most pronounced type, and in everything religious a ‘hebraist’ of uncompromising narrowness. He condemned cricket and football as sharply as card-playing and horse-racing. Further there was something of the casuist in his nature which enabled him, with no shock to his conscience, to conciliate the mammon of unrighteousness in the interest of his philanthropy. He had warm friends among bookmakers, commercial millionaires and various aristocrats, who showed scant evidence in their lives of the repentance which he so sternly demanded of his converts. He never appeared before these people except as a prophet of God, but the urgent need of their money for his emigration schemes, his farm colonies, his shelters, and his halls, induced him to tone down the thunders of Sinai to the piano note of a somewhat chaffing and good-natured admonition. Once, however, he made Cecil Rhodes kneel down and pray with him in a railway carriage. Among those who applauded him were churchmen of such eminence as Lightfoot, Westcott, and Liddon, while Archbishop Benson laboured hard to bring the ‘Army’ into the orthodox fold of the Church of England. He had an interview with King Edward VII, whom he liked greatly, and he took tea with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The King asked what the churches now thought of him; he replied with a grim humour, ‘Sir, they imitate me’.
His diaries reveal the secret of his attraction, if they do not account for the remarkable success of his propaganda. With a narrow and almost cunning mind, a turbulent and autocratic heart, something great yet childlike in the man’s nature was for ever at war with the universe, demanding mercy for mankind and peace for himself. The emotional side of his character was always at strife with the acute or commercial instincts of his nature, and perhaps the heart which so truly loved children and so earnestly sympathized with ‘the lowest of the low’, was never quite completely convinced of the justice of the divine ordering of this world. Every now and then there are records in his diaries, particularly at the time of his wife’s sufferings, which have something of the stark honesty and the searching realism of the Book of Job. Some aspects of his turbulent character—in particular, its wild fervour and its genius for advertisement—may probably be explained by the blend in his veins of Jewish and midland blood.
It is worth recording that this vehement person who, as it were, unroofed the slum to Victorian respectability, and spoke of himself as a moral scavenger netting the very sewers, was of a singularly delicate constitution. He had a physical horror of dirt, even of shabbiness, and from his youth up was noticeable for a meticulous attention to personal cleanliness, both of body and linen. Noxious smells made him ill. The sight of depravity tore at his heart. The sufferings of children, even the memory of them, brought tears to his eyes. It was this extreme sensitiveness to squalor and suffering which made him so effective in unveiling the dark places of civilization. He saw sharply what others scarcely saw at all, and he felt as an outrage what others considered to be natural.
That there was something in his nature which made him restless, harsh, autocratic, and sometimes even angrily explosive, he readily admitted. He called it ‘Booth blood’. In the main his higher self triumphed over these dangerous tendencies, and he probably changed more lives for the better than any other religious emotionalist for many hundreds of years. William James, the psychologist, quotes Booth as an authority for the doctrine ‘that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink’.
A portrait of Booth by D. N. Ingles was placed, on loan, in the National Portrait Gallery in 1925.
[Harold Begbie, Life of William Booth, 2 vols., 1920; personal knowledge.]
BOTHA, LOUIS (1862~1919), South African soldier and statesman, was born 27 September 1862 at Honigfontein, near Greytown, Natal. He was the ninth child of a family of six sons and seven daughters born to Louis Botha and his wife Salomina, the youngest daughter of Gerrit Reinier van Rooyen. Both the parents were children of ‘voortrekkers’ from Cape Colony into Natal, and till 1869, when Louis was seven years old, they lived as British subjects on the farm, Onrust, nine miles from Greytown. The family then. migrated to the Orange Free State and finally settled down on a farm near Vrede. Here Louis and the other young children had a limited amount of schooling from neighbouring teachers, but his education chiefly consisted in learning the South African farmer’s craft on a large mixed farm of some 5,000 acres, where ostriches, sheep, cattle, and horses
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