William & Catherine Booth: Salvation Army Founders Issue 26 | 1990 Purchase this issue

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When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence, kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life …

I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.…

Darkest England: This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of “Darkest Africa” and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all the spirited narrative of heroic endeavour, nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as his description of the immense forest … covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die.… It seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? …

The Submerged Tenth: ...