The matter was agitated before the English Government to such an extent in 1905 that the Rhodes Trustees, contributing sufficient funds to cover the expense, the Secretary of State for the Colonies nominated Mr. Rider Haggard, the novelist, to visit the United States and inspect the three Salvation Army colonies there, to make a report on the same, and to include in this report any practical suggestions which might occur to him. The following words were used in the letter of commission: "It appears to the Secretary of State that if these experiments are found to be successful, some analogous system might to great advantage be applied in transferring the urban population of the United Kingdom to different parts of the United Kingdom."[57]
Mr. Haggard visited the three colonies in the United States, and made a report to the English Government, favoring strongly the movement, and recommending that the Government take it up, provide the capital and utilize all ready existing organizations, such as the Salvation Army, in carrying out its scheme. The matter was referred by the Government to the Departmental Committee, who, after reviewing it and looking into the question in 1906, issued a long report in which they discountenanced Mr. Haggard's scheme on the ground that:
1. It was better for settlers from England to be scattered about with experienced farmers as neighbors than to be placed in a number together.
2. The Salvation Army or any similar organization was not a desirable management for a colony dependent on money advanced by the Imperial Government.
3. That Ft. Romie and Ft. Amity, the American farm colonies of the Salvation Army, were not precedents upon which a large scheme of colonization could be based.[58]
The Committee gave reasons for arriving at the above conclusions, into which, for the present, we need not enter, but their conclusions are suggestive, and may be borne in mind while we make our study of the subject.
Gen. Booth, in his plans as outlined in "Darkest England," provided for three main divisions of the work for the unemployed poor, viz., the City Colony, the Country Colony and the Over-sea Colony, signifying by these terms the City Industrial Work, the Country Industrial Colony, and the Farm Colony.[59] The last named was to be on a larger scale on some Colonial territory of England. This division has tended to persist in the United States, and this country has been the field for special experiments along this line. There are three Colonies in the United States: Fort Herrick, situated near Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Amity, situated in Southeast Colorado, and Ft. Romie, which is located at Soledad in the Salinas Valley, California. At first there was no differentiation between these Colonies, but latterly, the Colony at Ft. Herrick, the smallest of the three, has been managed as an Industrial Colony, and the other two have continued as regular Farm Colonies. The plan of "Commander" Booth-Tucker, in charge of the Salvation Army in the United States from 1896 until 1904, and the originator of these Colonies, was, in brief, as he states it, to take the waste labor in families, and place it upon the waste land by means of waste capital, and thereby to convert this trinity of waste into a unity of production.[60] His waste labor was the family struggling in the crowded city; his waste land, the large tracts of public land about to be opened up by irrigation; and his waste capital, if such a term can be used, was the capital lying idle, or at least, making 2½ or 3 per cent., when according to his estimate, it could yield 5 per cent. The principles which he laid down were as follows:
1. There must be sufficiency of capital.
2. The land must be carefully selected and laid out.
3. The colonists must be well selected.