At the time of the Jamestown, the Galveston, and the Dayton floods the Salvation Army officer, with his boat laden with sandwiches and warm wraps, was the first upon the rising waters, ministering to marooned and starving families gathered upon the housetops.
In the direful disaster that swept over the beautiful city of Halifax, the Mayor of that city stated: “I do not know what I should have done the first two or three days following the explosion, when everyone was panic- stricken without the ready, intelligent, and unbroken day-and-night efforts of the Salvation Army.”
On numerous other similar occasions we have relieved distress and sorrow by our almost instantaneous service. Hence when our honored President decided that our National Emblem, heralder of the inalienable rights of man, should cross the seas and wave for the freedom of the peoples of the earth, automatically the Salvation Army moved with it, and our officers passed to the varying posts of helpfulness which the emergency demanded.
Now on all sides I am confronted with the question: What is the secret of the Salvation Army’s success in the war?
Permit me to suggests three reasons which, in my judgment, account for it:
First, when the war-bolt fell, when the clarion call sounded, it found the Salvation Army ready!
Ready not only with our material machinery, but with that precious piece of human mechanism which is indispensable to all great and high achievement—the right calibre of man, and the right calibre of woman. Men and women equipped by a careful training for the work they would have to do.
We were not many in number, I admit. In France our numbers have been regrettably few. But this is because I have felt it was better to fall short in quantity than to run the risk in falling short in quality. Quality is its own multiplication table. Quality without quantity will spread, whereas quantity without quality will shrink. Therefore, I would not send any officers to France except such as had been fully equipped in our training schools.
Few have even a remote idea of the extensive training given to all Salvation Army officers by our military system of education, covering all the tactics of that particular warfare to which they have consecrated their lives—the service of humanity.
We have in the Salvation Army thirty-nine Training Schools in which our own men and women, both for our missionary and home fields, receive an intelligent tuition and practical training in the minutest details of their service. They are trained in the finest and most intricate of all the arts, the art of dealing ably with human life.