248 LETTERS TO THE "TIMES." v 



gerous nuisance than the mendicant friars of the 

 middle ages? If this is an academic question, I 

 really do not know what questions deserve to be 

 called practical. As you divined, I purposely 

 omitted any consideration of the details of the 

 Salvationist scheme, and of the principles which 

 animate those who work it, because I desired that 

 the public appreciation of the evils, necessarily 

 inherent in all such plans of despotic social and 

 { religious regimentation should not be obscured by 

 the raising of points of less comparative, however 

 great absolute, importance. 



But it is now time to undertake a more par- 

 ticular criticism of "Darkest England." At the 

 outset of my examination of that work, I was 

 startled to find that Mr. Booth had put forward 

 his scheme with an almost incredibly imperfect 

 knowledge of what had been done and is doing in 

 the same direction. A simple reader might well 

 imagine that the author of " Darkest England " 

 posed as the Columbus, or at any rate the Cortez, 

 of that region. " Go to Mudie's," he tells us, and 

 you will be surprised to see how few books there 

 are upon the social problem. That may or may 

 not be correct; but if Mr. Booth had gone to a 

 certain reading-room not far from Mudie's, I un- 

 dertake to say that the well-informed and obliging 

 staff of the national library in Bloomsbury would 

 have provided him with more books on this topic, 

 in almost all European languages, than he would 



