24:8 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 



