The Salvation Army.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 324, 13 July 1889, Page 4

The Salvation Army.

To annual meeting of the Salvation Army organisation engaged in the rescue work was held in Melbourne on June 24. The building wae crowded. Commissioner Howard Baid the need for the work upon which they were engaged was so apparent that there was no necessity to dwell upon it; and, though they had to go down into the filth to save souls, they were always prepared to do it. That morning, during a deputation at the office of the Attorney-General, he had heard for the first time of the extraordinary proportions to Which the vice of Melbourne, as shown by the police records, had attained. The numbers of poor women who awaited the helping hand of the organisation, and who were krihwn to the police, was no lees than 2,000 in Melbourne and the suburbs. He was not prepared to say that they could wipe out the foul blot upon society immediately, but he knew that even Individual efforts did much to remove the evil. The reform of even a single criminal was a social as well as a personal blessing. In the present day it was felt that although Crime was justly punished, still punishment, to be any good at all, must produce not only suffering in the criminal, but reformation. The Salvation Army rescue work organisation Was fully alive to this, and was in thorough harmony with the best spirit of the age. In facing the evil which beset them, their first object should be to bring legislation to bear upon the question. Wherever the Criminal Law Amendment Act had been applied there had been a sensible diminution of the terrible pest that was in their midst. In Glasgow alone, since the application of the act which they wished to see introduced in Victoria, no less than 300 disorderly houses had been closed, and wherever the act had been enforced thousands of children of tender years have been saved from lives of sin and shame. The same defence was necessary in Melbourne that had been found SO efficacious in the old country. Legislation should be supplemented by the social ostracism of men who were known libertines, and respectable members of society should shut their doors not so much against their fallen sisters as against the men who have ruined them, A third method of diminishing the evil was to support the rescue work of the Salvation Army, and assist in placing the young women who were brought from the depths of degradation in the homes which were maintained by the organisation,