HERRING (looking at him): 'Indeed!'
GENERAL BOOTH (laughing): 'Ah! Herring, you mean that it was _I_ who
did the talking, not Haggard. Well, _perhaps I did_.'
Some people think that General Booth is conceited.
'It is a pity that the old gentleman is so vain,' a highly-placed
person once said to me.
I answered that if he or I had done all that General Booth has done,
we might be pardoned a little vanity.
In truth, however, the charge is mistaken, for at bottom I believe him
to be a very humble-minded man, and one who does not in the least
overrate himself. This may be gathered, indeed, from the tenor of his
remarks on the subject of his personal value to the Army, that I have
recorded at the beginning of this book.
What people of slower mind and narrower views may mistake for pride,
in his case, I am sure, is but the impatient and unconscious
assertiveness of superior power, based upon vision and accumulated
knowledge. Also, as a general proposition, I believe vanity to be
almost impossible to such a man. So far as my experience of life goes,
that scarce creature, the innately, as distinguished from the
accidentally eminent man, he who is fashioned from Nature's gold, not
merely gilded by circumstance, is never vain.
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