A SHIFTY AND RESOURCEFUL MARINER.
General Booth shows himself in the capacity of a bold and shifty mariner who has been ordered to take a ship filled with precious cargo across a stormy and rock-strewn ocean to a distant port. Quicksands abound, cross currents continually threaten to carry the ship from her course, the wind shifts from point to point, now rising to a hurricane and then dying away to a dead calm. But alike by night and day, whether the sky be black with clouds, or bright with radiant sunshine, in the teeth of the wind or in a favourable gale, he presses forward to his distant haven. He will tack to the right or to the left, availing himself to the utmost of every favourable current and every passing breeze, supremely indifferent to all accusations of inconsistency, or of deviating from the straight line from the port which he left to the port for which he is bound, if so he can get the quicker and the more safely to his goal. Hitherto General Booth had practically been in the condition of a Captain who relied solely on his boilers to make his voyage. "Get up steam, make the heart right, keep the furnace fires going, and drive ahead through the darkness regardless of a lowering tempest or of the swift rushing current which sweeps you from your course." This book proclaims his decision in favour of adopting a less reckless and more practical mode of navigation. While his reliance is still placed on the inner central fire he will not disdain to utilise the currents, the tides, and the winds which will make it easier for his straining boilers and untiring screw to forge its way across the sea.
The book is interesting in itself as a book, but of the bookmaking part of it, it is absurd to speak. You might as well speak of the rivets and the paint, in describing the performance of a Cunarder; as to speak of the literary merits or demerits of this book. As a piece of actuality, full of life and force, it comes to us in paper and ink and between two covers; but the vehicle of its presentation is as indifferent as the quality of the boards in which it is bound. The supreme thing is not the form but the substance.—The Review of Reviews.
End of Project Gutenberg's Darkest India, by Commissioner Booth-Tucker