s altogether inadequate when
compared to the present great necessity.

The very magnitude of the problem has struck despair into the hearts of
would-be reformers, many of whom have leapt to the conclusion, that
nothing but an entire reconstruction of society could cope with so vast
an evil, whilst others have been satisfied with simply putting off the
reckoning day and suppressing the simmering volcano on the edge of
which, they dwelt with paper edicts which its first fierce eruption is
destined to consume.

Surely the present plan if at all feasible, is God-inspired, and if
God-inspired, it will be certainly feasible. And surely of all countries
under the face of the sun there is none which more urgently needs the
proclamation of some such Gospel of Hope than does India. That it is
both needed and feasible I trust that in the following pages I shall be
able to abundantly prove.

General Booth has uttered a trumpet-call, the echoes of which will be
reverberated through the entire world. The destitute masses, whom he has
in his book so vividly pourtrayed, are everywhere to be found. And I
believe I speak truly when I say that in no country is their existence
more palpable, their number more numerous, their misery more aggravated,
their situation more critical, desperate and devoid of any gleam of hope
to relieve their darkness of despair, than in India.

And yet perhaps in no country is there so promising a sphere for the
inauguration of General Booth's plan of campaign. Religious by instinct,
obedient to discipline, skilled in handicrafts, inured to hardship, and
accustomed to support life on the scantiest conceivable pittance, we
cannot imagine a more fitting object for our pity, nor a more
encouraging one for our effort, than the members of India's "submerged
tenth."

Leaving to the care of existing agencies those whose bodies are
diseased, General Booth's scheme seeks to fling the mantle of
brotherhood around the morally sick, the destitute and the despairing.
It seeks to throw the bridge of love and hope across the growing
bottomless abyss in which are struggling twenty-six millions of our
fellow men, whose sin is their misfortune and whose poverty is their
crime, who are graphically said to have been "damned into the world,
rather than born into it."

The question is a national one. This is no time therefore for party or
sectarian feeling to be allowed to influence our minds. True for
ourselves we still bel