Glasgow, he said, ’is a terrible place for drink, especially of methylated spirits and whisky.’  Drink at the beginning, I need hardly remark, means destitution at the end, so doubtless this failing accounts for a large proportion of its poverty.

The Men’s Social Work of the Army in Glasgow, which is its Headquarters in Scotland, is spreading in every direction, not only in that city itself, but beyond it to Paisley, Greenock, and Edinburgh.  Indeed, the Brigadier has orders ’to get into Dundee and Aberdeen as soon as possible.’  I asked him how he would provide the money.  He answered, ‘Well, by trusting in God and keeping our powder dry.’

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 L7; 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 L3,000 that swamped him.  Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered.  He had been three years cashier of this Shelter.