Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW : 1876 - 1954), Saturday 21 January 1911, page 7


RIDER HAGGARD'S NEW BOOK. I have beon reading with profound interest Ir. Rider Haggard's atriking trobuto to the Salvatioa Army in his book "Regeneration," Just published. Mr. Haggard Is well known, not alone os a novelist, but as a slnurer worker for national reform. His oxperlminta in agrIculture in Norfolk, his great study of rural lifo in Englnnd, and his efforts to promote national schemes of emigration, will bo fresah In the memory of many of my readers. tlr. Haggard nos during the past seeason examined in detail the work in England of General Booth's organisatlon, not, as he himself says, "as a matter of literary bu?nees, but as a centrlbutlon to soclal well-being." Thb picture that the groeat novelist draws of the work of the Army in England is the more convincing because he frankly states his disangreement with some of Its theology, oand with equal frankness crlticscs wherever he thinks criticism needed. But after all criticism :a done the plcture that he gives us In stimulating and inspiring. HIero we haysve a movement that In a hundred differcst ways stretches out its hands to aid the poor and the fallen. It feeds the starving on the Embankment; it shelters the homeless; its women agents are at work night after night in Piccadilly; It s'ands at the prlson gates to help the releCased convict; it finds homes for the orphans and suocour for the starving. Much of its work Is exceedingly hard; much of It may seem at hirst sight to give n Innadequate return for the ma'.y and 'nergy expended. At its head is a grc.ip of exceedingly able business men, who couli earn easily large salaries in the City, but who devote their whole lives to the poor for a minimum wage, usually limited ov'n with the highost st from £150 to .;200 a year, and wlth the lesser lliclaia somctiimes not reaching more thia £1. a week. Its leaders are drawn alike from the University and tihe public-house; from the mechanic's bench and thie professor's chair. Its methods have been denounced as flamboyant and crude. Its theology is snecred at by the dilettanti and the arm-chair critics as antiquated. It affords abundant room for criticism. Even the youngest of us can tell how he would better some of the things that it does. But while tmhe critics talk It acts; whlle the arm-chair philosopher dreams of a good time coming, it hlelps to make a better humanity. Mr. Rider Haggard's plcturo of the work this body is doing will fend many nto review and revise their opinions of it.