GLASGOW

I saw the Brigadier in charge of the Men\'s Social Work in Glasgow at a great central Institution where hundreds of poor people sleep every night. The inscriptions painted on the windows give a good idea of its character. Here are some of them: \'Cheap beds.\' \'Cheap food.\' \'Waste paper collected.\' \'Missing friends found.\' \'Salvation for all.\'

In addition to this Refuge there is an \'Elevator\' of the usual type, in which about eighty men were at work, and an establishment called the Dale House Home, a very beautiful Adams\' house, let to the Army at a small rent by an Eye Hospital that no longer requires it. This house accommodates ninety-seven of the men who work in the Elevator.

The Brigadier informed me that the distress at Glasgow was very great last year. Indeed, during that year of 1909 the Army fed about 35,000 men at the docks, and 65,000 at the Refuge, a charity which caused them to be officially recognized for the first time by the Corporation, that sent them a cheque in aid of their work. Now, however, things have much improved, owing to the building of men-of-war and the forging of great guns for the Navy. At Parkhead Forge alone 8,000 men are being employed upon a vessel of the Dreadnought class, which will occupy them for a year and a half. So it would seem that these monsters of destruction have their peaceful uses.

Glasgow, he said, \'is a terrible place for drink, especially of methylated spirits and whisky.\' Drink at the beginning, I need hardly remark, means destitution at the end, so doubtless this failing accounts for a large proportion of its poverty.

The Men\'s Social Work of the Army in Glasgow, which is its Headquarters in Scotland, is spreading in every direction, not only in that city itself, but beyond it to Paisley, Greenock, and Edinburgh. Indeed, the Brigadier has orders \'to get into Dundee and Aberdeen as soon as possible.\' I asked him how he would provide the money. He answered, \'Well, by trusting in God and keeping our powder dry.\'

As regards the Army\'s local finance the trouble is that owing to the national thriftiness it is harder to make commercial ventures pay in Scotland than in England. Thus I was informed that in Glasgow the Corporation collects and sells its own waste paper, which means that there is less of that material left for the Salvation Army to deal with. In England, so far as I am aware, the waste-paper business is not a form of municipal trading that the Corporations of great cities undertake.

Another leading branch of the Salvation Army effort in Scotland is its Prison work. It is registered in that country as a Prisoners\' Aid Society, and the doors of every jail in the land are open to its Officers. I saw the Army\'s prison book, in which are entered the details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough some of them were.

I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.

My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there were notes in his book to this effect.

I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at ￡7; but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as he said, \'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.\'

Another was a Glasgow silk merchant, who made a bad debt of ￡3,000 that swamped him. Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered. He had been three years cashier of this Shelter.

Another arrived at the Shelter in such a state that the Officer in charge told me he was obliged to throw his macintosh round him to hide his nakedness. He was an engineer who took a public-house, and helped himself freely to his stock-in-trade, with the result that he became a frightful drunkard, and lost ￡1,700. He informed me that he used to consume no less than four bottles of whisky a day, and suffered from delirium tremens several times. In the Shelter—I quote his own words—\'I gave my heart to God, and after that all desire for drink and wrongdoing\' (he had not been immaculate in other ways) \'gradually left me. From 1892 I had been a drunkard. After my conversion, in less than three weeks I ceased to have any desire for drink.\'

This man became night-watchman in the Shelter, a position which he held for twelve months. He said: \'I was promoted to be Sergeant; when I put on my uniform and stripes, I reckoned myself a man again. Then I was made foreman of the works at Greendyke Street. Then I was sent to pioneer our work in Paisley, and when that was nicely started, I was sent on to Greenock, where I am now trying to work up a (Salvation Army) business.\'

Here, for a reason to be explained presently, I will quote a very similar case which I saw at the Army Colony at Hadleigh, in Essex. This man, also a Scotsman (no Englishman, I think, could have survived such experiences), is a person of fine and imposing appearance, great bodily strength, and good address. He is about fifty years of age, and has been a soldier, and after leaving the Service, a gar............