once.

But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip
of the facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste
for blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee
that happy ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of
our cities when the men are not working, but resting and chewing
the cud of their reflections; and he will find that there is one
expression on every mature face: the expression of cynicism. The
discovery made by Bill Walker about the Salvation Army has been
made by every one of them. They have found that every man has his
price; and they have been foolishly or corruptly taught to
mistrust and despise him for that necessary and salutary
condition of social existence. When they learn that General
Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because it is a
high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he
shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his
character is unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites
and allies of their sweaters and oppressors. They know that the
large subscriptions which help to support the Army are
endowments, not of religion, but of the wicked doctrine of
docility in poverty and humility under oppression; and they are
rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul, the
doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage,
and terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness,
humanity, generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness.
The confirmation of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been
working so hard for years past, is the morality of militarism;
and the justification of militarism is that circumstances may at