Commander Evangeline Booth,
120 West 14th Street, New York, N. Y.
Dear Commander Booth:
I have known the Salvation Army from its beginning.
The mother of the Salvation Army was Mrs. Catherine Booth, and her common sense and Christian spirit laid the foundations; while her husband, General William Booth, in his impressive frame, fertility of ideas, and invincible spirit of evangelism always seemed to me as if he were closely related to St. Peter, the fisherman—the man of ideas and many questions, of the Lord’s family.
General William Booth was of a discipleship that kept him always on the “long, long trail” with a self-sacrificing spirit, but with a cheerfulness that heard the nightingales in the early mornings that awakened him to duty and service. He was never tired. The Salvation Army under the present leadership of your brother, Bramwell Booth, has “carried on” along the same roads, and with the same methods, as the great General who has passed into the Beyond.
The Salvation Army has been itself true to the spirit of its mighty originator during the present war. No work was too hard; no day was long enough; no duty too simple, no self-denial was too great.
Prom my personal knowledge, the Salvation Army workers were consecrated to their work. Just as the brave boys who carried the Flag, they were soldiers fighting a battle, to find comforts, and a song to put music into the hearts of the noble fellows that now lie sleeping on the ridges of the Marne, with their graves unmarked save with a cross.
The sleepless vigilance of the Salvation Army extended from their kitchens where they cooked for the boys, to the hospitals where they prayed with them to the last hour when life ended in a silence, the stillest of all slumbers.
The Armies of every country in which they labored have a record of their faithfulness and devotion which will be sealed in the hearts of the many thousands they helped in the days of the struggle for peace.
The question is, what can we do now to perpetuate the Salvation Army and its work, and my reply is, that there is nothing they ask or want that should be refused to them. They are worthy; they are competent; they can be trusted with responsibility; and their splendid leader seems to have almost a miraculous power for management in the work which her father committed to her so far as America is concerned.