248 LETTERS TO THE " TIMES " v 



more dangerous 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 compara- 

 tive, 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 know- 

 ledge 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 cer- 

 tain reading-room not far from Mudie's, I under- 

 take 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 



