Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
There is another element in the matter, the existence of which will be
news to most people, and that is the large proportion of ex-military
men who are among the helpless, hopeless destitute. Mr. Arnold White,
after spending many months in the streets of London interrogating more
than four thousand men whom he found in the course of one bleak winter
sleeping out of doors like animals returns it as his conviction that at
least 20 per cent. are Army Reserve men. Twenty per cent! That is to
say one man in every five with whom we shall have to deal has served
Her Majesty the Queen under the colours. This is the resource to which
these poor fellows come after they have given the prime of their lives
to the service of their country. Although this may be largely brought
about by their own thriftless and evil conduct, it is a scandal and
disgrace which may well make the cheek of the patriot tingle.
Still, I see in it a great resource. A man who has been in the Queen's
Army is a man who has learnt to obey. He is further a man who has been
taught in the roughest of rough schools to be handy and smart, to make
the best of the roughest fare, and not to consider himself a martyr if
he is sent on a forlorn hope. I often say if we could only get
Christians to have one-half of the practical devotion and sense of duty
that animates even the commonest Tommy Atkins what a change would be
brought about in the world!
Look at poor Tommy! A country lad who gets himself into some scrape,
runs away from home, finds himself sinking lower and lower, with no
hope of employment, no friends to advise; him, and no one to give him a
helping hand. In sheer despair he takes the Queen's shilling and
enters the ranks. He is handed over to an inexorable drill sergeant,
he is compelled to room in barracks where privacy is unknown, to mix
with men, many of them vicious, few of them companions whom he would of
his own choice select. He gets his rations, and although he is told he
will get a shilling a day, there are so many stoppages that he often
does not finger a shilling a week. He is drilled and worked and
ordered hither and thither as if he were a machine, all of which he
takes cheerfully, without even considering that there is any hardship
in his lot, plodding on in a dull, stolid kind of way for his Queen and
his country, doing his best, also, poor chap, to be proud of his red
uniform, and to cultivate his self-respect by reflecting that he is one
of the defenders of his native land, one of the heroes upon whose
courage and endurance depends the safety of the British realm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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