Then came Mr. Moody, holding meetings in Islington, and Tucker made his surrender.

He was not content with a passive and silent Christianity. As soon as he was back in India his bungalow became a center for prayer-meetings. He spoke at crossroads, he preached to British troops in their cantonments. He made evangelistic tours through the villages. The authorities were ill at ease at the news. They objected to an English official in the Civil Service playing the role of missionary in spare hours. It would irritate both Hindu and Moslem and bring the ruling race into disrepute. While the correspondence was passing between the government in Simla and its preaching official, news came in the press of the rise of a strange, new religious organization. It was called the Salvation Army. Tucker heard of it and made a mental note. “Here are the people I have been seeking,” he said to himself, and straightway took the P. and O. steamer to London to inquire more fully about them. The upshot was that he resigned his post in the Civil Service, together with all prospect of emolument, and ranged himself with these humblest of the humble. His father, in anger, threatened to cut him off from his inheritance.

His life became one of great self-abnegation, and when at last he died he left less than two hundred pounds. He signed the exacting Salvation Army articles, pledging himself to give his whole time to the Army and to have no other gainful occupation unless one in which all profit should go to the Army. Under these same articles he had agreed to devote not less than nine hours a day to active Army service, to obey orders, to have no permanent home, but to accept any place assigned to him.

He was almost foreordained to pioneer Army work in India. The headquarters staff on Queen Victoria Street, London, could give him a mere beggarly one hundred pounds for this advance movement.

He adopted native dress, lived on native food, took a native name, traveled as deck passenger and in crowded third-class compartments. When he first went out, his little group went into the forecastle. At Bombay they were met by the police on the dock. For an Englishman, member of a famous Anglo-Indian family, to travel thus and to begin his operations by handing out little books in the street like a beggar, outraged the feelings of the Bombay authorities. The party was arrested and fined; their goods were seized to pay the fine; but the kindly superintendent of police bought in the poor possessions for a hundred rupees and then presented them back to “the Army.”

Certainly the word “Army” was never applied to a more helpless and inoffensive band.

The eighteenth-century Moravians constituted perhaps the most remarkable and most self-denying missionary group of modern times. They went to remote lands and to trying climates but they lived in substantial homes and followed a hygienic fashion of life.

The Salvation Army officers in India were more ascetic in their ideal. God fulfills Himself in many ways. Yet commander Booth-Tucker felt that the manner of life he and his followers adopted was not so unwholesome as might first seem. “We find we can work just as hard as on English food. We have got officers who have lived on it for years and are enjoying even better health than many who have eaten English food all the time. Common mud huts are much more suitable for our purposes than the bungalows in which the English live. The mendicant is admired and even worshiped in India. Hence they do not object to the Salvationists begging their food.”

Tucker endured all the privations of this strange life. He wandered from village to village, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion, preaching Christ. For bedding he had sacking, for clothing the turban and the dhoty of the native, for provision the bowl with which he asked for food. The pair were invited in by householders of all classes. For they were now no longer sahibs but men of the country. Sometimes, though rarely, the villagers like those of Samaria, turned against him and even refused him drinking water. Near one such inhospitable hamlet he laid himself down to sleep under a tree. The natives crept out to examine his feet, knowing that when an Englishman’s feet were footsore from the hot sands no punishment was worse. They were touched by his condition, gave him food and invited him to speak to them. A great spiritual awakening started from this village and now there are twenty-five thousand Salvationists in Gujarat. “So I preached my best sermon in my sleep,” said the Commissioner quaintly.

On another occasion he started for Ceylon with money enough to pay his fare and no more. A fellow Salvationist had a few biscuits. He was a deck passenger. The Moslem firemen invited him to eat with them, begging him to talk with them for they recognized in him a man of God.

As time went on, the Army grew in strength. In 1886, forty officers volunteered for India. They traveled in the Clan Ogilvey (the entire passenger accommodation having been reserved for them) spending their time in prayer and Bible and language study. The late Charles T. Studd, another of Moody’s converts, then working as a missionary in China, sent his check for five thousand pounds, a gift that enabled the Army to purchase its Bombay headquarters. The Salvationists did not scatter their men but went in bands of forty or fifty preaching Christ. They refused to argue and gave purely positive testimony to the Cross. The Commissioner and his wife went about India conducting melas, or congresses, at which any number up to fifteen thousand might gather, the outcasts sitting in the middle.

Tucker was what the Hindus call a Mabap (“father and mother”) to thousands of Hindus. His heart went out to them in their poverty and daily struggles. As a prophylactic against recurring famine, he introduced the cassava from which tapioca comes. It grows where grain will not grow and at half the cost. He did much to stimulate silk culture. He established village banks to fight usury. He organized various colonies and agitated for an arbor day in which treeplanting might be general. He labored for the establishment of hospitals and dispensaries, for an improved sanitation, for the sinking of wells. He took up the cause of the poor whites of India, of stranded seamen and soldiers, opening homes for them and reforming many.

His special interest in these lines was the reformation of the “crim.” India is overrun with roving criminal tribes whose guerilla-pillaging baffles the efforts of the one hundred fifty thousand police and the seven hundred thousand village watchmen. These people meet power with cunning. They utilize the railway in their rapid raids, the post office for transmitting their loot. Locating themselves on the boundaries of the different states and provinces, they pass rapidly from one to another, disconcerting the authorities. They have chains of connecting posts from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Their secret wayside marks give them an almost free-masonic aid in their operations. Among these tribes are thugs and dacoits who specialize in bloodshed; also such quaint groups as the Yricilas who are adept in slitting the ears of sleeping women in order to steal their heavy gold, jewel studded earrings. They use blades so fine and sharp that they can slit the ears without waking the women.

The government of India asked the Salvation Army to undertake the reformation of certain of these tribes. They began with the Doms of Gorukhpur – violent, licentious people and inveterate gamblers. At the head of the Dom settlement were placed a devoted European Salvationist officer and wife, with an assisting corps of carefully picked native officers. The Doms were housed, fed, and put to work at weaving, farming, forestry. Each evening they had to answer their names at the roll call and if not present were searched after until found. Then came a Salvationist meeting with much music. The people had to keep themselves clean. The reports of this wonderful place spread among the Doms, and more applications for admission were made than could be complied with. “If you cannot take us in, at least let us live under the shadow of your power,” pleaded those shut out. High officials, commissioners, inspectors, and superintendents of police visited the place and marveled at the transformation.

From Gorukphur the work spread. By 1916 there were twelve purely agricultural settlements in operation with tracts of land amounting to six thousand eight hundred acres. There were sixteen other settlements where agriculture and industry were combined; there were also homes for released prisoners, for criminal boys, and for the children of the criminal tribes.

It would be hard to find a man better furnished to give advice regarding the general situation in India than was Booth-Tucker. He knew the British government in India and considered it “the best government in the world.” He knew the Indian people and loved them. He could say of them, “A more beautiful set of people I have not met in the world.” And one of the most delightful pictures of him is that of his opening the car window, when his train stopped at stations, to chat in the proper vernacular to any Indians who happened to gather near him.

He foresaw the present upheaval in India and warned the government to take measures in time to pacify and satisfy the masses. In 1919, he was asked to give testimony before a governmental commission. His suggestions were poles away from the revolutionary proceedings of Gandhi and the Babus. He pleaded for the cause of the villages and of the depressed classes, “the sheet anchor,” as he said, “of the British government.” He urged better and more wells in the villages, afforestation with quick growing trees to supply fuel and thus prevent the burning of cow dung, so needed for fertilizer. He urged that the villages be supplied with simple medicines, that a village newspaper like Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper be started to give the masses honest information, free from disintegrating and disloyal propaganda. He recognized the evil that destruction of village industries had brought and urged that India be made the great silk-producing country of the world. He also insisted that the British officials ought to learn to speak in public in order to exert a quieting influence on the people. He would have them meet in friendly conference for the discussion of grievances and remedies. His were the wise suggestions of the experienced proconsul that he was by family inheritance, touched with the friendliness and practicality that long years of association with the masses added thereto.

Joseph R. Chambers