by many children, all brought up in the temper and vocation of their parents, The General made his family a sort of Headquarters’ Staff of The Salvation Army, and celebrated his household marriages or bewept his domestic bereavements with all the eclat and effect of oecumenical events.  We saw him buy up and turn into stations for his troops such places as the ‘Eagle Tavern’ and ‘Grecian Theatre,’ overcome popular rioting at Bath, Guilford, Eastbourne, and elsewhere; fill the United Kingdom with his War Cry and his fighting centres, and invade all Europe, and even the Far East.  At home he plunged, insatiable of moral and social conquests, into his crusade for ‘Darkest England,’ being powerful enough to raise in less than a month as much as all England and the Colonies contributed for the Gordon College at Khartoum in response to another victorious general.  For General Booth certainly ended by being victorious.  If the evangelical creed he inculcated was rude, crude, and unideal, it was serious, sincere, and stimulating.  He waged war against the Devil, as that mysterious personage was understood by him, with the most whole-hearted and relentless zeal.  He enjoined, let it be remembered, an absolute temperance, soberness, and chastity upon the Officers and rank and file of his motley host; and, ugly as some may think the uniforms of Salvationists, the police and magistrates know that they cover for the most part honest hearts.  Could The General have affected all this—­or a tenth part of it—­if he had not lent himself to the eternal necessities and weaknesses of the uneducated, and given them his drill, his banners, his drums, his prayer-volleys, his poke-bonnets, and his military tunics?  We doubt it, and in contemplating, therefore, the enormous good this dead man did, and sought to do, and the neglected fields of humanity which he tilled for the Common Master, we judge him to be one of the chief and most serviceable figures of the Victorian age; and well deserving from his own followers the ecstasy of grief and veneration which is being manifested, and from contemporary notice the tribute of a hearty recognition of pious and noble objects zealously pursued, and love of God and of humanity made the passion and the purpose of a whole unflinching life.”

Daily Chronicle, August 22, 1912

By Harold Begbie

“Scarcely could you find a country in the whole world where men and women are not now grieving for the death of General Booth.  Among peoples of whom we have never heard, and in languages of which we do not know even the alphabet, this universal grief ascends to Heaven—­perhaps the most universal grief ever known in the history of mankind.

“One realises something of the old man’s achievement by reflecting on this universal grief.  It will not do to dismiss him lightly.  More, it will not do to express a casual admiration of his character, an indulgent approbation of his work.  The man was unique.  In some ways he was the superman of his period.  Never before has a man in his own lifetime won so wide a measure of deep and passionate human affection.