I tell this story merely to illustrate his habit of reflecting aloud, for as he spoke these words I was standing beside him.  When I repeated it to his Officers, one of them remarked horrified:—­

’Good gracious! it might just as well have been something much less complimentary.  One never knows what he will say.’

He is an autocrat, whose word is law to thousands.  Had he not been an autocrat indeed, the Salvation Army would not exist to-day, for it sprang from his brain like Minerva from the head of Jove, and has been driven to success by his single, forceful will.

Yet this quality of masterfulness is tempered and illuminated by an unfailing sense of humour, which he is quite ready to exercise at his own expense.  Thus, a few years ago he and I dined with the late Mr. Herring, and, as a matter of fact, although I had certain things to say on the matters under discussion, his flow of most interesting conversation did not allow me over much opportunity of saying them.  It is hard to compete in words with one who has preached continually for fifty years!

When General Booth departed to catch a midnight train, for the Continent I think, Mr. Herring went to see him to the door.  Returning presently, much amused, he repeated their parting words, which were as follows:—­

GENERAL BOOTH:  ’A very good fellow Haggard; but a talker, you know, Herring, a talker!’

MR. HERRING (looking at him):  ‘Indeed!’

GENERAL BOOTH (laughing):  ’Ah!  Herring, you mean that it was I who did the talking, not Haggard.  Well, perhaps I did.’

Some people think that General Booth is conceited.

‘It is a pity that the old gentleman is so vain,’ a highly-placed person once said to me.

I answered that if he or I had done all that General Booth has done, we might be pardoned a little vanity.

In truth, however, the charge is mistaken, for at bottom I believe him to be a very humble-minded man, and one who does not in the least overrate himself.  This may be gathered, indeed, from the tenor of his remarks on the subject of his personal value to the Army, that I have recorded at the beginning of this book.

What people of slower mind and narrower views may mistake for pride, in his case, I am sure, is but the impatient and unconscious assertiveness of superior power, based upon vision and accumulated knowledge.  Also, as a general proposition, I believe vanity to be almost impossible to such a man.  So far as my experience of life goes, that scarce creature, the innately, as distinguished from the accidentally eminent man, he who is fashioned from Nature’s gold, not merely gilded by circumstance, is never vain.

Such a man knows but too well how poor is the fruit of his supremest effort, how marred by secret weakness is what the world calls his strength, and when his gifts are in the balance, how hard it would be for any seeing judge to distinguish his success from common failure.  It is the little pinchbeck man, whom wealth, accident, or cheap cleverness has thrust forward, who grows vain over triumphs that are not worth having, not the great doer of deeds, or the seer whose imagination is wide enough to enable him to understand his own utter insignificance in the scale of things.