T "DARKEST ENGLAND" SCHEME. 281 



not deny doing these things; the only question 

 was this, Was it right to practise this decep- 

 tion? These points of difference were fully dis- 

 cussed between myself and the Chief of the Staff 

 on my withdrawal, especially the Leamington 

 incident, which was the one that finally drove 

 me to decision. I had come to the conclusion, 

 from the first, that they had acted as they 

 supposed with a single eye to the good of 

 God's cause, and had persuaded myself that 

 the things were, as against the devil, right to 

 be done, that as in battle one party captured 

 and turned the enemy's own guns upon them, 

 so, as they were fighting against the devil, it 

 would be fair to use against him his weapons. 

 And I wrote to this effect to the " General " 

 (p. 63). 



Now, I do not wish to say anything needlessly 

 harsh, but I ask any prudent man these questions. 

 Could I, under these circumstances, trust any 

 uncorroborated statement emanating from head- 

 quarters, or made by the General's order? Had 

 I any reason to doubt the truth of Mr. Hodges's 

 naive confession of the corrupting influence of Mr. 

 Booth's system? And did it not behove me to 

 pick my way carefully through the mass of state- 

 ments before me, many of them due to people 

 whose moral sense might, by possibility, have been 

 as much blunted by the army discipline in the 



