WILLIAM BOOTH'S IN DARKEST ENGLAND AND THE WAY OUT:
A REAPPRAISAL*

by
Norman H. Murdoch

[*This study was done with the support of a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts through the Wesleyan/Holiness Project which enabled me to do research in England in the summer of 1988. I am pleased to express publicly my thanks. ]

There are several reasons why a reappraisal of William Booth's Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) is needed. The book which "aroused more public interest than any other book since Henry George's Progress and Poverty," according to Victor Bailey, set out to end unemployment in Britain by progressively moving the unemployed from city workshops to farm colonies, then to overseas colonies.1

Let me propose two reasons for why a reassessment is needed. First, historians have neglected this 1890 scheme that provides the foundation of Salvation Army social services and an example of late 19th century Wesleyan interest in social reform.2 There are reasons for this neglect. Social historians are not inclined to credit religious revivalists as social reformers. Historians' natural distaste for sectarian movements had not been dissipated by the fact that Salvationist historians have wrongly presented Booth as the scheme's sole author and have ignored the fact that its ideas did not come to him by some form of divine inspiration. While such a claim may appeal to evangelical supporters who tend to see great "men of God" stepping into the breach in troubled times as a matter of course, scholars rightfully scorn such claims, particularly since Booth was not a social reformer before the mid1880's when he began to develop his social vision.

Salvationists, who have seen Booth's motives as primarily evangelistic, even in millennial terms, locate the ideological base for the Darkest England Scheme in Booth's Wesleyan and postmillennial theology and his personal encounter with urban culture.3 This interpretation scans Booth's heart, but ignores his intellect, and is at best partially justified. To tie his scheme exclusively to practical-minded Wesleyanism, his urban experience, and his 1880's post-millennialism, does not point us to the real ideological origins of his 1890 Darkest England Scheme. While Booth's theology was Wesleyan, his experience urban, and his hope postmillennial, Darkest England's ideas did not rise from such sources.

Rather, the scheme's roots are in nineteenth century communalist and socialist ideology. The more interesting question, one we will attempt to answer here, is: Why would Booth adopt such secular ideas when he was admittedly no devotee of world redemption by human effort? In fact, since the mid1870's he had viewed social services as a diversion from revivalist endeavors and had argued as late as 1883 against social salvation programs proposed by Andrew Mearns' Bitter Cry of Outcast London. Booth argued that salvation will "clothe the naked" and "change their miserable hearts and make them happy."4

The answer to the question of why Booth changed his mind is that certain Salvationists pushed him in new directions. These Salvationists have not gained credit for their role, both because Booth's authoritarian rule required that he be the sole originator of Army programs, and because the crediting of their own ideas to these Salvationists might well have split the Army into separate spiritual and a social organizations. Divisions between Salvationist revivalists and those involved in social reform activities were only tenuously patched over by Booth's charisma.

But Salvation Army historians have consciously altered the record of the influence of "social" Salvationists like Frank Smith, a Henry George disciple who brought the scheme's social reform ideas to William Booth. Unquestionably Smith abetted his own debunking by leaving "the work" (Salvationists' phrase for their vocation) nine months after he put the Darkest England scheme into operation in April 1890, and by his silence on the matter of the schemes authorship. In 1891, Smith embraced socialist politics as a better way to bring about society's reform by starting a Labor Army and publishing a Worker's Cry. Again in 1929, he aided Army historians' efforts to brand him a traitor by denouncing Army leaders who deposed Bramwell Booth as General. Suzie Swift, another social-wing Salvationist who claimed to have assisted Booth in writing Darkest England, committed as great a sin by leaving the Army to join a Catholic order in the United States in 1896.

Nevertheless, only William Booth could hold a two-winged Salvation Army together. If spiritual-side Salvationists were displeased with socialist ideas Frank Smith and Suzie Swift espoused, American Salvationists had reason to dislike the scheme's British imperialist content, fed to Booth by W. T. Stead, Cecil Rhodes, and Arnold White. To create a "Greater Britain" in Britain's overseas territories, Booth would direct emigration of England's unemployed "submerged tenth" to Canada and Australasia, and specifically bypass the United States. Only Booth's overwhelming personal attraction could bring these diverse forces together under the banner of social reform.

To understand how William Booth became a social reformer we must look at his background. Although he was a Wesleyan evangelist in career terms, Booth was in secular jargon, an opportunist. A brief look at his vocation as a revivalist will show that he regularly turned roadblocks into highways to opportunity. In 1844, as a poor fourteen-year-old Nottingham lad, he experienced spiritual conversion through the kind interest of a Wesleyan lay couple who invited him to attend chapel.5 After a period of adolescent lay evangelism among Nottingham's Meadow Platts' poor, when the clergy's faint devotion to revivalism frustrated him, his pastor proposed that he prepare for the ordained ministry. William accepted this recognition by official Wesleyanism only to be scorned by his chapel's lack of concern for his welfare when he became ill. In 1850, when, due to a misunderstanding, Wesleyan Methodists labeled him a "reformer" and took away his class ticket (membership), he was pastor to the Reform Methodists in Spaulding even though their disorganized ways repelled him. In 1854, he sought ordination in the Methodist New Connexion. When he found that "settled ministry" did not suit him, he resigned, in 1861, to become an itinerant evangelist in Cornwall, Wales, and the midlands, Britain's "burnedover" district.

Booth had seen no career for himself in urban evangelism in 1861 when he left the New Connexion, but an invitation to his wife Catherine to preach in London in 1865 led him to accept support from layrun East London evangelical missions as a temporary solution to his vocational quandary. He soon organized his own Christian Mission which, by 1870, resembled a Methodist society. When his mission failed to attract the "heathen masses" in the mid 1870's, he reenergized it by giving it a military cast, in 1878, under the name "salvation army," an idea he borrowed from the successful Volunteer movement in which thousands of working class men found that civilian soldiering during their leisure hours gave them new status.

When, in 1886-88, Booth's Salvation Army again failed to win converts in London's East End and other urban areas where Irish "mobs" attacked alien Wesleyan intruders, Booth once again found a popular idea which might solve his problems.6 Social reform ideas were "in the air" due to journalists' exposes, strikes by organized labor, reform laws which expanded the franchise, and mass immigration. Booth's female officers, working in the slums, convinced him in 1883 that reform activities would save sinners from a heathen urban environment and, just as important, bring new life to his failing mission. Booth, always an opportunist, although in this case a reluctant one, agreed.

Each time Booth made a new beginning it came as a result of a block to advancement, seldom admitted, but always apparent to an astute observer. Progress for him was never a straight line. In his march to glory, glory was often less his goal than personal or organizational survival. In his desperate search for a career in the 1850's, he had gone so far as to entertain notions of becoming a Congregationalist, although Calvinism repelled him. He even considered migrating to America where his style of revivalism was more in vogue. He was constantly on the prowl for new directions that would lead him out of a career "wilderness" (a term his son Bramwell used to explain William's dilemma in 1863-65, when he needed to find a home for his family that would suit the needs of his popular preaching wife). Catherine, no less an opportunist than her husband, supported his many schemes for survival and, they hoped, for success.

The Salvation Army's bleak situation was becoming apparent to a public audience by 1888. January's British Weekly survey indicated that London corps (the name for local Salvation Army mission halls) attracted only 7% of London's population to religious services. By comparison, an 1881 survey had shown that the Army had attracted 11.1% in provincial Scarborough, 7.4% in Hull,6.8% in Barnsley, and 5.3% in Bristol. While the Army grew in working-class neighborhoods of the West End, the provinces, and overseas, it declined in East London. By late 1888, Church of England clergy were announcing in the secular press Booth's failure to win the "heathen masses" to the gospel. The phenomenal early growth of his newly-reorganized and renamed Salvation Army slowed dramatically and, after 1878, growth in cities stopped.

The decline was particularly noticeable in London, headquarters of Booth's worldwide Christian imperium. In the Whitechapel and Bethnal Green districts of the East End, British Weekly surveyors could scarcely find a Salvationist. They found that the Army's main hall at Clapton was situated "among artisans and clerks," a class other Nonconformist groups were already reaching.7 Decline in East London, in spite of Booth's public denials, could be documented from his own War Cry, even though he stopped publishing statistics after 1886. On April 13, 1889, District Officer Adjutant Morgan disclosed that the average East London corps' membership was 71.6, with a total number of about 1,000 in all East End corps. This was the same as the number at the East End Stations of Whitechapel, Limehouse, Poplar, and Shoreditch, fifteen years earlier when the Christian Mission reached its peak.8The obvious conclusion was that the Army was not converting the "heathen masses" to the gospel.

It was at least partially due to these difficulties with the Salvation Army's evangelistic work in the mid1880's that William Booth was prepared to adopt social reform ideas from Frank Smith and others.9 Booth embraced these new ideas as a millennial vision for the redemption of England's urban slum population, a "submerged tenth," in agricultural havens in England and in British overseas dominions. As a side-effect, these social ideas would also remove attention from his Army's noticeable failure in East London.

Today, as social historians rediscover nineteenth century communal ideas, it is time to retrace the roots of Booth's social reform ideas to their nineteenth century intellectual soil.10 Booth published Darkest England and the Way Out in October 1890, as Catherine, his most devoted critic, was dying of cancer. Preaching, administering, and sitting by his dying wife's bed absorbed William's energy. Therefore, he relied on several minds to invent his social reform scheme. Frank Smith, just returned to London from the American Salvation Army command in New York, funneled socialist ideas to Booth from Henry George, the single tax advocate, and others. Booth's part in authorship may have been little more than that of proof reader of Smith's proposals. Smith had made trips to Holland, Denmark, and Sweden to find information on farm collectives and immigration schemes. Material which Smith found led to the threefold pattern of Darkest England's solution to urban unemployment: 1) urban workshops (city colonies), the first step from poverty to self-reliance; 2) farm colonies in England, a step "back to the land" which was intended to rehabilitate the city-wrecked poor; 3) over seas colonies. farms which the Army would prepare for acquisition by Britain's surplus population. Suzie Swift, one of many Salvationist women involved in social programs, claimed to have done editorial work on the text. Booth turned to W. T. Stead to whip the unwieldy pile of paper into a book. Stead later claimed to have incorporated several of his own ideas into the text.11

How did Frank Smith, Suzie Swift,and other "social" Salvationists come to absorb reform ideas from nineteenth-century populists and socialists, and why did William Booth adopt these ideas? Social reform was "in the air" when Salvationist slum sisters, living in London, established refuges for unfortunate women in the Soho and Picadilly areas, just as Toynbee Hall was founded in 188312 When they discovered that slum dwellers, mostly Irish and southern and eastern European immigrants, opposed their Wesleyan/holiness salvation message as foreign to their culture, Salvationist women opened homes for "fallen women" and orphaned "waifs and strays," and hunted down drunkards and met released prisoners in "Red Mariahs" at prison gates. Frustration over failure with populations they felt called by God to save led these women to attempt to solve the problem of the Army's decline in East London and other slums in new and different ways.

These activities did not require a sharp break with earlier revivalist urban home mission practices of temporary handout charity. (The formation of the Darkest England Scheme's attempt to change the very nature of the urban environment later in the decade would represent such a break.) But the example of these women did lead the Booths to embrace W. T. Stead's "Maiden Tribute" crusade in 1885, which brought to world attention the need for legislation to save girls under sixteen from white slavery in London and Paris brothels.13 Such experiences had begun to change the mind of William Booth.

We know the actual content of only some of the materials Frank Smith fed to William Booth between 1887 and 1890. We know from citations in Dark est England and from Booth's speeches that he acknowledged the presence of secular ideas in his reform scheme. He pointed to three British social thinkers as most notable, but he also acknowledged the influence of American reformers Edward Bellamy and Henry George, even though he did not adopt their ideas directly. Of the three British reformers he mentioned, Count Rumford, E. T. Craig, and the Earl of Meath, none represented his Wesleyan evangelical religious persuasion. Wesleyans and other evangelicals with whom Booth was familiar were engaged in reform activities in 1890, and Booth could have quoted them, but he did not choose to do so.14 Perhaps it was because of his need to gain broader public support that he claimed convergence of his ideas with those of popular secular reformers. Whatever his reason, he chose to acknowledge three such sources in Darkest England and the Way Out.

Count Rumford was an eighteenth century reformer in Bavaria whose ideas had again become popular in the 1880's. The Earl of Meath was President of a rival social reform-evangelical organization, the Church Army. Prebendary Wilson Carlisle had founded the Church of England's Church Army in 1882, as a Salvation Army clone, at a time when the Church was negotiating with Booth to merge his Army with the established church as its evangelistic arm15 E. T. Craig was an aged Robert Owen disciple, whose Ralahine, Ireland, social reform experiment had failed in 1833. Ralahine was seen as the most successful Owenite farm colony experiment.16

In Darkest England's Appendix, Booth introduced Count Rumford as the abolisher of beggary in Bavaria Rumford had served in the British Army as an American officer "with considerable distinction in the Revolutionary War," according to Booth. After England failed to put down the rebellion, he settled in England and then moved to Bavaria to reform its army. He also took on social reform activities. He set up Houses of Industry (city work shops) where, beginning on New Years' Eve 1790, he compelled beggars to work. He discovered that when he treated them with justice and kindness, offered clean and orderly surroundings, and provided inexpensive provisions, they responded with hard work. Best of all for Booth and cost-conscious Victorians, Rumford's program was self-sufficient. Rumford's military approach to unemployment, vice, and poverty impressed Booth, who was no democrat. Booth agreed with Rumford, the poor needed direction from a strong hand. Like the Count, he would provide despotic social reform leadership. Just as he had militarized his mission's spiritual work in 1878, he would also be obeyed in social reform ventures. There would be no voting, no coddling. With Thomas Carlyle, Booth lauded the military system's effectiveness. He would organize workers, "not as a bewildered bewildering mob, but as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them. Despotism is essential in most enterprises." Booth's city colony workshops reflected Rumford's houses of industry in Munich, and, like Rumford's, his despotism was thoroughly military.17

Next, Booth adopted ideas from E. T. Craig's 1831-1833 Cooperative Experiment at Ralahine, Ireland, an agricultural cooperative patterned after Robert Owen's earlier socialist experiments. With support from John Scott Vandeleur, a wealthy Irish landowner, Craig had induced unruly Irish peasants to join an experiment to increase production and improve living standards. Profits, after rent, belonged to the peasants. Craig, as would Booth, permitted no intoxicating drink or tobacco. Booth would propose a Workingmen's Agricultural University to train those he would move "back to the land." Unfortunately, gambling by estate owner Vandeleur led to the 1833 closing of the Ralahine cooperative. When Booth established his farm colonies, he followed the Ralahine format even though he was in no sense an ideological descendant of secularist Robert Owen. Booth was willing to accept good ideas from whatever source and, in fact, enjoyed reaching outside his Wesleyan tradition to embrace ideas which expanded his list of financial subscribers.18

In early 1889, over a year before he published Darkest England, Booth acknowledged his debt to the Earl of Meath in a speech published by the Times. Booth said that Meath's pamphlet on poverty expressed his own notions on individual responsibility exactly. Booth had just opened a second "elevator," a self-supporting Men's Shelter, in Clerkenwell Men paid three pence for supper, a "homely talk on salvation," and bed and breakfast. Unlike common lodging houses, Salvation Army shelters were free from "vile, demoralizing associations." Yet, Booth claimed, the Army did not encourage "soupers." He would do nothing for a man "on condition that he did some thing religious in return."19

Meath contributed more to Booth's ideas for the second and third phases of the Darkest England scheme, English and overseas farm colonies. Meath's book, Social Arrows (1886), pressed for state-directed colonization of the unemployed in "Greater Britain." In 1890, Booth offered to become the state's agent in selecting, preparing, and transporting poor but willing settlers to relocation in Britain's overseas empire. Booth echoed Meath's concern that the dominions would not accept London's vicious paupers, and he agreed that prior training on an English farm colony could improve their work habits and character and make them acceptable for emigration. He followed Meath's prescription for successful emigrants: 1) character was more important than agricultural training; the government's program had failed because it had not followed this plan; and 2) children could be trained on model farms in England to be apprenticed to colonial farmers.20

Meath resented Booth's theft of his plan. His Church Army accused Booth of stealing social reform ideas from a pamphlet, "Our Tramps," which it had published in March, 1890. The pamphlet proposed a threefold scheme of city, farm, and overseas colonies. Booth could well have charged this alleged theft as repayment for the Church Army's theft of his ideas for militant evangelism as well as hymns from his Song Book. As the Church Army's President, Meath led an organization with a social reform plan which directly competed with Booth's.21 As President of the Social Service Union and the British Institute of Social Service, inspired by Booth's Congregationalist friend J. B. Paton, Meath already had a reputation as a reformer. He found it difficult to tolerate a competing reformer with grace.22 Through Meath's efforts, the government set up two state-assisted emigrant colonies in Canada.

But Meath wanted Booth to acknowledge his sources for Darkest Eng land. Meath wrote in 1904 that a "great religious Nonconformist leader," almost certainly Booth, had not mentioned twenty-two German labor colonies in existence in 1890, when he was recommending English labor colonies. Meath claimed to be puzzled: had this been done out of ignorance or out of a desire to "claim credit for an idea which was not novel?"23 Meath's barb is an example of high-minded jealousy over ideas Booth adopted with out giving due credit. Booth often found that professional clergymen, labor union leaders, social workers and philanthropists were his most ardent foes in their vested fields of religion and social reform. They resented his instinct for conscripting ideas from any source that might save his Army from extinction and aid the poor.24

These three men: Count Rumford; E. T. Craig, and the Earl of Meath; were ideologists whom William Booth acknowledged in Darkest England and the Way Out as sources for the Salvation Army's social service program. Booth took these ideas from the hands of "social" Salvationists, who had found them in secular sources, without acknowledging any debts. After returning to England from New York in 1887, Frank Smith had gathered social reform information from British and European sources. In October 1890, with the aid of Smith, Suzie Swift, and W. T. Stead, Booth published the ideas in a scheme that drew praise from social leaders in labor, government, religion, and professional social services.

There were also critics. T. H. Huxley did not approve of state-supported social reform by a practitioner of "corybantic Christianity,"and the Charity Organization Society's Charles Loch did not welcome "unscientific" approaches to social service.25 Undaunted by critics, in 1890 Booth and Smith put the plan into effect. While the scheme's last two elements, the farm and overseas colonies, lasted only until 1906 in their designed form, urban work shops continue to be a major element of Salvation Army social services in the late twentieth century. More important, turning the Army from a singular emphasis on evangelism to an equal or greater emphasis on social services is the result of these reform ideas and the Salvationists and others who became their conduit from Count Rumford, E. T. Craig, the Earl of Meath, and others, to the mind of Wesleyan revivalist William Booth.

NOTES

1Victor Bailey, "In Darkest England and the Way Out: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 18851910," International Review of Social History, 29, 1984, p. 155.

2Frederick Coutts, Bread for My Neighbour: An Appreciation of the Social Action and Influence of William Booth (London: Hodder and Stough ton, 1978), pp. 1118, a Salvation Army general, struck out at secular historians who neglected Darkest England because, he argued, William Booth: 1) was "unashamedly religious"; 2) had "academic limitations"; and 3) they claim, "was trying to shore up his failing evangelical efforts." Neglect has not been as great since Coutt's chiding. See Victor Bailey's sympathetic study "In Darkest England and the Way Out: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 18851910," International Review of Social History, 1984, pp. 133171. Bailey argues that Booth was in "synch" with labor movement ideas of social welfare, and on the issue of social control, acted as "an expression of independent workingclass cultural development, and not as an agency of middleclass domination." p. 134 However, Bailey agrees with this writer that "The stable centers of Salvationism were thus to be found in the solid working-class communities of London, not in the poorer quarters of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel, where the Army was not conspicuously successful," and quotes Bramwell Booth to support this conclusion. p. 141

3Coutts, pp. 2229; Roger J. Green, "O Boundless Salvation: William Booth's Theology of Redemption," forthcoming in Christian History, 1990 provides an excellent study of Booth's urban, Wesleyan, and post-millennial perspectives. Green defines the Booths' postmillennialism as their belief that "the Army would usher in a thousand-year reign of Christianity in this world a perfect society, after which Christ would return." William Booth, "The Millennium; or, The Ultimate Triumph of Salvation Army Principles," All the World, 6, August 1890, p. 342. William Booth had expressed the view that his Army would bring in the millennium as early as 13 December 1884. See "The General's Letter," War Cry (London),13 December 1884, p.2. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 44, 104, 178, supports the notion that Methodists leaned toward practical and postmillennialist emphases.

4Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London: J. Clarke, 1883). William Booth's response was quoted in the War Cry from the Wins ford and Middlewich Guardian, 16 February 1884. See similar Salvationist responses: "London Division," War Cry, 29 September 1883, p. 2; "Our All Night," War Cry, 7 November 1883, p. 2; "Funeral of Sister Mrs. Billups at Cardiff," South Wales Daily News quoted in the War Cry, 1 December 1883, p. 1; Staff Captain Ewens, "The Salvation Army's Reply to the Bitter Cry of Outcast London," War Cry, 25 December 1883; and Catherine Booth, "Brighton," War Cry, 2 February 1884, p. 2.

5This "conversion" is not clearly placed in time or locale by his biographers. Neither is his experience of "sanctification," the second work of grace which Wesleyans point to in their spiritual testimonies.

6Norman H. Murdoch and Howard F. McMains, "The Salvation Army Disturbances," Queen City Heritage, 45, Summer 1987, pp. 3139. Such attacks occurred in numerous cities. Victor Bailey, "Salvation Army Riots, the 'Skeleton Army' and Legal Authority in the Provincial Town," in A. P. Donajgrodzki, ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, 1977, p. 236, deals with this phenomenon of riots from a legal aspect.

7War Cry, 12 January 1889, p. 9; and 19 January 1889, p. 5. The Rev. Llewellan Davies' attack in The Times, Christmas 1888, noted the Army's lack of success among the poor. Ellen Pash, "A Unique Failure," All the World, January-May 1890, defended the Army. Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974), pp.60, 89; Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, the Struggle for London, 18851914 (London: Routledge, 1967), p. 18.

8War Cry, 26 January and 13 April 1889.

9Norman H. Murdoch, "Salvationist-Socialist Frank Smith: Father of Salvation Army Social Work," Salvation Army Historical Society, September 1978; E. I. Champness, Frank Smith, M. P.: Pioneer and Modern Mystic (London: Whitefriars, 1942); Keir Hardie, "Frank Smith, L.C.C.," The Labour Prophet, September 1894, 113; "The London Major Frank Smith's Account of Himself," War Cry, 21 September 1882, 1; Frank Smith, "Sociology," War Cry, 30 August, 13, 27 September, 1, and 29 November 1890. For an excel lent recent study of the Army's relationship with contemporary social reform ideas and movements of the 18851910 period, see Victor Bailey's article cited above.

10J F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1969); Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979); W. H. G. Armytage, Heavens Below (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1961), discuss communal interests of the nineteenth century.

11Suzie Forest Swift, a Vassar graduate and a Salvation Army brigadier by 1896, left the Army to become a Dominican nun. On Stead's contribution see Frederick Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), vol. 2, p. 13.

12See the discussion of the Salvation Army's 1880's decline in endnote #4, and in Norman H. Murdoch, The Salvation Army: An Anglo-American Revivalist Social Mission (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1985), chapters 5 and 8.

13For studies of the Maiden Tribute crusade and the Armstrong Case that followed it see: Ann Stafford, The Age of Consent (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964); Madge Unsworth, Maiden Tribute (London: Salvationist Publishing, 1949); Frederick Coutts, No Discharge in This War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 10212. Rebecca Jarrett, unpublished autobiography; "Babylon: the Pall Mall Gazette and Salvation Army on Corruption, Cruelties, and Crime of London," July 1885, probably by George Scott Rail ton, Salvation Army Archives, London; Pall Mall Gazette and the War Cry, July 1885.

14Methodist Hugh Price Hughes and Congregationalist J. B. Paton were two evangelical social reformers with whom Booth was thoroughly acquainted.

15Norman H. Murdoch, "The Salvation Army and the Church of Eng land, 18821883," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 55, March 1986, pp. 3155.

16George E. Ellis, Memoir of Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876); W. J. Sparrow, Count Rumford of Woburn, Mass. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964); Sanborn C. Brown, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979). Earl of Meath, Social Arrows (London: Longmans, Green, 1886); Prosperity or Pauperism (London: Longmans, Green, 1888). E. T. Craig, History of Ralahine and Cooperative Farming (London: Trubner, 1882); Competitive Society Illustrated (London: W. Reeves, 1880).

17William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Charles Knight, 1970: 1890 orig.), xviiixxii. Rumford was an American who was a British loyalist. See "Carlyle on the Social Obligations of the Nation Forty Five Years Ago," Darkest England Appendix, xxviii.

18"Ralahine," in Darkest England, Appendix, xxiiixxiv. For recent work on Craig see Vincent Geoghegan, Ralahine: Ireland's Lost Utopia, New Lanark, Scotland: New Lanark Conservation Trust,1988; Gillian Darley, Villages of Vision (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 84f, 105.

l9The Times, 17 January 1889. War Cry, 26 January 1888, p. 3; 16 February 1888, p. 6; 25 February 1888, p. 8.

20Reginald Brabazon (Meath), Social Arrows, 1886, pp. 112, 120f, 133, 153, 157, 185, 189, 220f, 233ff, indicates concern for careful planning and for British imperial interests later reflected in Booth's scheme.

21Earl of Meath, Brabazon Potpourri (London: Hutchinson,1928). In 1884 Meath did not include the Salvation Army on a list of charitable organizations that deserved support of "men of leisure." See Murdoch, "The Salvation Army and the Church of England," pp. 3155, for a discussion of this Church Army-Salvation Army rivalry. Also see: Edgar Rowan, Wilson Carlisle and the Church Army (3rd edn.; London: Church Army Bookroom,1928), pp. 126132; Robert Sandall, History of the Salvation Army, 18781896 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons,1947), pp.105ff; Sidney Dark, Seven Archbishops (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1944), p. 31.

22Meath also served as Chairman of the County Council Parks Commit tee of the London County Council. Frank Smith was also a L.C.C. member at the time 23Brabazon Potpourri, p. 269.

24This complaint from Meath may lend credence to Victor Bailey's contention that the Salvation Army represented, in this period, an attempt by the working-class to organize themselves for their own improvement. If so, the Church Army represented a middle-class attempt to control the working class masses. Bailey, "In Darkest England," pp. 13334.

25T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton, 1898). On Charles Loch, see Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, The Struggle for London, 18651914 (London: Routledge, 1967), pp. 9199. See Murdoch, The Salvation Army, chapter 9, on "Darkest England." In 1901, the Army began an emigration program which, by 1938, had transferred 250,000 English emigrants to overseas dominions. This replaced the overseas colony idea. E. H. McKinley, Somebody's Brother: A. History of The Salvation Army Men's Social Service Department, 18911985 (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), is an excellent study of the Army's urban workshop program in the United States.

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