"In the last letter he ever wrote to me, a letter that broke off pitifully, because of his blindness, from the big, bold, challenging handwriting, and became a dictated typewritten letter, occurred the words, 'I am distressed.' He was chiefly distressed by the over-devotion most of us pay to politics and philosophy, by the struggle for wages, by the clash between master and man, by the frivolity of the rich, the stupor of the poor, by the blindness of the whole world to the necessity for the cleansed heart. He did not want to establish a Salvation Army, but to save the whole world. He did not want to be acclaimed by many nations, but to see suffering and poverty and squalor clean banished from the earth. And he believed that with the power of the State at his back, and with the wealth now squandered in a hundred abortive directions in his hands, he could have given us a glad and unashamed England even in a few years. He knew this and believed it with all his heart. And he held that his dictatorship would have hurt no just man. He suffered because poverty continues and thousands are still unhappy. For such men this world can never suffice. They create eternity.
"Others may criticise him. And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year grows more potent for social good; who was so tender and affectionate and cordial, and who felt for suffering and sorrow and unhappiness wherever he found it with a heart entirely selfless and absolutely pure.
"Even if The Salvation Army disappeared from every land where it is now at work--and, though it will not disappear, I anticipate during the next ten years many changes in its organisation--to the end of time the spirit of William Booth will be part of our religious progress. We cannot unthink ourselves out of his realism, out of his boundless pity, out of his consuming earnestness. He has taught us all to know that the very bad man can be changed into the very good man, and he has brought us back, albeit by a violent method, to the first simple and absolute principles of the only faith which purifies and exalts humanity.