that remarkable man
from murder to a life of devotion and service.
What other force can society devise which will take such
a man as this Plumber, bred in drunkenness and crime, and
convert him from a thief, a dipsomaniac, and a domestic
tyrant, into an upright, honourable, and pure-minded
citizen? Conversion is quite properly a subject for psycho
logical examination, but modern theology misses its chief
weapon against the attacks of materialism when it fails to
insist upon the immense significance of these spiritual
miracles. Whatever conversion may be, whatever its
physical machinery, it is religion and only religion which
can put the machinery in motion, and make a bad man a
good man, a profitless and dangerous citizen a useful
member of society. Surely this story of the Plumber, even
as it is narrated here in a few pages of print, must bring
home to the minds of politicians and sociologists really
acquainted with the appalling condition of modern London,
that here in religion is the one great hope of regeneration,
the one certain guarantee, as the whole of Tolstoy's work
teaches, of a noble posterity, There is really nothing else.
RAGS AND BONES
T N some ways the man in this story is the most original
•*• and striking of the group with whom I discussed
religious experience in poor London. Certainly the manner
of his conversion is quite different from the usual narra
tives recorded in books. I can find nothing like it in The
Varieties of Religious Experience.
Let me begin by attempting to paint his portrait. He
is very like the popular idea of a burglar ; his nose is brief,
and flat to the face, somewhat broken ; he has a long upper
lip ; his mouth is twisted into a snarl ; his light-coloured,
bird-like eyes glare fiercely at you under a heavy and over
hanging forehead ; the colour of the old face, which is
ploughed with deep wrrinkles and marked by bitter suffer
ing, is like dirty linen — that peculiar prison-tinge, half
grey, half brown, which suggests stubborn powers of
resistance and the habit of silent thought. He is vigorous
and powerful, with jerky movements and passionate ges
tures. His voice has the fog of London in its growl.
When he laughs his eyes remain hard, and his mouth is
like a cat's when it draws back its lips. He is impatient
of subtle questions, strikes the table often with a clenched
fist, occasionally yields to a kind of ecstasy in the midst
of eating bread and butter — throwing back his head and
shouting ' Glory to God !' in the direction of the ceiling,
his face wrinkled up and contorted as though he was
suffering physical torture.
He has suffered ; he tells you that he knows. He is
rugged, irregular, real.
One does not quite know what to make of this rough
old son of the slums, except to say that he has suffered
frightfully, that he has been delivered from hopeless despair
152 RAGS AND BONES
in a miraculous manner, and that he is now as firmly fixed
in righteousness as any saint of mysticism. As to the
mystery of his consciousness, as to his ideas of God and
the nature of existence waiting humanity beyond the grave,
one can conjecture nothing.
He began life in misery. He was the child of parents
who spent all their money in drink. His infancy was spent
in his mother's arms in the * Queen's Arms ' or the ' Royal
Arms,' a double embrace which afforded his young soul
little acquaintance either with maternal affection or royal
favour. His early childhood was also spent chiefly in
public-houses, where he stood at his mother's knee half
suffocated in a dark and moving world of trousers, petti
coats, and spilt liquor. By the time he was tall enough to
see the counter he was old enough to fend for himself in
the streets ; he preferred them to the tavern. He had long
been used to going home with his mother after midnight,
and now he very often waited for her outside the public-
house door until he was so tired that he crawled away to
sleep in a yard or a doorway. The streets had no terrors
for him.
This life of neglect, misery, and destitution, by some
miracle, did not depress Teddy. He grew up, in spite of
it, sharp, active, acute, and humorous. He was sharp
enough to provide himself with food, to avoid thrashings
from his father, and to find comfortable dosses in back
yards. Later, he was acute enough to see that the ranks
of an infantry regiment was the best place for a hungry,
growing boy. He enlisted and soldiered without distinc
tion, but without great crime, till his time was up.
Throughout his soldiering he was a cockney humorist.
Drink was getting hold of him ; but he was strong, and
could carry a ' skinful.' He came out of the Army a hard
drinker, but not a drunkard. He had his wits about him.
He became a marine-store dealer, that is to say, a
rag-and-bone merchant in a very small way of business.
His liveliness, his fondness for drink, and his endless
stories of sharp practice and cunning, made him popular
and brought him business. But as fast as money came
RAGS AND BONES 153
in — not very fast, perhaps — he drank it away. Then he
married a good woman, and his wife exercised a certain
restraint over him. Things began to go better. He was
really deeply attached to his wife, and for her sake he
made a manful fight to keep out of the public-houses ;
there were whole weeks when he did not drink a glass of
beer or waste a penny in the taverns. His home was really
a very happy one, as happiness goes in shabby London.
But terrible disaster overtook him. His wife died. He
was left quite alone in the world. It was the death of his
wife which made him an habitual drunkard. Before that
he had no overmastering craving. Strong-willed and tena
cious, he had power over his appetite, could control
it, and make it obedient. But the death of his wife broke
him down, and drove him to alcohol for consolation. One
must try to understand alcohol's fatal attraction for the
poor.
' The sway of alcohol over mankind,' says Professor
James, ' is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate
the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to
earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no ; drunken
ness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the
great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its
votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant
core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not
thrcugh mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor
and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony con
certs and of literature ; and it is part of the deeper mystery
and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something
that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouch
safed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases
of what in its totality is so degrading and poisoning. The
drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic conscious
ness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our
opinion of that larger whole.
4 Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when
sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical con
sciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond
154 RAGS AND BONES
depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth
fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming
to ; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to
clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Never
theless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there
persists ; and I know more than one person who is per
suaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine
metaphysical revelation. Some years ago I myself made
some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxica
tion, and reported them in print. One conclusion was
forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of
its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our
normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we
call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all
about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie
potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may
go through life without suspecting their existence, but
apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there
in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which
probably somewhere have their field of application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can
be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness
quite disregarded.'
This is so true that one surely need not emphasize it ;
but, unfortunately, too many who strive to cure people of
alcoholism will not recognize that they are endeavouring
to take away a man's escape from misery, his one means
of flight into the rapturous air of illusion ; they persist in
treating drunkenness as a form of greediness quite similar
to a schoolboy's stomach-ache from overbunning ; in this
way they fail in their good intentions.
The psychological aspect of alcoholism is one that opens
the door to much mystery, and reveals to those who look
long enough and deep enough puzzling glimpses of the
human soul.
This rough man, an ex-soldier and now a rag-and-bone
merchant, finding himself bowed down by the death of a
woman he had loved sincerely and nobly, went to drink
for oblivion, stood in a public-house to forget the grave,
RAGS AND BONES 155
laughed with the drinkers to forget his desolate home,
drank and drank to stop the bleeding of his heart. And
he discovered happiness. The filmy screens surrounding
his normal consciousness lifted with the potent fumes, and
he inhabited fields of consciousness wide, glorious, and
delightful. It is important to know that he became a
happy drunkard. Some men find in alcohol a deadening
and soporific narcotic ; they grow sullen, silent, quarrel
some in a grumbling, growling way ; others, and of this
company was our poor widower, discover in alcohol a
Jinni, or, if you like, an Ifrit, who lifts them up to the
seventh heaven, transports them over stellar space, builds
for them in the twinkling of an eye palaces of porphyry
and jasper, fills their hands with gold, and breathes into
their souls the sense and the conviction of absolute power.
From deep melancholy this man rose to dazzling heights
of happiness. Alcohol, like the magic carpet, lifted him
into mid-air ; like the ivory-tube, revealed to him all he
desired to see; like the enchanted apple, healed him of all
sickness.
Because he was so intensely happy, he became immensely
popular. The wretched Miserables who congregated in his
public-houses for happiness and oblivion, welcomed his
company, laughed at his jests, applauded his songs, loved
him in their drunken sodden joy for the wonderful contagion
of his joviality.
For a long time, for years, this state of things continued,
Then his business dwindled and failed. He was in
trouble for his rent. Sharper men served his customers
He went laughing and singing to his ruin, caring not a
jot what became of him. So long as he had the magic of
alcohol, what mattered rags and bones?
He took to sleeping in yards, in dustbins, in any dog-
hole or celler that he could stumble into unobserved by
midnight police.
He got his living — that is to say, money for drink —
by a hundred clever dodges. Although this man has a face
which reminds one of Flaxman's fiends, throughout his life
he has been inoffensive, always he has enjoyed popularity.
156 RAGS AND BONES
1 No one can help liking old Teddy ' is a phrase in
the district. The man is reckoned clever. He would take
the laces out of his boots, go into public-houses where
h<* was not known, and offer them for sale. He made
money in this fashion, and could sleep with the laces in
his pocket, ready for the next day's traffic. His eyes were
keen to notice vendible things in backyards and in gutters.
He cadged his way through life, without committing crimes.
In a moment of destitution he got hold of a sheet of news
paper, tore it into strips, and sold them at a penny each
as ' bringers of luck.' He was too good-tempered to be
a criminal.
But he found it harder and ever harder to pick up
sufficient money to satisfy his increasing craving for drink.
He sank deeper into the gutter, his joviality began to leave
him, his old companions showed less disposition to pay for
his drink, less disposition to listen to his jests. For one
thing, his clothes were now the foul rags of a tramp.
Alcohol is an Ifrit that has the habit of leaving its victims
at an awkward moment. The magic worlds fade away.
The palaces dissolve and melt. Consciousness narrows to
a pint pot.
Once at this point in his career he had what is called
' a turn.' After having slept in various areas and certain
conveniences attached to public-houses for a long period,
he discovered an old muddy, broken-down cart in a yard,
which was never disturbed by its owner, and which offered
shelter from wind and rain. Here he established himself,
and this old cart became his home. People got to know
about it. They laughed at Teddy's ' doss.' He slunk into
the yard at one or two in the morning, climbed into the
cart, lay in his rags on the floor, and slept soundly till the
dawn.
Well, one cold night after a fairly successful day, he
found himself with coppers enough for a ' fourpenny kip '
— that is to say, a bed in a common lodging-house. Every
now and then he indulged himself in this luxury, especially
on occasions when whisky had excited his feelings, and his
soul became princely. On this particular night he walked
RAGS AND BONES 157
proudly towards his lodging-house, thinking of the kitchen
fire in the basement, and anticipating joy from a dirty
sheet, a foul blanket, and a palliasse such as you would
not give to your dog.
On his way he met an old tramp, a poor broken wretch
known in the neighbourhood as Old Bumps. This man
whined about the bitter cold, said he felt bad, wished to
God he had some place where he could sleep. Teddy told
him of the cart, and gave him permission to use it for that
night only.
After glorious repose in the lodging-house, Teddy rose
and came out into the world with renewed hope. As he
walked someone met him, started, turned quite grey, and
stood. * What's the matter?' asked Teddy. ' Why !' cried
the man, with an oath, * you're dead !' 4 Dead ! what do
you mean?' ' D'you mean to tell me you're alive?' Teddy
demanded explanations. * Everybody in the place is say
ing you're dead,' replied the man; ' hundreds say they
have seen your corpse. You died last night in the cart.
I saw them wheeling your body away.'
Old Bumps had died in his sleep. Someone had seen
the body lying there. A policeman had been told. The
crowd saw a corpse taken out of the cart and wheeled away
in an ambulance to the mortuary. The whole world said,
* Teddy is dead.'
The thought that he had been considered dead had an
explosive effect in Teddy's mind. It was a catherine-wheel
of alarm, scattering sparks and confusion. It pulled him
up. It made him reflect on death. He considered within
himself that the hour surely cometh, and for him might
come suddenly and soon, when a man's soul passes out of
the body, and must give account of the deeds done in the
body. He saw how very easily the corpse of Old Bumps
might have been his corpse. He might die one night in
his sleep. He might be taken out of that cart, cold, stiff,
motionless. People would say, ' Teddy is dead — dead like
a dog !' But what of his soul?
11 Love would not be love," says Bourget, " unless it
could carry one to crime." And so one may say that no
158 RAGS AND BONES
passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry
one to crime ' (Sighele, Psychologic des Sectes, p. 136).
On this Professor James comments, ' In other words,
great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions set by " con
science." And conversely, of all the criminal human
beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who
actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal
impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the
presence of some other emotion to which his character is
also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only
made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available
emotion for this result in this particular class of persons.
It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appro
priately as a '* higher affection." If we are soon to die,
cr if we believe a day ot judgment to be near at hand,
how quickly do we put our moral house in order — we do
not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us I
Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract
from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for
repentance, and its full conversion value.'
The most available emotion — fear — began to work in
the mind of this London Miserable. He thought, What
can I do? It seemed to him that he must first of all escape
from the present life. He could never more sleep in that
cart. He must avoid his old haunts. Best of all, he must
leave London behind him. Somewhere he must find work.
Somehow he must begin again.
So the frightened drunkard, born and bred in the gutters
of the slums, took to the road in middle age, and tramped
out of London to save his soul.
1 have never seen man's face express more suffering
than the battered, weather-beaten face of this rag-and-bone
merchant when he described to me the horrors of a tramp's
life. To tramp till the legs are like boards, the feet like
burning coals, the empty stomach ravenous and tigerish
for food, and everywhere to find the doors of homes shut
against one, to receive only fierce or mocking looks from
men, frightened or contemptuous glances from women and
children ; to walk on and on under a burning sky, through
RAGS AND BONES 159
a downpour of rushing rain, in snow and hail, in drenching
mist and blood-congealing cold — always regarded with sus
picion, barked at by the dogs in farmyards and stables,
followed threateningly by the village policeman, refused not
only one helpful word or one kindly gift, but refused work
of any kind, the hardest and most menial — this is an
experience which hardens a man's heart, turns the blood to
vinegar, and makes him the savage enemy of his own kind.
Nor was it much better when he reached the shelter
of a workhouse. No effort was made to save his soul, to
humanize his heart with kindness. No one ever sought to
reclaim him, to provide him with manly work, to hold out
the hope of wages, home, and self-respect. From the
moment when the door ot the workhouse opened he was
treated as a criminal. Hard words and hard looks accom
panied him to his bed, and before he could eat a workhouse
breaktast he had to break — this broken tramp, starving for
nourishment — half a ton of stones. Many a time on the
road he telt deserted by man and God, and driven by some
inexorable devil onwards to greater suffering and more
terrible hell. Again and again he abandoned hope, lived in
blackest despair, and only refrained from self-destruction
out of fear of hell. And all the time he was tortured by a
craving for alcohol, which was like a tire burning at his
vitals.
He told me a curious story. He had tramped one day
across Salisbury Plain, and on the point of collapse from
starvation, he sank down in a ditch, and covering his face
with his hands, weeping like a child, he cried aloud, ' O
God, give me something to eat !' A feeling of help came
to him in the midst of his exhaustion and despair. He
took his hands from his face and looked to right and left
of him ; not a soul was to be seen. His eyes looked
ahead of him. In the opposite hedge he saw a piece of
paper. He got up, convinced that there was the help he
sought. The paper turned out to be a bag. It contained
two scones.
A curious coincidence.
He tramped back to London, feeling that those who
160 RAGS AND BONES
knew him would be more likely to help him than peasants
and farmers who took him for a criminal. He arrived in
his ofd slum such a pitiable object — ' lousy as a cuckoo,'
in the local phrase — that everybody turned their backs upon
him. Here and there he managed to cadge a drink. Now
and again he picked something up in the gutters which he
was able to sell for beer. Occasionally he got a copper
for holding a horse. Once or twice he held the spirited
cob ot the Puncher, while that flash prize-fighter was drink
ing in saloon bars. In this manner he existed for months
and months, always starving, frequently half drunk, and
getting every day more dreadful a creature to look at, so
that even many in like case with himself gave him a wide
berth.
One day, when he was quite penniless, the craving for
alcohol became so forceful and irresistible that he knew,
whatever the cost, he must obtain it. At that moment he
was on the edge of crime. Like a ravenous beast he went
slouching at a half-run through the streets, looking with
his ferocious eyes for some chance of getting money and
drink. As luck would have it, he saw the landlord of a
public-house in which he had spent hundreds of pounds
talking to a man at the door. Teddy, in his vile rags,
went up to him, and said, ' Will you trust me with a pot
till to-morrow?'
The landlord looked at him with contempt, and
answered, * Don't you see I'm talking to a gentleman?'
But Teddy's craving was proof against insult and
contempt.
4 Trust me till to-morrow,' he said. ' I'm perishing
for a drink.'
The landlord made no answer.
Again Teddy made his request. This time he was told
to go to hell.
1 Come on,' pleaded the poor wretch, ' give us one
chance; just a drink, only one; I'll go away quiet, if you
will. '
4 Oh, go and mess the Army about !' said the publican,
with impatient contempt.
RAGS AND BONES 161
There was a Salvation Army open-air meeting in the
next street, and the sound of the band came to their ears.
' Do you mean it? — you won't?' demanded Teddy.
' Yes. You go and mess the Army about,' repeated the
publican. Now it must be told, what perhaps is not widely
known, that in these destitute quarters of London, the
publicans very often support the Salvation Army with
subscriptions, and frequently encourage them to get hold
of the worst drunkards. A Salvationist can always go
freely into the public bar of these gin-palaces. As one of
them explained to me, ' A publican doesn't make anything
out of a four-ale man, and when they get badly and
habitually drunk, he's never over pleased to see them, for
often it means a tow in the bar and trouble with the police.
What the publican likes is the toff, who cracks down a
bob for three or four pennorth of whisky and a tuppeny
smoke. There's profit there. And the toff drinks, lights
his cigar, and goes — making room for others. But the
four-ale man spends his twopence, and sits solid for hours>
hoping to cadge another drink from some mate who never
appears. Yes, the publicans support us. It pays them.'
So it will be seen that this particular publican really
meant it when he told Teddy to go and mess the Army
about. He had no desire, perhaps, for the salvation of
Teddy's soul, but he did not want him for a customer,
which — from the publican's point of view — comes to the
same thing.
The contempt in the words stung Teddy. He con
sidered how much wealth he had poured into that public-
house. And now, when he was mad for just one drink,
just because he was penniless and in rags, the devil he
had enriched ordered him, like a dog, to get out of his
way. The words ' go and mess the Army about ' stuck in
his mind. Suddenly it occurred to him that this thing called
the Salvation Army was kind even to tramps in a condition
as vile as his. It was like light to his soul. Denied by
the publican, this sinner thought of Christ. There on
the slum pavement, outside a tavern, mad for drink, and
sunken to the very depths of misery, all of a sudden the
i6a RAGS AND BONES
consciousness of the outcast received the idea of Christ's
kindness to the lost.
As I said at the beginning of the story, I know nothing
like it in the chronicles of conversion. How different from
the ecstatic vision of the mystic, how different from the
glowing light suddenly suffusing the prayerful soul of the
penitent, how different from the mysterious voice calling a
dejected spirit to the love of God ! And yet how natural,
how real, how simple, in its abnormality. Also, how true
to the slums !
' Right, guv'nor,' said Teddy, and he said it savagely,
not at all in the tone of penitence, ' I'll take your tip !'
and he walked away in his filth and his rags.
He went straight to the open-air meeting in the next
street. The band was getting ready for the march back to
the hall. Teddy approached the drummer and said, ' Can
I come along with you?' The drummer looked at him and
said, ' Yes.' Teddy marched beside that man to the hall,
the rattle of the drum and the blare of the trumpets making
strange music in his soul. At the meeting in the hall he
broke down, covered with remorse for his past life, and
feeling how greatly he had rejected the mercy of God. He
went to the penitent form, knelt down, and prayed with
anguish for forgiveness, and also for strength to make a
fresh start. ' Oh, God, oh, God,' he kept crying, ' I want
to be born again !'
He says the answer came with the cry. Then and there
he felt his breast broadened, his soul lightened, and the
blood coursing joyfully through his veins. He was saved.
Remember that ten minutes before this man had been
running through the streets, mad for alcohol.
The Salvationists showed him love and kindness. He
was in a terrible state, one of the dirtiest men ever handled
by that corps. He had no socks and no shirt. Next to
the blackened flesh of his feet was the broken leather of
his foul boots ; next to the skin and bones of his legs,
trousers that were rent and threadbare and unspeakable ;
next to the poor body, something that called itself a coat
and was not. This man had neither socks, nor shirt, nor
RAGS AND BONES 163
waistcoat; the state of his skin must not be described;
they had to get an old sack to put over him. It was the
case of his trade — rags and bones.
To such a condition can a man come in our modern
days. To such a condition can drink bring him ; to such
a condition the State allows him to come. Religion took
this man and saved him from the publican and the State.
Here, you may be tempted to think, is the case of a
man merely saved by being provided with work ; a man
who made use of religion to obtain employment, and lived
his repentance more or less comfortably on the wages of
charity.
Hear the end.
He left the hall, after his conversion, and without say
ing a word to any of his friends, walked about the streets
for two nights. As a rule the Army carefully looks after
its penitents, but in Teddy's case there was an accident
Everybody thought that somebody else was nursing him ;
in fact, no one did. They set him on a white horse next
day, and led him in triumph through his old haunts,
through the foulest quarters of the town, exhibiting Teddy
as a converted sinner, and making a vast impression. But
this Man on the White Horse was starving, and he said
nothing. He never complained, he never hinted for bread
or penny. He endured the agony of starvation in a noble
silence. All that time he was praying a single prayer, ' Oh,
God ! give me one chance, and I'll serve You all the days
of my life.' He was determined not to live by the Salva
tion Army — like almost all the men I talked to, he glories
in the sneering title of * Starvation Army ' — he was deter
mined to provide for himself. ' I didn't go to the Army
for beer, nor yet for charity, nor yet for work,' he cries
fiercely ; ' that's what a good many do go for, and they
go away disappointed, calling it Starvation Army. Glory
to that title ! The Army isn't for mouchers and work-
shys, and willing-to-work-but-wonts. No; it's for those
who seek Almighty God, who go on their knees to Him,
and who get up with something inside them that won't
ever let them cadge or whine or play the loafer again. And
164 RAGS AND BONES
that's what I got. Praise God I He lifted me up from a
cadging, drunken beast, and gave me a soul to praise Him
and love Him and stand firm. Do you know how I made
my start? I'll tell you. It began like this. Somebody
gave me twopence. It was my first capital. I bought for
that sum a couple of little flour bags. I picked them to
pieces, sewed them up again as aprons, and sold them for
twopence each. That was my start — turning twopence
into fourpence. With that fourpence I bought more flour
bags. With every penny I made I bought something else,
and sold again, till my capital was half a crown — all made
in one long day. I was now a man of business. I worked
like this for weeks, till I was fairly floated ; then I slept
in a Rowton House like a gentleman ; I started a rag-and-
bone round, kept myself steady, saved money, took a house,
and began to do well. Never a farthing did I take from
the Army.'
And now for a confession.
Some months after this amazing regeneration the news
came, ' Teddy's broke it !' — which meant Teddy had gone
back to drink. This rumour reached the ears of the ' angel-
adjutant ' — it was Teddy, by the way, who gave her that
name. The adjutant was returning home after an exhaus
tive day's work, and she had a meeting in the evening.
But the news was serious. ' Teddy's broke it !' — it meant
ruin for poor Teddy's soul. The Man had fallen from the
White Horse. She jumped upon her bicycle, went to her
officers, and in a few minutes the whole corps was beating
the district for this fallen star, this lost sheep, this poor
dog returned to its vomit. To this day the corps sometimes
speaks of the great bicycle hunt for Teddy.
They found him at last in a public-house, mad drunk.
They got him back to his nice home, which they found
wrecked and broken and defiled, and put him to bed.
When he came to himself he found that someone had
lit a fire and had set a kettle to boil for tea, and was
kneeling in the little chamber praying and crying. It was
the adjutant.
The loving gentleness broke his heart.
RAGS AND BONES 165
How did he fall? He himself says now that he is all
the better for that fall, that before it he was ' too self-
confident,' not meek enough to know his own weakness,
and not sensible enough to realize that only God can save
a drunkard. But there was a very human disposing cause.
Consider this little narrative of a fragment of London's
social world : Teddy had a mother who was in the work
house, well cared for and protected from drink by wholesome
regulations. Every Sunday after his conversion he went
to the workhouse, brought his mother home, gave her a
shilling and a good tea, and afterwards took her safely
back. But this filial affection was not good enough for
the neighbours. Tongues wagged. ' Everybody knew
what he should have done ! ' says one of his friends
contemptuously.
Well, these gossiping neighbours used to talk to Teddy's
mother, get her alone and tell her she ought to make him
remove her from the workhouse and let her live like a lady.
They worked upon her feelings, till she grew to hate her son,
till she felt that it was he who put her in the House and
kept her there. Then one Sunday, during his absence at
i.he Salvation Army meeting, having filled the old woman
with drink, the neighbours assisted her to smash up the
home he had got together with such great labour, self-
denial, and pardonable pride ; they smashed up his home —
to teach him filial affection.
The blow was too much for Teddy. He went out
from the ruin of his house savage and disheartened, and —
broke it.
The tender-heartedness of the adjutant brought him once
more to the penitent form and to Christ, where this rough,
big, powerful, burglar-looking man sobbed and cried like
a child. And something of great importance came of this
fall. While he was mad drunk in the public-house a Salva
tion lass had entered and commanded the publican not to
serve him with any more drink. Teddy was struck by that
woman, and considered her. He had prayed for a wife
for his home, and now that it was ruined he felt that only
a wife could help him to restore it. He made sure of the
1 66 RAGS AND BONES
power of this second conversion, and then offered himself
to the Salvationist.
She liked him — even in his drunkenness, as we have
said, everybody liked Teddy — and when he told her all
the ache and longing of his heart, she got after a time to
love him. With her love to assist him he prospered more
and more at his business, and now, with a child in his
home, the delight of his eyes, he has one of the best rag-
and-bone rounds in aristocratic London, and his happy
home, his prosperous domesticity set an example to his
neighbours.
One day he came to the adjutant and subscribed ten
shillings to the funds of the local corps. She did not like
to take it, but he insisted. ' They tell me,' he said, ' you
are worried for the gas-bill.' Then he said, ' How much
is it, and how much have you got?' ' With your ten
shillings, Teddy,' she answered, ' I have got a pound, and
the bill is for fifty shillings.' 'Thirty bob short,' he said.
'How long have you got?' 'Till to-morrow morning.'
At eight o'clock next morning Teddy came with the
thirty shillings.
What a revolution in personality ! Does one exaggerate
to call it a new birth?
APPARENT FAILURE
PHIS is a strange love story. It has the interest of
•*• presenting to the reader a poor man's version of the
marriage problem, a theme usually restricted by fashionable
novelists to the lucky classes. Also, it has the particular
interest of showing religion disappointed of a soul and yet
undefeated in its tremendous conflict with evil.
When I was gathering the materials for this book,
and returning every now and then for fresh air from the
slums to happier places in society, I found that almost
everybody to whom I spoke of my investigations said in
the modern tired way, ' But do these conversions last?
Are they not merely disturbances of the emotions, and quite
transitory in their effects?'
The reader who has followed these stories with intelli
gence and with knowledge of human nature deeper than
that which serves the average poor man-of-the-world in his
journeys round the sun, will understand how I must have
felt, listening to such chilling commentaries on stories like
the Puncher's, the Criminal's, and the Lowest of the Low.
It was not until I heard the story which now follows, the
story which I have purposely reserved for the end of my
book, and which I name ' Apparent Failure ' with a good
reason, that I learned how best to silence the lounging
critics of conversion — those innumerable people too shallow,
I fear, to study such a work as Professor James's Varieties
of Religious Experience, and certainly too superficial ever
to experience in themselves profound spiritual changes or,
indeed, any emotion of a penetrating nature.
The answer to these people is the Seventy-Times-Seven
of forgiveness. Even if every person in the world, con
verted, from infamy to purity, from crime to virtue, from
i68 APPARENT FAILURE
selfishness to unselfishness, from cruelty to love, from
hell to heaven — even if every one of them reverted to their
past, still conversion would remain the sovereign force and
glory of religion. For, during the period of their conver
sion, however brief, the lost would have been saved, hell
empty, and heaven glad ; during that period, however
brief, sins which might have been committed remained for
ever uncommitted ; and during that period — how brief or
how long does not matter — these people proved what the
enemies of religion will not believe, with all the history
of religious experience against them — that the very lowest
and vilest of men are capable of noble thoughts and lives of
pure unselfishness, can, over and over again, disprove all
the pessimism of ' heredity ' and ' environment.'
And above all other considerations, this : A man once
converted, or half converted, remains to the end of his
days haunted by that pure memory in his life, that pure
interlude when hell receded and heaven came close about
his ways. I do not believe he ever becomes wholly bad.
I think he is always more conscious of a spiritual destiny
than he was before the hour of his half-conversion. And
from all I can gather, the man whose half-conversion ends
in apparent failure, becomes, in his fall, little worse than
most of us who languidly commit our sins, languidly fight
against them and believe all the time that we are worthy
of the tremendous things uttered by poets and prophets
concerning man's immortal soul.
Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats
Tantot I'homme d'en haut et tantot Phomme d'en bas ;
Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne.
These fallen converts, I mean, remain fighters. They may
give up religion, but they maintain some kind of conflict
with their lower natures. Their lapse is a sin at which
we must not sneer, but which we must forgive, even with
seventy-times-seven. I would ask the reader, who doubts
the lastingness of conversion, who is prejudiced against
this pre-eminent miracle of the religious life by the cant
of a wholly bastard Christianity, and who thinks that
APPARENT FAILURE 169
humanity could get along very well without any religion
at all, particularly emotional religion, to consider that the
stories in this book are really true stories, that they repre
sent the actual truth of poor life in London, and to reflect
that they reveal, even among the most brutal, sunken,
and degraded, a craving after religious satisfactions, the
denial of which would empoverish their lives and make
them enemies of society. To welcome the conversion of
these men is to help them and to help humanity ; to forgive
them and bid them strive again, even if they fall head
long back to former ruin, is Christ-like ; to shrug the
shoulder at them, to deny the efficacy of their regeneration,
is to deny the chief insisted revelation which the Founder
of Christianity announced to mankind. I believe that none
of these men whose stories I have tried to tell, many of
them converted for a long period of years, will ever revert ;
but if they should relapse, all of them, I should still insist
upon their temporary salvation as an argument in favour
of the truth of religion, and as an argument in favour of
religion as the supreme force in social regeneration.
But here follows a story of failure, apparent failure ;
and this story, I think, will, perhaps, more convince sceptical
readers of the reality and value of conversion than any of
those which have preceded it, where no question of failure
arose. Also, I trust that it will create deeper sympathy
for that particular religious organization whose work among
the outcasts I have followed in this book, and make its
methods more respected and admired by those who judge
it without knowledge.
The ' angel-adjutant,' whose work made so great a
change in the quarter of London we have glanced at in
these pages, went from London to a large manufacturing
town, where drink had created courts and slums almost as
vile as any in the metropolis. She found that the corps
of the Salvation Army to which she was now attached had
many of the characteristics of a respectable and successful
sect. The large hall was always more or less filled at the
evening meetings, and by people who appeared to be pros
perous, happy, and comfortable. In vain did she look for
170 APPARENT FAILURE
the Miserables, with broken heads and drunken faces, who
had filled the back benches in London. She began to feel
half afraid — such is the character of religious zeal — that
the town was without outcasts.
But when she questioned her associates, she found that
the place had Miserables enough and to spare ; that there
were many black slums, and that crime flourished par
ticularly in one bad street where no one dared to breathe
the name of religion. In a few days the adjutant had
visited this bad street, and had laid her plans for battle.
There was one man in this quarter of the town, she
discovered, who exercised more influence on the wicked than
any other. He was not a criminal. He was not wholly
vicious. But there was some spell of personality about
him which made him a force, some strength of individuality
and some charm of being, which gave him power. He was
young. He was strong. Few men dared face him in
fight. His bad habit was drink.
This man was married, and lived with his mother in a
common lodging-house, where he ruled the unruly and kept
order in vigorous fashion ; drunk or sober, this man knew
the etiquette of the lodging-house and saw that it was
observed. His mother was glad of him, but wished that
he did useful money-earning work in the day, instead of
drinking himself mad in the public-houses. Otherwise, a
good son.
The adjutant perceived that if she could get this man,
she would certainly draw a great many after him. She
therefore concentrated her efforts on securing his sympathy.
He was astonished when this weak little woman in the
poke bonnet waylaid him in the midst of that bad street,
so astonished that he stood still and stared at her.
Throughout London, and, indeed, in almost all the
great towns, these officers of the Salvation Army, both
men and women, are familiar figures in the worst and
most dangerous streets. Desperate men and abandoned
women have these people in their midst, and do them no
harm, offer them no insult. As the drunken man mentioned
in a footnote in the preface said to this very adjutant,
APPARENT FAILURE 171
' Never hurt the likes of you, because you care for the
likes of us.'
But it happened that in this particular town the bad street
had not been visited even by Salvationists. The degraded
people on the pavements and in the road, outside public-
houses, and on the doorsteps of lodging-houses, stared
at the Salvationist who confronted their terror and smiled
in his face.
The terror himself was so taken aback that he listened.
The strategy of the adjutant took this form : she said
that she was organizing a great meeting for the reclama
tion of drunkards and outcasts, that she was new to the
town, and that those who knew it well warned her of
opposition, and even of a riot at her meeting. And she
concluded by saying that she had heard of this man's
great strength and his powerful influence over others,
and therefore had she come to him for protection. ' I
am rather afraid,' she said.
He began to understand, began to be flattered.
She then asked him directly if he would come to the
meeting, and if he would use his influence there to
prevent lawlessness and disorder. ' I am afraid — will you
help me?'
The sweet face of this good woman, the confidence
of her appeal, perhaps the gentleness of her voice, had an
immediate effect upon this dangerous man. They roused
in him all that was chivalrous and good and knightly.
He became, even there in the street, and at this the very
first appeal to his goodness, a different man. The adjutant
had reached to some dim and mysterious field of conscious
ness. She had touched his soul.
' The great thing,' says Professor James, ' which the
higher excitabilities give is courage; and the addition and
subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a
different man, a different life. Various excitements let
the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it ; inspiring
example will do it ; love will do it ; wrath will do it. In
some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of
danger does it, though danger is for most men the great
172 APPARENT FAILURE
inhibitor of action. " Love of adventure " becomes, in
such persons, a ruling passion. " I believe," says General
Skobeleff, " that my bravery is simply the passion, and
at the same time the contempt, of danger. The risk of
life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there
are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of
my body in the event is required to furnish me an
adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to
me to be reflex ; but a meeting of man to man, a duel,
a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost,
attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for
it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one
runs after women ; I wish it never to stop. Were it
always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure.
When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope
to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty ; I
could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay. A
sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me, my entire
nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my
will would in vain try to resist."
Such a man, with the difference made by nationality,
education, and social environment, was this terror of the
bad street to whom our adjutant made her appeal. It was
his courage, his love of danger, which made him respond
to her petition with a vigorous promise to see her through
with her meeting.
That meeting filled the great hall to overflowing with
the worst people in the town. The announcement that
certain well-known former bad characters would speak,
testify to conversion, attracted the crowd ; and the rumour
that Jack, their own local terror, was to be among the
audience roused a widespreading curiosity.
For the first time the new hall was literally filled with
those people to whom the Salvation Army makes it a most
earnest part of their mission to minister — the vile, the
degraded, the abandoned, and the lost, those off-scourings
of our nation almost entirely neglected by all other religious
bodies. Jack kept order with a bullying energy till the
meeting began, warning the mockers and the drunken that
APPARENT FAILURE 173
he would pitch them out and give them rou^h handling if
they disturbed the little woman's entertainment.
They sang a hymn to begin with, then there was a
prayer, then the adjutant read her favourite parable of the
Prodigal Son. So far there was no disorder, and Jack's
duties carried him no further than scowling in the direction
of those he wanted to fall upon and chastise, but who, vexa-
tiously enough, behaved with every possible propriety.
Then followed the testimonies.
Jack soon forgot to look about for disorder. He stood
in the front of the standing pack which occupied the back
of the hall listening. He saw men who had been prize
fighters, criminals, tramps, and petty thieves standing
clean and happy on the platform speaking of the joy that
had come to them with conversion, and explaining that
conversion meant a surrender of man's mutinous will to
the will of a God all-anxious to care for them. Again and
again came the assurance : ' However bad any man here
may feel himself to be, however hopeless and ashamed and
lost he may feel, he has only to come out publicly to this
penitent form, kneel down and ask God for His mercy,
to have the load lifted off his soul and to feel himself
strong in the strength of Almighty God to overcome all
his temptations.'
When, at the end of the meeting, the formal invitation
was made, among the many wretched and miserable souls
who advanced to the form was the local terror who had
come to keep order.
The same spirit which had impelled him to come to the
meeting impelled him to the form. He was brought to
see that, with all his strength and courage, drink was his
master and he its slave. His honour was touched. To
make a fight against such a tyrant struck him as a grand
conflict, one of Victor Hugo's ' sublimes combats.' He
Eose up and went to the form, because it was a difficult thing
to do, because it required courage. He was not drawn
there, touched by compassion for the Man of Sorrows or
ecstasied by love of God ; he was not, perhaps, in any
mood of imaginable repentance. All the changes in his
174 APPARENT FAILURE
brain ran into the one channel of energy : * I am not afraid ;
I will do this thing; I will get the Victory.'
When the adjutant told me of this meeting, she said :
' Jack was converted from drink, but that is not the real
thing.'
Nevertheless, it was a very great thing. He rose up from
his knees a changed and altered man. He said he was
saved — meaning that he felt conscious of profound change
in his spiritual being. He said he would come regularly
to the meetings, and promised to bring others with him.
He went out happy and confident.
Now, there was tragedy in this man's life. He had
married in his youth a woman who had neither the power
to keep him good nor the ability to resist in herself the
contagion of nis example. She had come to a state of
moral feebleness which inspired in her husband nothing but
disgust. He had thrashed her cruelly on many occasions,
without altering her character ; he now appealed to her
from his vantage of respectability, equally in vain. She
sank lower and lower.
To the man making his fight against drink the com
panionship of this poor creature was odious and sometimes
maddening.
The adjutant saw how things were, tried to save the
woman, tried to make the man patient under his provoca
tion, and watched over that interesting drama with anxiety
and solicitude. One day it reached her that the man had
fallen back into drunkenness.
She got upon her bicycle and rode immediately to the
bad street. She was half-way down the evil road when
she saw him. He was in the midst of a bloody fight with
his brother. Like two madmen, their faces horrible with
cuts, bruises, and blood, the two men rushed and struck
at each other with all the passion of murder. To interfere
with those madmen seemed like madness. But the adjutant
got off her bicycle, gave it to one of the crowd, and going
in amongst the fighters, caught hold of her man and
implored him to desist. He shook her off with a foul oath,
warning her that he would strike her if she interfered, and
APPARENT FAILURE 175
rushed upon his brother again with added hate and new
fury. There was a stable close by, with the door open. It
flashed through the adjutant's brain that the crowd in the
street kept up the excitement of the fight. She waited till
the brothers were locked together close to this open door,
and then — how she did it she does not know — she threw
herself upon them both, pushed them into the stable, shut
the door in a flash and locked it.
Bruised and terribly wounded, the lapsed convert came
to the next meeting, knelt afresh at the penitent form, and
vowed that he would never again give way to drink.
The adjutant saw what fine courage this man possessed
to come publicly in his shame, under the watchful eyes of
his bad neighbourhood, once again to implore the forgive
ness and help of God. But she feared that conversion was
still incomplete, and dreaded another relapse — well knowing
the frightful influence of the bad wife.
Some time after came the news that the man had beaten
his wife and turned her out of doors. The adjutant went
to see him. He said that a good life with that woman
was impossible ; but now that he was free of her he intended
never again to fall, never again to drink, smoke, bet, or
fight, but always to keep his soul pure and strong.
Here was a problem to begin with — the man's responsi
bility to his wife. Was he justified in turning her out of
doors? Many will say Yes, angry that such a right should
be questioned. The woman was bad, her influence checked
the man's goodness, she stood between him and his God.
But religious people whose logic is the commandment of
an absolute Master cannot give that confident answer. This
husband had promised to protect his wife — he had thrown
her upon the streets. He had vowed before God to cherish
her — he had abandoned her to the world. His salvation
was a selfish salvation ; without hers it was not the salvation
of Christ.
And yet, to take her back, perhaps to sink with her
down to the abyss — who could advise this dangerous
course?
The adjutant, mothering the soul of this troubled man,
176 APPARENT FAILURE
was sorely puzzled by his problem ; but the complexity of
it was not yet reached.
He made his wife an allowance, they were properly
separated, and he began a new life.
The change in him was really remarkable. He became
smart in his appearance, clean in his habits, respectable
in his way of living, and regular in his religion. He was
never what one could call devout. His vision did not extend
beyond the earth. The supreme influence in his soul was
not celestial, but purely human ; it was a desire to please
the pure woman who had once appealed to his chivalry,
and who had believed in him even when he lapsed again
and again into sin. Through this humanity he reached into
the religious sphere, so far as he was able.
The adjutant had to be content with this development
of character, which seemed his utmost. She could not,
being a woman, feel anything but pleasure at his devotion ;
she could not, being a missionary, prevent herself from
feeling delight at the great change in his character ; but,
being a Salvationist, she remained disquieted by his dis
tance from true spirituality, and anxious, always anxious,
as to his future.
Some time had passed, and he was still a model of
respectability in that foul neighbourhood, still an influence,
at least for sobriety and order, in a quarter of the town
where once he had been the ringleader in all things evil,
when the devil once more got in his way.
Remember, that religion had changed him from a very
bad man into a decent, sober, and self-respecting citizen ;
remember, also, that since the departure of his wife he
had found it easier to maintain the battle against the press
ing temptations of his neighbourhood — a really terribly
difficult thing to do. Remember this, before you see him
in his next stage. Converted, half-converted, or not con
verted at all, this once quite bad man had become, under
the influence of religion, a good man — for the neighbour
hood in which he lived, a saint.
Well, this is what happened.
He rose early one morning, in his mother's lodging-
APPARENT FAILURE 177
house, washed, dressed, and set off before anyone was
stirring for his daily work. As he opened the door, he
saw the bowed figure of a woman crouched upon the steps
under the porch. He took her for some poor old vagrant,
who had stolen into that shelter for a night's lodging. He
spoke to her briskly, but with kindness in his voice.
' Hullo !' he exclaimed, * what are you doing here?'
She lifted her face from her knees, turned her head,
and looked up at him with weary, sleepy eyes. She was
quite young. She was pretty. She was pathetic in her
sorrow.
He saw that she was well dressed. He noticed that
there was a black shadow under one of her eyes.
* My man struck me last night,' she said, ' and I left
him. I'll never go back again.'
' Your husband, you mean.'
' No, he isn't my husband.'
* What are you going to do?'
' I don't know. But I'll never go back to that one
again. '
' Well, I'm sorry for you.'
' I shall do all right.'
He felt in his pockets. ' Look here,' he said, giving
her some coins, * you go and get yourself a cup of coffee.
I'd do more for you if I could. Anyhow, I'm sorry. You're
too young to be out in the streets.'
He nodded to her and went off.
The adjutant says, not bitterly, and quite gently, that the
devil entered into that girl on the doorstep. I rather think
that the kind words of the man, and the masculine com
passion in his attractive eyes, melted something in the
heart of the poor forsaken creature and filled her with a
new hope. Perhaps they were the kindest words she had
ever heard. Perhaps the man was the best man she had
ever set eyes upon. If one considers her position — the door
step of a lodging-house on a bitter winter's morning, an
entire loneliness in the midst of the great cold, uncharit
able world — and then endeavours to imagine the effect of
kind words and compassionate eyes, there will be, I think,
178 APPARENT FAILURE
no need to drag in the agency of the devil to understand
what followed. Remember that she was little more than
a child.
The man came back from his work. The girl was
waiting for him in the street. He had thought about her
during the day. He was not sorry to see her there again.
Something in her pretty face and pathetic eyes had appealed
to him.
The girl stopped him, and spoke to him. They stood
a few minutes in the street outside his home, talking
together in low voices. He thought over what she had
to say to him, and then they walked off together.
In a day or two the adjutant knew that this convert
was keeping a mistress.
But here, to begin with, was a problem — he came as
usual to the meetings in the hall, and maintained his
religious bearing. Was he a hypocrite? One becomes
impatient of such crude questions. Nevertheless, was it
possible for the Army to countenance a man living in open
sin? One great side of its work among the poor is for
domestic purity. Very few people, perhaps, know how
great a problem is presented to the social reformer in the
slums by this vexed question of marriage. The Salvation
Army has done, and is doing, an immense work for the
sanctity of marriage. It has done, and is doing, this
great work under conditions of heartbreaking difficulty.
The law which permits husband and wife to separate with
out granting them that divorce which alone can enable
them to marry again, has made for great immorality.
Almost every man and woman so separated, thousands every
year, find a mate and form a union unsanctioned by religion
or State. The thousands, tens of thousands, of boys and
girls who marry every year and then separate over poverty,
drunkenness, or brutality, spread a vast influence over the
community making for contempt of religious responsibility
in the sacrament of marriage. The number of illicit unions
in the poor quarters of London is extraordinarily great,
and every year witnesses a further and wider weakening
of the marriage bond. Against this deplorable condition of
APPARENT FAILURE 179
things — so dangerous to the State, so unhappy for pos
terity — the Salvation Army has opposed the strictest idea
of purity. The most powerful weapon in its hand when
combating misery and wretchedness is the shining testi
mony of the happy home, where religion consecrates the
love of man and woman and creates the beauty of the
family. The Army, working in the vilest parts of London,
insists upon purity. No force, I really think, is doing more
in the worst parts of England for the sacredness of mar
riage — on which so much depends — than this saving host
of missionaries working by the ancient reed of conversion.
Well, what could the adjutant do in this matter? Was
she to forbid the man to come to meetings, as the
Church would assuredly forbid him her sacraments, and
by so doing thrust him back into his old excesses, his old
lost state of depravity and sin? It was a difficult matter.
One course was open to her that seemed right and hopeful,
an appeal to his awakened conscience.
She saw him alone and spoke to him. At first he denied
the charge — anxious for the adjutant's regard — then, when
she smiled reproachfully, so sad for that lie, and said that
she knew the truth — he protested that he was only standing
between the poor forsaken girl and the world that was ready
to ruin her. But the adjutant pressed her charge with
kindly and gentle sympathy, and at last he looked her
straight in the eyes and said, ' I won't deceive you; I care
for her.'
Then came the appeal to his awakened conscience, would
he give her up? He was living with her in sin, he was
injuring her soul as well as his own, he was not following
Christ Who had done so much for him, but was actually
turning his back upon that pure Saviour — would he give
her up? Help her to be good? Help his own soul to be
innocent and pure?
No; he would not give her up.
The man had reason on his side. The problem lay in
the sound reasonableness of his position. He said the
girl loved him purely, and helped him to live a good life.
He said that he had now got, for the first time, a home that
i8o APPARENT FAILURE
was happy. He declared that without the love of this girl
he could not face the world. If she had dragged him
down, if she had made him indifferent to religion, he would
have thrown her off. But, no ; her influence was all for
goodness, kindness, decency, respectability, and happiness.
She was helping him. He could not see the crime or the
sin of living with her. In his sin he had married a woman
who dragged his soul to hell ; in his regeneration he had
found a woman who braced his strength for goodness. If
the law freed him from his wife, he could marry this girl ;
if the law would not free him, he would stand by her,
protect her, cherish her, love her to the hour of his death.
No one should come between him and this good girl, who
made him happy.
However reasonable this position, it was a-position clean
contrary to the injunctions of religion. From the point of
view of the present world, the man's logic was unassail
able. But religion looks to two worlds. What appears
so unreasonable in Christianity is the logic which embraces
the universe. Christianity is not a code of morals ; it is
a religion. It is not a terrestrial icligion; it is a cosmical
religion. For those who believe in it, all its injunctions,
however hard and apparently unreasonable, are easy and
just, because its purpose is the evolution and development
of a spirit unbounded by time and place, and created for
immortality.
The distressed and affectionate adjutant, confronted by
this great problem, could only preach her gospel, could
only insist upon its insistence. That insistence is emphatic
enough. * Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' Professor
James speaks about ' the divided self ' ; religion comes to
heal the division, to consummate a unity. A hundred
familiar phrases rise to one's mind. ' Thou madest us for
Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.'
Empty thy heart, says an old mystic, of all which may
' hinder that immediate Contact, that Central Touch between
thee and thy God.' 'The Perfection of the Soul is her
union with God.' ' What must the condition of those
Wretched Spirits be, who have no more union with God
APPARENT FAILURE 181
than what is just enough to sustain them in Being . . .
what must the Darkness, what the Poverty, what the
Barrenness^ what the Coldness, Dryness, Deadness, Empti
ness, Desolation, and Solitude of such a State ! Depart
from Me ye cursed ! I need not add into Everlasting Fire,
for here we have hell enough already. '
It is religion which unifies the dual nature of man,
which saves him from the conflict by fixing his purpose
and his affection on one subject, his Creator and his God.
This is what mystics call * the Unitive way of Religion.'
We must understand that position, before we can realize
the ability of such fine and compassionate natures as those
which follow Christ into the dark places of our civiliza
tion, to preach an unequivocal gospel to the sad and sorrow
ful for whom they feel so profoundly. One must perceive
that these people definitely and with a great assurance believe
that no single soul can be happy, at peace with itself, or
secure in its evolution, which is not united with the Will
of God. It is because of this great assurance that they
are so relentless in their preaching of utter holiness. Con
sider for a moment these two striking testimonies :
' My sadness,' says Adolphe Monod, ' was without
limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled
my life from the most indifferent external acts to the most
sacred thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings,
my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw
that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason
and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be
to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one
of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I
had then no resource save in some influence from without.
I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost ; and what
the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded
in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity,
and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise,
in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my
soul, in that, namely, of a real, external, supernatural
action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them
away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master
182 APPARENT FAILURE
of my heart as He is of the rest of nature. Renouncing
then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal
resources, and acknowledging no other title to His mercy
than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself
on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life.
From this day onwards a new interior life began for me ;
not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost
its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once
entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I
then had learned to give myself up, little by little, did the
rest.'
' God,' says Martin Luther, ' is the God of the humble,
the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of
those that are brought even to nothing ; and His nature
is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken-hearted,
to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned.
Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own
righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miser
able, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not
God to come to His own natural and proper work. There
fore, God must take that maul in hand (the law, I mean)
to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her
vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her
own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But
here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and
cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again,
and say, " Now I am bruised and afflicted enough : now
is the time of grace : now is the time to hear Christ."
The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he
rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his con
science. " If I live," saith he, " I will amend my life :
I will do this. I will do that." But here, except thou do
the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his
law, and in these terrors and anguish lay hold upon Christ
Who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl,
thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty,
thy works, thy merits? What shall all these do? What
shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and damnable
sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son
APPARENT FAILURE 183
of God, and so come to Him, what needed He to deliver
Himself for me? If I, being a wretched and damned sinner,
could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the
Son of God to be given ? But because there was no other
price, therefore He delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor
silver, but even God Himself, entirely and wholly " for
me," even " for me," I say, a miserable, wretched sinner.
Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to myself.
And this manner of applying is the very true force and
power of faith. For He died not to justify the righteous,
but the wnrighteous, and to make them the children of God. '
Such is the faith of Salvationists, and such was the
gospel, she had no other, which the little angel-adjutant
of the slums had to preach to her convert. It is neces
sary for the reader to make himself well acquainted with
the inexorable and unalterable gospel which the Salvationists
insist upon with the lost and the evil.
He heard her out, did not attempt to controvert her
arguments, and went away to live the life that seemed
good in his own eyes.
She saw him several times, heard of him again and
again, and never desisted from appealing to his better
nature. But gradually he slipped out of religion, gradually
he became less respectable, and at last he definitely — so it
seemed — abandoned all struggle to be his highest.
The adjutant went to him in his home. The woman
was not there. It was now the moment for her great
appeal. With all the tenderness of her gentle character
she made the man feel the difference in his present state
and that of only a few months ago, when he was living
in purity and serving God by trying to make other people
better. He was softened, and in his relenting mood she
pressed home to his heart the condition of the woman's
soul with whom he was living in sin. Was she really good ?
Was she pure? Was she willing to live as God wanted all
pure women to live — in service for others? Could he say
solemnly before God that he was not preventing her by
this life of sin from uniting her will with the will of God —
from being her best possible?
184 APPARENT FAILURE
He listened, wretched and unhappy, to her searching
words. He knew their truth. Gradually this girl who
had come to hirH like a spaniel, and who had seemed so
sweet, affectionate, and pliant, had drifted into bad habits,
had associated with women living a life like her own, was
now hardening and growing dark of soul. The life was
not a good one. But he was fond of her still. For him,
there was no other woman in the world. What was he
to do?
The Salvationist asked him to give her up, spoke about
placing her in the Army's home for such women, made
him hold the hope that one day this poor sinner might be
herself rescuing the fallen and unfortunate.
He lifted his head at that. ' I won't hinder you,' he
said. ' I tell you what. I won't turn her out of doors,
but if she goes, I won't go after her.'
That was the extent of his sacrifice.
If it was not the utterance of one's idea of a converted
soul, at least it was not very unlike some of St. Augustine's
earlier prayers. How different, at any rate, from the thing
he would have said before conversion.
An appeal to the woman succeeded, after much persua
sion, in moving her heart towards renunciation. She
agreed to leave the man, and said she would go into the
rescue home.
That very night the adjutant took her to London,
carried her to the home, and remained with her till the
next day. But morning brought disillusion to the girl's
mind. She had not suffered remorse, she was not spiritual,
for a cleansed mind and a pure soul she had no longing or
desire. For the rest, the home did not appeal to her
sympathies. She had no broken and contrite spirit, such
as that of the women in the place, most of them gladly
content to work out their repentance in humility and
silence and shadow. The girl was not conscious of sin.
She would not stay.
So the adjutant was obliged to bring her back, and the
girl returned to the man.
He was now lost to the Army. He was, in technical
APPARENT FAILURE 185
phrase, a backslider. The world might have pointed to
him with amusement as an example of these emotional
conversions. Even the adjutant herself thought of him as
a lost sheep.
No news of him came to the Salvation Army, he dropped
out of that busy ministering life, he sank in the depths of
the poor quarters, where religion apparently has no power.
And yet, hear the sequel.
The union was not happy. Man and woman, sinking
together, with no sacred affection to make them even
kindly and forbearing to each other, quarrelled and came
to blows. They parted ; the woman to form another evil
alliance, the man to take back his wife.
Long after this, the adjutant received her marching
orders. A special service was organized for the night of
her departure, a service of farewell to the best friend of
the poor and the outcast who had ever worked in that
town.
To her surprise the man attended this meeting, and at
its conclusion he came to the penitent form.
Now there was no occasion for him to make this
appearance, he derived no advantage by kneeling with the
penitent, his attendance was his own will, his penitence —
requiring no little courage — was entirely his own thought.
One thinks that perhaps his failure to live the highest life
was only a failure in relativity, that the adjutant's failure
with her convert was apparent rather than real. For from
this man she presently received a manly letter of good-bye,
a letter which confessed his weakness, implored her forgive
ness, and expressed his gratitude for her kindness — the
letter of a backslider, but one whose sliding had not carried
him right back. Is this not a case where one may attach
a new meaning to a hackneyed phrase, and verily say, ' 'Tis
better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved
at all '?
The failures of the Salvation Army ! What a book
might be written of these people ! However far they fall
one cannot think that they ever forget the hour of their
penitence, the moment of their vision, and the desire of
1 86 APPARENT FAILURE
their hearts for cleanness and mercy. In the larger self,
that vast field of unexplored consciousness, the memory of
these things works toward some end in their destiny,
wholly good and wholly pure. A profound thought, deeply
planted, can never be rooted from the mind, and a soul
that has once looked and recognized and desired the highest
can never for the rest of existence be perfectly satisfied
with the lowest. One thinks that the failures pray in
secret, some of them, and that nearly all of them — this I
feel is really true and important to remember — never
become so bad as they might have been.
It's wiser being good than bad ;
It's safer being meek than fierce :
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched ;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst !
POSTSCRIPT
T THINK that every reader who brings an unprejudiced
mind to the study of these narratives will feel and
confess the wonder and the power of religion.
But scepticism will raise two objections.
We shall be told, first, that it is doubtful whether these
conversions last ; and, second, that the word religion is
merely an unscientific term for mental excitement. The
value of the conversions will be depreciated by the first
criticism ; their testimony to the truth of religion assailed
by the second. I am anxious to meet these two objections
which are so general in modern, society, modern society
with its mouth full of negations and its soul empty of
affirmations, and to show their shallowness.
Most of the men whose stories are narrated in these
pages have carried their regeneration over several years ;
not one of them has been recently converted. Such
tremendous change lasting over a week, over a month,
would be wonderful and worth while ; what does scepticism
say when all of these conversions are declared to be a matter
of years? And here is a brief story of a man converted
by the Salvation Army long before it had assumed its
present form and title, while it was still known among the
polite as the Christian Mission, and among the common
people as the Top-Hat Brigade, the story of a man who
has continued in his conversion, through difficulty and
obstruction, all those long years down to the present day.
John Garry ran away from home at the age of four
teen, and attached himself to a travelling circus. He is
described as a ' smart and wicked brat, as good a boy at
the game as you could meet.' The immorality of this
troupe did not shock him in the hast. He proved himself
1 88 POSTSCRIPT
as cunning and impudent a rogue as ever lived a vagabond
life. Ill-treated, badly fed, and overworked by his masters,
he yet kept his audacity and cheekiness, and saw that he
got as much pleasure as possible out of the general wicked
ness of the company. When he reached manhood he was
a dipsomaniac. Turned away from circus after circus, he
took at last to a cadger's life, and became what is called
an * unemployable.' He got drinks by performing tricks
in public-houses, such, for instance, as eating a cat. For
what is called * a navvy's price,' in other words, ' a bob
and a pot,' he undertook to eat any dead cat that was
brought to him in that bar, and the winning of this wager
established for him the name of 'The Cat Eater.' He
lived also largely by crime, and was always in hiding
from the police.
Once, when he wras sleeping in some bushes on a
London common, he woke up to find a band of people
gathered together beside a tent quite close to him. The men
were in black coats and tall hats. The Cat Eater instantly
imagined that they were detectives. When they saw him,
spoke to him, and said that they were going to hold a
religious service, inviting him to join them, he replied that
if it were a job to nab him, he would surely murder some
of them. Still unconvinced by their assurances, he suffered
himself to enter the tent, and there he was converted. He
felt a desire for betterment. He prayed for mercy. He
told the missionaries the story of his life, and said that
he would begin again from that moment. They were kind
to him, helped him to make a fresh start, and watched
over his new birth. He married one of the women who
had seen him in his rags and wretchedness kneeling as a
penitent at that first meeting. And now, in his old age,
he and his wife are prosperous and happy people, carry
ing on a good business in London, and following their
religion with devotion. Never once through all these long
years of incessant labour has the ex-dipsomaniac, the
ex-cadger, the ex-unemployable, the ex-cat eater, looked
back to his evil life.
Older, then, than the Salvation Army itself is this
POSTSCRIPT 189
conversion, and I could fill pages with similar stories. I
ask the reader, who has not studied the question for him
self, to believe my assurance that the records of conversion
testify in an overwhelming percentage to lifelong victories.
There is no question of that. And after all, as one
endeavoured to point out in ' Apparent Failure,' the relapses
among ccnverted people only witness to the tremendous
conflict in every man's soul between good and evil, only
serve to make more vital an apprehension of this eternal
duality in nature, only bring home to us the significance
of this struggle, and the tremendous need for religion as
a force in the conflict. Why the struggle to be good?
Can materialism explain that? Why does religion convert
at all? Can scepticism declare it?
But is it ' religion '? Here we reach the second
objection of sceptical people.
I want to point this out and to make it real, that
however science may explain the psychological side of
conversion, however convincingly it may show us that
religion is a clumsy term for describing emotional excite
ment, science itself cannot and does not save the lost and
rescue the abandoned. Science cannot do this ; it knows
how it is done, and yet cannot itself do the thing which
it assures us is not a miracle ; and science does not do it,
does not desire to do it, for the very reason that it lacks
the religious impulse which alone can accomplish the
miracle, the miracle not only of converting people, but of
making conversion of the evil and the bad a passion of
the life of the good and the virtuous. It is really not so
wonderful that religion should transform character and give
new birth to personality as that it should inspire pure and
holy people with a love for the degraded, the base, and the
lost. That is, it seems to me, the great testimony of con
version, the love and the faith of those good and gentle
souls who give their lives in rescuing the outcasts of society.
Religion alone can create this sublime impulse.
A poor creature of my acquaintance, intellectually
crippled and paralysed by success in the schools, endeavours
to persuade me that there is no merit in this devotion and
190 POSTSCRIPT
sacrifice of good people, because they like to do it, because
they love doing it. And I in vain endeavour to make him
perceive that unless they loved this work and were happy
in it, there would be neither miracle nor merit. For is it
not the most profound of Christ's revelations that all
sacrifice of self and all labour for righteousness, without
love, are of no avail? It is their love of saving souls which
most testifies to the truth of religion. My poor critic, who
never yet raised his finger to help a fallen creature, can
charge good people with loving unselfish labour, but cannot
explain how it is they come to love it. That is religion.
To the unprejudiced reader I offer this book, with the
request that he will contemplate the narratives with
honesty and common sense, considering within himself
these simple reflections :
Men, radically bad, radically evil — a burden to the
State, a scandal to civilization, and a disgrace to humanity
— become, under the influence of religion, good, honest,
industrious, and kind.
Homes where children suffer frightfully, where priva
tion and tyranny obscure all the beauty and all the blessing
of existence ; homes so base, vile, and cruel that they
cannot be described, become, under the influence of religion,
happy, virtuous, and glad.
Vices which degrade men lower than the brutes, which
make them loathsome in the sight of respectable people,
and fill our prisons and workhouses with an immense
burden on the community, under the influence of religion
lose every fibre of their power, and drop away from the
strangled souls of their victims like dead ivy, like an
outworn garment.
Sins and crimes which retard the progress of the race,
which breed corruption, degeneration, and prosperous
misery, under the influence of religion cease to have power
over the minds of men, and in the instant of conversion
appear horrible and inimical.
Let the reader bear these things in mind, and ask
himself what would become of humanity if materialism
triumphed over religion, and life were revealed to the
POSTSCRIPT iqi
masses of the human race only as a struggle for existence.
Could the law, could eugenics, assure us of evolution?
' Socrates confessed that it was through a hard struggle
that he attained virtue. An ultra-evolutionist would have
eliminated him in his first stage. Nero, on the other hand,
set out well.' Professor Gold win Smith, who makes this
telling remark, might have cited with Socrates the great
Augustine, St. Francis, David, and many another whose
struggle towards righteousness has sustained and assisted
generation after generation of men struggling to attain
their highest. Hear him on the necessity, even from a
material point of view, for religion in its sanction of the
conscience :
1 But if this life ends all, I do not see how conscience
can retain its authority. The authority of conscience, it
seems to me, is religious. ... In the absence of such a
sanction what can there be to prevent a man from fol
lowing his own inclinations, good or bad, beneficent or
murderous, so long as he keeps within the pale of the law,
or manages to escape the police? One man is a lamb by
nature, another is a tiger. Why is not the tiger as well
as the lamb to follow his nature, so far as the law will
let him or as he has power? Eccelino, for instance, was
by nature a devil incarnate, a sort of Satanic enthusiast
of evil. What had merely utilitarian morality to say
against his gratification of his propensities as long as he
had power on his side?'
The common sense of this subject is that life without
conscience becomes a destroying animalism, and that con
science without religion has neither force nor justification
for its restraints.
Those who know life deeply and intimately, who are
profoundly acquainted with all the suffering, sorrow,
misery, and sin of cities and villages, those whose studies
are not limited to books read in a library, or to discussions
accidentally started in a drawing-room, know as the first
axiom of their knowledge that religion alone among all the
forces at work for the improvement of humanity has power
to alter the character and regenerate the soul of evil
1 92 POSTSCRIPT
people. Legislation may better house the poor, may
educate their children, limit the opportunities for drink and
crime, and punish evildoers with a saner and more deter
mined effort at their moral reformation, but without
religion they will never give spiritual joy and rejoicing
strength to the posterity on which evolution depends.
1 No heart is pure that is not passionate ; no virtue is
safe that is not enthusiastic.'
When I visit the happy homes and experience the
gentleness, kindness, and refinement of such people as
those whose life-stories appear in this book, and compare
them with the squalor and misery of the great majority of
homes surrounding them, I am astonished that the world
should be so incredulous about religion, and that legislation
should be so foolish as to attempt to do laboriously by
enactments, clumsy and slow, what might be done instantly
and easily by religion, if it had the full force of the
community at its back.
Greater faith is necessary to the salvation of this
country. Without God, vain is the work of the builders.
THE CAMPFIELD PRESS, ST. ALBANS
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