“We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of self-congratulation.  It is not often true.  A well-known millionaire told me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother’s cottage carrying to her in a tight-clenched fist his first week’s wage—­a sixpenny bit.  Mr. Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to dream of his romantic life.  ‘I haven’t time,’ he said; ’the present is too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.’  Mr. Chamberlain in the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing.  Perhaps we may say that men of action never look back.  And so it was with General Booth.  He might well have rested during these last few years in a large and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement, and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction.  Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are full of happiness and delight.  But this old, rough-tongued, weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The Salvation Army—­he who could see all this, and who could justly say, ‘But for me these things had never been,’ was not happy and was not satisfied.  He ached and groaned to save all such as are sorrowful.

“In the last letter he ever wrote to me, a letter that broke off pitifully, because of his blindness, from the big, bold, challenging handwriting, and became a dictated typewritten letter, occurred the words, ‘I am distressed.’  He was chiefly distressed by the over-devotion most of us pay to politics and philosophy, by the struggle for wages, by the clash between master and man, by the frivolity of the rich, the stupor of the poor, by the blindness of the whole world to the necessity for the cleansed heart.  He did not want to establish a Salvation Army, but to save the whole world.  He did not want to be acclaimed by many nations, but to see suffering and poverty and squalor clean banished from the earth.