IN DARKEST ENGLAND AND THE WAY OUT

I found out about William Booth and his work just like I found out about the Catholic Worker Movement, quite by accident. Public education does not often tell the history of poor people and their struggles. William Booth's remarkable history is nearly lost, except to those who enter the ranks of the Salvation Army. William Booth, born in 1829, was the founder of that organization which began as a tiny unfunded mission in London, England.

Booth wrote the book "In Darkest England and the Way Out" when he was 61 years old. At that time the Salvation Army was well established and successful. Let me assure you up front that this is not a "religious" book, as some might suspect. While religious thoughts are not absent, it is mainly about Booth's social and economic plans to help the masses of "workless" people in England. It also incorporates insights into the tragic position of poor people of that time.

Booth sketches a multidimensional approach to move beyond the many programs that he had already successfully started, such as rescue homes for women, retreats for inebriates, homes for discharged prisoners, and the office for discovery of lost friends and relatives.

Booth wrote that "I have keenly felt the remedial measures usually enunciated in Christian programs and ordinarily employed by Christian philanthropy to be lamentably inadequate for any effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of these outcast classes". He goes on to say "I see the folly of hoping to accomplish anything abiding, either in the circumstances or the morals of these hopeless classes, except there be a change effected in the whole man as well as in his surroundings".

Booth spoke of his plans for change as The Scheme of Social Salvation. He criticized social remedies advocated by Utopians, economists, and most of the philanthropists for reserving help for only the sober, the thrifty, and the industrious. He felt that these people were already more able to help themselves. Booth wanted to also lift up the improvident, the lazy, the vicious, and the criminal.

He would not accept limitations to human brotherhood.He insisted that his plans would be always include room for the thief, the harlot, the drunkard and the sluggard. He wrote "We who call ourselves by the name of Christ are not worthy to profess to be his disciples until we have set an open door before the least and worst of these who are now apparently imprisoned for life in a horrible dungeon of misery and despair".

This book should be required reading for all those who are interested in poor people and welfare reform. If Booth could speak to us today, I think he would tell us in no uncertain terms that preaching, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters are not enough to help people in poverty. I think he would sternly cold those who give charity without requiring any corresponding responsibility. His book tells some of his ideas conceived for his time. Those ideas could help us as we design a plan for today.

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