Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of The Salvation Army in Great BritainHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Religion
Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of The Salvation Army in Great Britain
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Salvation Army
As regards the Army's local finance the trouble is that owing to the
national thriftiness it is harder to make commercial ventures pay in
Scotland than in England. Thus I was informed that in Glasgow the
Corporation collects and sells its own waste paper, which means that
there is less of that material left for the Salvation Army to deal
with. In England, so far as I am aware, the waste-paper business is
not a form of municipal trading that the Corporations of great cities
undertake.
Another leading branch of the Salvation Army effort in Scotland is its
Prison work. It is registered in that country as a Prisoners' Aid
Society, and the doors of every jail in the land are open to its
Officers. I saw the Army's prison book, in which are entered the
details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough
some of them were.
I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was
that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was
separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second
was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by
the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be
wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The
explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of
capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.
My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the
permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there
were notes in his book to this effect.
I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom
had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man
who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the
Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South
African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at £7;
but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither
of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at
the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally
came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as
he said, 'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.'
Another was a Glasgow silk merchant, who made a bad debt of £3,000
that swamped him. Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered. He
had been three years cashier of this Shelter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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