Punch and the Salvation Army
The verses gave such offence that Punch was moved to publish an explanation a week later, disclaiming any intention to throw any doubts on the motives or the sincerity of the American Evangelists, but maintaining his right to criticize what he honestly believed to be bad taste in the style and manner of their appeals.
Let it be granted that there was much in the early methods of the Salvation Army that provoked opposition and caused the judicious to grieve. The outrageous familiarity with which the most sacred names and subjects were treated in the War Cry; the conversion of the most popular songs into hymn tunes; the military organization, uniforms and titles; the "allonging and marshonging" with big drums and trombones—all these features affronted and disgusted good people who associated worship with privacy and reticence; while the hooligans looked on the Salvationists as sour-faced Puritans, and organized a "Skeleton Army" to break up their meetings. Collisions were frequent, and throughout the 'eighties members of the Salvation Army were fined and even imprisoned as disturbers of the public peace. Those of us who are old enough to remember these scenes can well recall the impression which the Salvationists made upon the detached observer of forty years ago. Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. Punch could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. But there is really no excuse for his childish exultation over the Queen's refusal to subscribe to the Salvation Army's funds in 1882, and his jeers at the Archbishop of Canterbury for investing "his modest fiver in the Booth Bank."
The prophecy in which he indulged in that year in an article headed, "Bootheration to 'Em," is worth quoting. Punch regretted the conversion of the Grecian Theatre—"a place of generally harmless recreation for the East End"—into a temple of Salvationism:—
Yet we feel certain that the Army, once possessed of a great permanent meeting-place, will speedily convert it into some sort of Conventicle, the excitement of "drums and excursions" will gradually cease, conservatism will increase, Respectability and recognition by Respectability will be the object of the majority, reformers will arise and "camp out," regiments will desert, and some twenty new Sects will be added to the list of the country which possesses "any number of religions and only one sauce."
Part of the prophecy has been fulfilled; the concluding part, in which the wish was father to the thought, has been falsified. For Punch in these days only saw hysteria and vulgarity in what he considered an unhealthy mania. He seized on the repellent features of the crusade, e.g. the song, "On Board of the 'Allelujah," issued by "Admiral Tug" of the Salvation Navy—and overlooked the sincere and devoted efforts at social reclamation which underlay these exuberances. Mr. Justice Field's decision in June, 1882, allowing Salvationists to hold processions and parades was deplored as likely to encourage all the strange sects enumerated in Whitaker's Almanack—Jumpers, Shakers, Mormons and Recreative Religionists—to go and do likewise. The verses printed in November, 1883, are a bitter and violent tirade against the movement in general and the Booth family in particular, with offensive references to "dear Catherine ... blushing so feminine" who had been arrested by a Swiss magistrate:—
All the world knows we're so blessedly 'umble—
(How like the Master we follow so well!)—
That for a Booth there's no chance of a tumble,